[graemep]

> tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff.

That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible.

I have started using Alpine Linux for servers (not for my desktop, yet) because it is light and simple. Maybe BSD will be the next step.

[nucleardog]

The UI generally quite stable and well documented, which is awesome.

They also have things like `rpm` in ports that you can install. Why? Because you can enable linux binary compatibility[0] and run linux binaries on it (this implements the linux kernel interface, it's not a VM/emulator). It's also backward compatible with its own binaries back to FreeBSD 4 (circa 2000).

Though you may not need that as the ports/packages collection is pretty comprehensive.

It also comes with some nifty tools built-in for isolation (similar to but predating cgroups/containers) as "jails". It also has a hypervisor built in (bhyve) for virtualization if you do need to run any linux VMs or anything for any reason.

The way I usually sum up the difference to people is that FreeBSD is designed while Linux is grown. FreeBSD feels much more like a cohesive whole than Linux.

Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM".

[0] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/

[ornornor]

> Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM".

That, and the wifi situation on laptops.

[graemep]

Thanks. I have been thinking about it for a while, but have never made the leap to using it. Mostly I am running pretty small and simple servers, and do not really need Linux style containers.

[kev009]

That is the sweet spot for any of the BSDs. FreeBSD has the most of pretty much everything so it's my usual recommendation, but you could probably get along with Net and Open too which have their own charm.

[barkingcat]

I've run the same freebsd system for the last 15 years just hosting a small site for some of my friends from back in university.

I've migrated it through system upgrades and security fixes, but nothing else needed to change. usual uptime is about 3 years between major release updates.

freebsd is an awesome server platform.