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by oscargrouch 1527 days ago
FreeBSD have a lower memory footprint and their network (now together with their filesystem) make it a better server than Linux if you want a better use of your network bandwidth.

I love FreeBSD and would prefer to use it as my desktop instead of Linux, but for servers people should also consider FreeBSD as a great option for a better use of computational resources. (And all this even when Linux have zillions of smart people working hours and hours to optimized it which FreeBSD cannot afford to)
2 comments
behnamoh 1527 days ago
I was also looking into BSDs (FreeBSD and OpenBSD) as an alternative to Linux, but almost every package that I need is available for the top 3 OSs (Win, macOS, Linux) only.

For example, I didn't see vscode for BSD. And I'm worried that maintaining a BSD would be more of a hassle than even Arch Linux.

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mst 1527 days ago
https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/ has apparently been part of the ports tree since 2019 and was last updated 11 days ago.

Whether it's been added to the binary package build farm or you'll have to build the port yourself I don't know though, but poudriere makes (re-)building ports a pretty pleasant experience.

BSD often does start off feeling like a hassle, but the docs are excellent and once you get a feel for it then it doesn't honestly feel like more work than linux. Note: I run a mixture of FreeBSD and Debian on my personal systems and find them both pretty painless, but I do tend to value "do exactly what I told you to" when it comes to recreational sysadminry so bear that preference in mind when interpreting my thoughts.

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hedora 1527 days ago
I love the animated gif at the top of that page. Nice touch!
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throw0101a 1527 days ago
There's an emulator if you need binary support:

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator

Back in the day I used run the Linux version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein under FreeBSD (with NVidia drivers), and it ran as fast or faster (per FPS counts).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein

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boopmaster 1527 days ago
and you still can:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/freebsd-x64-archiv...

someone at Nvidia must be a FreeBSD stalwart and I’m okay with that

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ncphil 1527 days ago
It used to be that if you were going to run BSD that meant either compiling from ports or source. Packages were only available for the most common components, but the default was ports and most admins went along with that because you got greater flexibility/opportunities to optimize. Back then source compiles of software like Apache were the norm for even the Solaris boxes I worked on. Same for most perl modules (I had a decade-long war with Math::Pari).
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kingcharles 1527 days ago
I seem to remember the BSDs being a lot more reliable for production use, versus Linux, back in around 1996 when HoTMaiL launched.
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