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by assimpleaspossi 938 days ago
No one said anything about entrenched systems that already use Linux or other systems. FreeBSD is an excellent OS to use for those same jobs that a lot of people and companies are missing out on by not giving it a look. Netflix and Whatsapp can't be too wrong in their choice.
2 comments
inferiorhuman 937 days ago 

  Netflix and Whatsapp can't be too wrong in their choice.
Most companies aren't Netflix, Whatsapp, Google, etc. Netflix can afford to run FreeBSD because they have staff that are intimately familiar with tuning it and hacking on the kernel. That's not most companies.

  No one said anything about entrenched systems that already use Linux or other systems.
GNU/Linux is entrenched pretty much everywhere at this point. Think about your stack. Does anything you use depend on GNU userland tools? Yeah, you'll get real good at rooting out hardcoded paths and dependencies on GNU extensions. Are your coworkers used to GNU tools? Well, there's a learning curve. Do you use nodejs at your company? The node maintainers actively refused to merge trivial patches to get current versions to build on FreeBSD (and the port itself stagnated).

Evaluating something that's not-Linux is neat and cool, I get it. But the reality is switching will incur a heavy up front (and potentially long-term depending on the candidate pool) cost and lots of long-term paper cuts.

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inferiorhuman 937 days ago
I was just thinking about this again and here's an example (well, two) of why I would not recommend FreeBSD for a prod environment: third party software.

The ports tree has been an archaic mess for as long as I've been dicking around with FreeBSD (~2.2.2). Processors and disks have gotten fast enough that relying on make(1) isn't quite as painful as it was, but ok. To ease the pain, FreeBSD started offering binary packages a while ago via pkg(8).

Earlier this year I was evaluating upgrading 12 -> 13, so I fired up VirtualBox and installed 13.whatever. Out of the box pkg did not work. It started its bootstrap song and dance and fell flat on its face. Digging around on the forums came up with a work around to get everything bootstrapped and a working version of pkg installed, but still this was a known problem that made it out the door.

Meanwhile even with a working version of pkg, the FreeBSD mirrors are glacially slow. I've consistently gotten about 2Mbps max from them. Typically I'll get a few hundred kilobytes per second even on an un-throttled 10 Gbps connection with an Intel 825xx NIC.

So on the 12.x machine I set up varnish and pointed the jails at that. And all was well with the world. Until a few weeks ago when pkg again fell flat on its face. Turns out that somewhere along the way pkg went from "use SRV(!) records but fall back on CNAME/A" to "fail if there are no SRV records". Shame on me for not configuring pkg to ignore SRV records in the first place, but what the hell kind of breaking change is that in the middle of a product's lifecycle? That's 100% the kind of thing that should be synced up with the release of new major version of FreeBSD (e.g. 14), but doesn't because pkg straddles and blurs the boundaries between base system and 3rd party tools.

So. Yeah. FreeBSD's great for academic purposes. It's great if you want to push the limits of what's capable and you have staff who are competent kernel hackers. It's great if you can't use GPL licensed products. But for most things? It's a distraction.

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