[knowknow]

It seems FreeBSD is becoming more talked about in enthusiast communities simply because Linux is a lot more mainstream now and there’s a joy in contrarianism rather than any real changes with either of the two operating systems.

[travisgriggs]

My interest has been piqued of late. I've been a Linux enthusiast since the late 90's. I don't think it's a sense of contrarianism that motivates my interest anew.

As I've aged, what I've come to value most in software stacks is composability. I do not know if [Free]BSD restores that, but Linux feels like it has grown more complicated and less composable. I'm using this term loosely, but I'm mostly thinking of how one reasons and cognates about the way the system work in this instance. I want to work in a world where each tool on the OS's bench has a single straightforward man page, not swiss army knives where the authors/maintainers just kept throwing more "it can do this too" in to attract community.

[IgorPartola]

I can’t speak for whole communities but my interest in FreeBSD has been renewed over the past couple of years. It has been a very solid OS for a long time and the tight integration between the kernel and core userland has meant that it is sometimes more performant than some popular Linux distros. But its UX has not always been amazing. Seems like lately they have really improved that. Plus ZFS and root on ZFS in particular is very nice.

I would actually be interested in running it in some production environments but it seems like that is pitted against the common deploy scenarios that involve Docker and while there is work on bringing runc to FreeBSD it is alpha stage at best currently.

Still, if you just want an ssh server, a file server, a mail server, it is a great OS with sane defaults and a predictable upgrade schedule.

[arthurfirst]

Docker did work. AFAIK the APIs are there. Someone needs to grab the bull by the horns.

Jails and BHYVE vms are excellent -- but I use Docker every day and if I could use BSD as my docker host I would.

Good thing my docker servers are all built with terraform so I do not have to touch.

[IgorPartola]

Specifically I was talking about this not being ready for prime time: https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

[crest]

You can use Podman on FreeBSD, but the CNI providers need a bit more time cover all the amazing/crazy things the FreeBSD network stack can do.

[ginkoleaf]

Dismissing the FreeBSD community as contrarians feels uncharitable. I can think of at least a few other contributing factors for the increase in popularity of late:

1) Linux's popularity has enlarged the pool of users interested in Unix-like operating systems. Some proportion of users familiar with Unix genuinely like FreeBSD and the unique features it offers.

2) The rise of docker and the implosion of VMWare has driven an increase of interest in FreeBSD Jails and the Bhyve hypervisor.

3) Running a homelab is a popular hobby. ZFS is popular for RAID, and pf is popular for networking.

4) Podman being brought to FreeBSD: (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...).

5) Dell, AMD, Framework, and the FreeBSD foundation committing $750,000 to making FreeBSD easier to use last year: (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/why-laptop-support-why-no...).

6) Apple announcing that they're bringing the Swift language to FreeBSD this year.

[wkat4242]

For me it's all the changes in Linux. Every time I upgrade they change stuff that worked fine for me. Another issue is many distros pushing their "invented here" stuff like canonical and redhat. And the huge amount of corporate influence over Linux.

FreeBSD is largely free of those. And it leaves all the agency to the operator, rather than the distro forcing stuff down (except arch, but I don't like the community there)

[lmm]

Disagree. Linux has been gradually changing with the push towards systemd, snap, flatpak etc.. Today's FreeBSD resembles the Linux of 10 or 20 years ago a lot more than today's Linux does.

[tombert]

> Today's FreeBSD resembles the Linux of 10 or 20 years ago a lot more than today's Linux does.

I'm not sure that that's the win that you think it is. Linux 10 to 20 years ago was pretty terrible, at least on desktops.

Everyone hates on systemd, but honestly I really think that the complaints are extremely overblown. I've been using systemd based distros since around ~2012, and while I've had many issues with Linux in that time, I can't really say that any of them were caused by systemd. systemd is easy to use, journalctl is nice for looking at logs, and honestly most of the complaints I see about it boil down to "well what if...", what-if's that simply hasn't happened yet.

FreeBSD is cool, but when I run it I do sometimes kind of miss systemd, simply because systemd is easy. I know there was some interest in launchd in the FreeBSD world but I don't know how far that actually got or if it got any traction, but I really wish it would.

[phicoh]

It is a bit of a bummer if you spend quite a bit of time tracking down a very weird DNS bug and it turns out to be systemd-resolved.

And I don't want to go into all of the time spend getting systemd unit files correct. There is very active community suggesting things you can add, which then of course breaks your release for users in unexpected ways. An enormous waste of time.

[wkat4242]

I like BSD especially because it lacks systemd :)

[lmm]

> I'm not sure that that's the win that you think it is. Linux 10 to 20 years ago was pretty terrible, at least on desktops.

For all its usability issues, Linux 10 to 20 years ago had advantages that, for a certain kind of user, were worth the cost. Frankly Linux on the desktop today is the worst of all worlds - it doesn't have the ease-of-use or compatibility of Windows or OSX, but it doesn't have the control and consistency/reliability of BSD either.

[darkwater]

I believe this is pretty unfair. Today's Linux on desktop is pretty straightforward for any normal user, given that there are no lines anymore between local and remote software. Windows shoves ads down your throat and MacOS make you pay a premium on HW which normal people spends on phones, not laptops or desktop computers anymore.

[philipallstar]

I just tried installing Zoom on my Ubuntu desktop, and the options seem to be:

- find Zoom in the package manager (can't)

- find zoom-client in the package manager (can, but it appears to be authored by some person and not Zoom Inc)

- go to the Zoom website and download a .deb and then run a command

This is fine for me, but let's not pretend that a regular user wanting to install something as basic as Zoom is going to have an easy time of it.

[tombert]

Most Ubuntu based distros let you just double click on the deb and just install the deb file. I don’t see how that’s appreciably different than Windows.

[darkwater]

I mean, it's either "App Store" or downlaod from vendor, no?

Btw I just went to Zoom as well with my work Mac and I got TWO buttons: "Download for Apple Silicon" and "Download for Intel". I guess that a normal user will panic here, no?

[ux266478]

The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit[1], fun fact.

Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all. My system always felt really opaque, because the mountain of understanding systemd seemed insurmountable. I had to remember so much, all the different levers required to drive the million things systemd orchestrated... and for very little effect. I really prefer transparency in my system, I don't want abstraction layers that I have no purpose for. I don't take it as a coincidence at all that since I moved away from systemd distributions, my system has become quite a bit more reliable. When I got my Steamdeck, the first systemd setup I've used in years, one of the first things I noticed is that the jank I used to experience has showed its face once again. It might not be directly tied to poetteringware, but it's very possible that this is a simple 2nd or 3rd order effect from having a more complex system.

[1] - https://www.fortinet.com/resources/articles/xz-utils-vulnera...

[tombert]

Any sufficiently large codebase that runs an operating system will have security exploits eventually, so finding an example of this really doesn’t change anything. I am sure FreeBSD has had security issues in the past.

I am hardly a super genius and I really didn’t find systemd very hard at all to do most of the stuff I wanted. Everyone complains about it being complicated but an idiot like me has been able to figure out how to make my own services and timers and set the order of boot priorities and all that fun stuff. I really think people are exaggerating about the difficulty of it.

[ux266478]

I think you misunderstand the issue being raised, hence your confusion. The "difficulty" isn't the individual facets of the system, but piercing the opaqueness of the entire picture without wholly specializing into it. On the very basis of using a configuration DSL loaded with strange quirks, the init system part of systemd alone is already asking to take up more space in your head than an init system reasonably should. Having to memorize a completely different set of string expansion behaviors, for example, and all the edge-cases that introduces at the boundary of shell scripts. One small example, and only of the tiny slice that is the init part of systemd. We can talk all day about the problems with resolved, udevd, logind, and so on.

None of these issues are "difficult" and perhaps that is why you think people are "exaggerating" and engaging in bad faith. I would challenge you on this and suggest you haven't seriously interrogated the idea that the standpoint against systemd has a firm basis in reality. Have you ever asked the question "Why?" and sought to produce an answer that frames the position in a reasonable light? Until you find that foundation, you won't understand the position.

[tombert]

systemd solves problems that are not easily solvable in the old SysV init way. If you need resources to load in a specific order, for example, it’s trivial to do this with systemd, but you have to muck with weird symlink stuff to get the same effect with SysV. There are lots of things like that. You can hand wave this away and act like it’s not important, but it absolutely can be important to correctly make sure services load in the right order, and being abke to designate dependencies if services.

Of course I have run non-systemd distros, like Ubuntu (back when it used upstart), Gentoo, and of course FreeBSD (yes I know it’s not a Linux distro but close enough for this particular point), so it’s not like non-systemd stuff is foreign to me, and I am just not convinced it is actually causing more headaches than other systems.

[int_19h]

> Any sufficiently large codebase that runs an operating system will have security exploits eventually

Indeed, but the one that has been around for much longer is likely to have more bugs flushed out by now.

[hulitu]

> I don't want abstraction layers that I have no purpose for.

That is the main issue in modern software. The only way to "improve" something, is to add another abstraction layer.

[hedora]

Desktop Linux kind of peaked 20-25 years ago with Debian. Ubuntu was a win for a few years after that, but it’s been a long slow slide since.

FWIW, Devuan is good enough to keep me from switching to a BSD, but I guess the vandals that work at the big corporate distros are starting to delete X11 support from applications even though Wayland still hasn’t hit feature parity.

On the bright side, the last time I tried it, steam ran OK in a FreeBSD vm, except the VM had no video accelerator. That’s the main application keeping me on Linux.

[hulitu]

> I'm not sure that that's the win that you think it is. Linux 10 to 20 years ago was pretty terrible, at least on desktops.

Huh ? It worked much better than today. It was not so bloated and people kept improving things instead of changing them every year.

[groundzeros2015]

I think it’s a joy of having a system built by a small community for fun and not debates between large corporate interests.

[irusensei]

If you work with computers the whole day it would make sense the computers you keep as a hobby have some degree of difference.

[kalleboo]

FreeBSD users definitely seem to have taken over the mantle of OS evangelicals from Linux users.

I tried using FreeBSD for two different projects (NAS and router) and it turned out to be unsuitable for both, for each one switching to Linux solved the problem. Despite having solved my problems, the FreeBSD faithful seemed to think that using FreeBSD in itself was supposed to be the goal, not to solve the task at hand.

[int_19h]

FreeBSD is also extremely conservative by comparison to Linux. It's not just systemd; things change less in general, and it's closer to old school Unix. Some people like it for nostalgia reasons, some just got tired of having rug constantly being pulled from under them (seems to be a common thing when people get older).

[movedx]

I feel like you may never have used it. Would that be true?

[jajuuka]

That is the vibe I get from this post. Very "I am different" energy.

[MangoToupe]

There was always some truth to that, and there are worse reasons to find joy in actual competition. How do you discover the truth about differences in quality without fuel for curiosity?

[anticristi]

Well said! I used to administer both FreeBSD and Linux (Debian) servers at the same time. I found them different, but couldn't say either was better or worse.

[BrouteMinou]

The desire to be different is strong with some people.

[rixed]

A well needed counterbalance when so much in tech is just a popularity contest.

[shevy-java]

That's fine. The thing is: I am different with Linux too. So I don't quite understand that FreeBSD focus.

From the BSDs, I think only OpenBSD has a really unique selling point with its focus on security. People ask "why pick FreeBSD rather than Linux" and most will not find compelling arguments in favour of FreeBSD there.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

First of all, FreeBSD has plenty of selling points compared to your typical Linux distro:

Small, well integrated base system, with excellent documentation. Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother, which differs from linux where sure there's docker, btrfs, iptables, bpftrace and several different hypervisors to choose from, but they all come from different sources and so they don't play together as neatly.

The ports tree is very nice for when you need to build things with custom options.

The system is simple and easy to understand if you're a seasoned unix-like user. Linux distros keep changing, and I don't have the time to keep up. I have more than 2 decades of experience daily driving linux at this point, and about 3 years total daily driving FreeBSD. And yet, the last time I had a distro install shit itself(pop os), I had no idea how to fix it, due to the rube-goldberg machine of systemd, dbus, polkit, wayland AND X, etc etc that sits underneath the easy to use GUI(which was not working). On boot I was dropped into a root shell with some confusing systemd error message. The boot log was full of crazy messages from daemons I hadn't even heard of before. I was completely lost. On modern Linux distros, my significant experience is effectively useless. On FreeBSD, it remains useful.

Second, when it comes to OpenBSD, I don't actually agree that security is its main selling point. For me, the main selling point of OpenBSD is as a batteries included server/router OS, again extremely well documented in manpages, and it has all the basic network daemons installed, you just enable them. They have very simple configuration files where often all you need is a single digit number of lines, and the config files have their own manpages explaining everything. For use cases like "I just want an HTTP server to serve some static content", "I just want a router with dhcpd and a firewall", etc, OpenBSD is golden.

[vogon_laureate]

OpenBSD's philosophy of simple config files and secure defaults are among its best features.

[sellmesoap]

Out of the box ZFS is a big selling point for me. Jails are just lovely. The rc system is very easy to reason with. I've had systems that were only stable on freebsd that would crash using windows or various Linux.

[arthurfirst]

ZFS is amazing and while there are many would be clones there is only one ZFS.

I used (and pushed) it everywhere I could and first encountered on Solaris before FBSD. Even had it on my Mac workstation almost 18 years ago (unsupported) -- aside I will never forgive that asshole Larry Ellison for killing OpenSolaris. NEVER.

Systemd is the worst PoS every written. RCs are effective and elegant. Systemd is reason enough to avoid Linux but I still hold my nose and use it because I have to.

[tombert]

Sorry, can you be specific about what's terrible about systemd? I really would like to know why it's the "worst piece of shit ever written".

[MangoToupe]

I can't speak for others, but I find it poorly documented and only rarely improves on the systems it replaced, and it invalidates decades of high quality documentation that you can easily find on the internet. It's possible the transition will pay off one day with eg a usable graphic interfaces for system configuration that might compete with that of mac os, but as of yet, no such thing has materialized.

This is especially true compared to how beautifully well and consistently the BSDs tend to document their init and configuration systems. Or Mac OS, again—launchd is still way easier to use and far more of a "fire and forget" system without adding complicated interfaces for unrelated stuff like network interfaces and logging. But that has always been true as well.

[rootnod3]

It is unnecessarily complex to begin with. On top of that, the maintainers are historically not the most open to criticism and try to aggressively push the adoption. So much so that Gnome for example now has very strong dependecies on systemd which makes it very difficult to adopt Gnome on non-systemd systems unless you wanna throw a bunch of patches at it. This hard coupling alone is something that I wouldn't want to rely on, ever.

[vrighter]

Because "it's one program doing too many things and that goes against the unix philosophy"

In reality systemd is 69 different binaries (only one of which runs as pid 1), all developed under the same project, designed to work together.

[sellmesoap]

The systemd privacy issue of DNS fallback to cloudflare is something that comes to mind. No shade on cloudflare, I love them despite the privacy implications their business entails.

[BrouteMinou]

But you are aware there are distros without systemd, right?

[arthurfirst]

Yes. Over the years I've used just about every linux distro from Slackware and RH up to nix + arch, as well programming on Solaris, IRIX, SCO, OS/400 and even Tandem --look it up it's pretty obscure! But I just use FreeBSD mostly now.

There's pretty much nothing I can't do on FreeBSD that I would get with one Linux or another. Not much of a gamer so maybe that factors in..

[sbseitz]

Debian and Ubuntu support it out of the box. DKMS works for other distros. Same core ZFS code BSD uses. Hope this helps educate you.

[sellmesoap]

I've played with most of them, I'm primarily a nixos user. I haven't yet had an experience as smooth as the FreeBSD installer for ZFS. looking at the debian wiki it still looks like dkms and manual partitioning are in order.

[quotemstr]

Eh? ZFS does double caching and doesn't have a way to consolidate extents except to rebuild the FS.

[movedx]

I once upgraded a FreeBSD system from 8 to 12 with a single command. I don’t recall having to reboot — might have needed to.

Can you give that shot for me on Linux? Could you spin up a Ubuntu 14 VM and do a full system update to 24.04 without problems? Let me know how you go.

I once needed help with a userland utility and the handbook answered the question directly. More impressive was the conversation I had with a kernel developer, who also maintains the userland tools — not because they choose too but because the architecture dictates that the whole system is maintained as a whole.

Can you say the same for Linux? You literally cannot. Only Arch and RedHat (if you can get passed the paywall) have anything that comes close to the FreeBSD Handbook.

FreeBSD has a lot going for it. It just sits there and works forever. Linux can do the same, if you maintain it. You barely need to maintain a FreeBSD system outside of updating packages.

Most people who use containers a lot won’t find a home in FreeBSD, and that’s fine. I hope containers never come to the BSD family. Most public images are gross and massive security concerns.

But then, most people who use FreeBSD know you don’t need containers to run multiple software stacks on the same OS, regardless of needing multiple runtimes or library versions. This is a lost art because today you just go “docker compose up” and walk away because everything is taken care of for you… right? Guys? Everything is secure now, right?

[AdieuToLogic]

> I once upgraded a FreeBSD system from 8 to 12 with a single command.

The command you most likely used is freebsd-update[0]. There are other ways to update FreeBSD versions, but this is a well documented and commonly used one.

> I don’t recall having to reboot — might have needed to.

Updating across major versions requires a reboot. Nothing wrong with that, just clarifying is all.

> Most people who use containers a lot won’t find a home in FreeBSD, and that’s fine. I hope containers never come to the BSD family.

Strictly speaking, Linux containers are not needed in FreeBSD as jails provide similar functionality (better IMHO, but I am very biased towards FreeBSD). My preferred way to manage jails is with ezjail[1] FWIW.

> But then, most people who use FreeBSD know you don’t need containers to run multiple software stacks on the same OS, regardless of needing multiple runtimes or library versions.

I completely agree!

0 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/

1 - https://erdgeist.org/arts/software/ezjail/

[movedx]

Thanks for sharing and clarifying those details :)

And yes, jails are way better, but here we are.

[sellmesoap]

I haven't tried, but I heard podman runs on freebsd :D

[movedx]

I think that’s true yeah.

[prmoustache]

It has a decent manual for a start.

[xmcp123]

Linux is not fucking mainstream

If anything is mainstream, it’s BSD, because OS X is BSD.

[bigyabai]

OS X is XNU. BSD code is in the kernel and BSD tooling is in the userland, but the kernel isn't BSD in license or architecture.

[lern_too_spel]

Linux is the most-user kernel on consumer devices (Android) and servers by a very wide margin.