Why FreeBSD?

ctaranotte said:
Why FreeBSD?

Because we all live in harmony here and we don't start a religious war every time a parishioner has a vision and starts his/her/it own parish.

Don't get me wrong but this is not true. People in this thread have called the OP's issue bullshit even though he is working on that by opening another thread and have been judgmental on his ability to use Gentoo and Arch Linux which is not appreciated IMHO.

Regards.
 
owemeacent said:
I've heard that BSD "isn't that good", or that the BSD developers use Macs to develop FreeBSD. And that there's this USB drive thing where the system gets a kernel panic when when you take it out of the slot before you unmount it. And that BSD is much slower than Linux and everything else.

Is this stuff true? Why do people use FreeBSD instead of Linux? Or Mac? Or Windows? What does BSD have that all the other operating systems don't?
Okay, to answer some of these original questions:
  • The kernel panic when unplugging a mounted USB device was last seen (at least by me) somewhere in the 7.x series. A long time ago.
  • *BSD developers use Macs, and why not? Use the tools you have.
  • Yes, it is good.
  • Yes, Linux is faster. But it also makes your d*** shrink with extended usage.

It seems you got fed a lot of crud on this toppic, and you really need to get a look on your own. The question, expecially here, is "why do people use Linux and not *BSD"? We here are all biased. I, for one, dumped Linux because it simply does not adhere to engineering practices. The "hack as hack can" got too much IMHO.
 
owemeacent said:
I'm a Gentoo and Arch user. I love these two distributions dearly.

I prefer those 2 distros as well and understand why you like them. In Gentoo it is nice to be able to build software from source as you need. This has come particularly useful for my job being able to use portage system to pull in all dependancies and then cross-compile it all into a nice little binary to drop onto an embedded device. But last I checked Gentoo's Portage will not install binaries, everything must be compiled. Arch Linux is great though because it installs binaries and most of the time I don't NEED to compile my software anyways and just want it quickly. But last I checked Arch wouldn't allow me to build/install applications from source. FreeBSD on the other hand allows you to install software from source or as a binary and does so right out of the box. It's done it for years, and it does it well. It still amazes me that Linux has yet to make this happen.
 
segfault said:
owemeacent said:
I'm a Gentoo and Arch user. I love these two distributions dearly.
But last I checked Arch wouldn't allow me to build/install applications from source. FreeBSD on the other hand allows you to install software from source or as a binary and does so right out of the box. It's done it for years, and it does it well. It still amazes me that Linux has yet to make this happen.
You should check out: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System
Arch allows for source installs as well and it's not very difficult either. FreeBSD ports is still a bit easier imo and I prefer it over ABS. When I still used Arch I mostly used binary packages, but I have compiled some stuff using the ABS.

Personally I like FreeBSD and Linux distributions both. I also happen to use both FreeBSD and Linux on servers, where I prefer FreeBSD but most of my colleagues prefer Linux (and within are Debian/Ubuntu vs RedHat camps). Yet we all get along, because in the long run we all like Unix, just different flavours. On the desktop I do use Linux, not FreeBSD, because there is just more support there (hardware and software-wise). My distro of choice at the moment is Fedora, which used to be Debian a year ago. But I am tempted to give it a go once again when Wayland gets there.
 
For me, FreeBSD is more well-orgranized. I can find the setting of each program easily. Also, I can compile applications from source with a very simple command and it allows me to do some configuration before compiling.

I run FreeBSD for my server but Mac for my daily work. Mac uses FreeBSD userland so I can use all the UNIX tools that I am used to on both operating systems and Apple really does a good job in providing a good user interface and good hardware design. Don't bother on which operating system you should use. Just pick the one that you love.
 
qweefb said:
Mac uses FreeBSD userland so I can use all the UNIX tools that I am used to on both operating systems and Apple really does a good job in providing a good user interface and good hardware design.

This is not quite the way things are in OS X. Some parts of the userland are from FreeBSD but for most part it's developed from NeXTSTEP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
 
I mainly switched because of the sound.

Seriously. Linux's most noticeable drawback is that using bare ALSA makes the audio sound bad.
I thought I was crazy at first, that it was just my impression that audio sounded worse on Linux than on Windows. It turns out it was true [1]. PulseAudio baffles me even more...A userspace process standing atop of ALSA to trying to fix things? To make matters worse, OSS stopped even compiling on Linux with recent versions of the kernel. It was very frustrating. Allegedly JACK is better than PulseAudio, but I never tried it. They should just rework the audio so that it doesn't need those ugly hacks, but the fact that Chrome is adopting PulseAudio (and google is not the only vendor doing this) makes me doubt that the situation will change in the short term.
On FreeBSD the audio just works.

1 - http://insanecoding.blogspot.com.ar/2007/05/sorry-state-of-sound-in-linux.html
 
kpa said:
qweefb said:
Mac uses FreeBSD userland so I can use all the UNIX tools that I am used to on both operating systems and Apple really does a good job in providing a good user interface and good hardware design.

This is not quite the way things are in OS X. Some parts of the userland are from FreeBSD but for most part it's developed from NeXTSTEP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

I am saying so because I read the following from https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths.

FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits

This is as much a myth about OS X as about FreeBSD: that OS X is just FreeBSD with a pretty GUI. The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions. Some of this code flow works in the other direction, for example FreeBSD 9.1 and later include a C++ stack and compiler that were originally developed for OS X, with major parts of the work done by Apple employees. Other parts are very different.

The XNU kernel used on OS X includes a few subsystems from (older versions of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation. The similarities in the userland, however, make it much easier to port OS X code to FreeBSD than any other system. For example, both libdispatch (Grand Central Dispatch in Apple's marketing) and libc++ were written for OS X and worked on FreeBSD before any other OS.
Thanks for providing extra information! I really love both systems. However, in Hong Kong, there is no local FreeBSD community. If you need any help, you must look for some foreign websites.
 
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