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by dingleberry 1526 days ago
i tried freebsd and surprised that pf is already included.

that and zfs (no partition, can use whole disk).

i'm considering using freebsd on both server and laptop from now on.

will i miss anything?

2 comments

FreeBSD's PF has been forked long time ago and lives independent life now. FreeBSD have implemented SMP improvements, but this hasn't been taken back by OpenBSD that has moved on since ... there are some incompatibilities.

Both OpenBSD and FreeBSD are boringtech(tm). It just work, without all the drama, changing init systems and or system tools every couple years. It really depends on your workload, but with FreeBSD, you can run linux/windows/whatever in BHYVE or virtualbox if you need something specific ...

I've ran FreeBSD servers with ZFS and jails (bastille) before, but I usually fall back to OpenBSD (if storage <100G) or SmartOS (storage >100G -> ZFS). Really depends on the workload. Give it a shot or mention what you need.

Last I checked it is a different version of pf than the version shipped on OpenBSD.

I think that OpenBSD tends to be better on laptops.

Allegedly, OpenBSD devs run OpenBSD on their Thinkpads. FreeBSD devs use MacOS on their laptop ...
Don't watch to much youtube...freebsd dev's have the approach: The best tool for the task, hence zfs for saving data ;)
I quit using ZFS when FreeBSD managed to somehow lose the entire zpool it was installed on. That was a long time ago, so I'd hope it's better now, but I've had no reason or inclination to waste my time with it since.
I've lost a 3T collection of HDTV movies back in the day (student) because of WD green drive that decided to return something else that was written to it in a USB box. Took me a while to realize what's going on, but seeing cksum errors when this particular drive was a member of zraid1, I didn't lose any more data (blocks with correct data and checksum were returned from pool) and was able to replace it on my schedule and money. Since then, I just don't feel like gambling on bitrot. Neither on movies, nor on family photos.
>ZFS when FreeBSD managed to somehow lose the entire zpool it was installed on

Maybe freebsd...maybe user ;)