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Comment by zenoprax

11 hours ago

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?

If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it in `/etc/` over every other system.

This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.

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zenoprax

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joshstrange  6 hours ago

Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu).

Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparently being better than containers, it doesn't really matter, there isn't the ecosystem there.

FreeBSD might be as good as this blog author makes it out to be, and maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility) but I can't help but feel it causes more friction than I'd like, it's just "slightly" harder to do anything. In the age of LLMs I have to tell it (or put it in my system prompt) "I'm using FreeBSD" or it will be give me Linux advice. It just feels like death by a thousand papercuts.

  • AdieuToLogic  3 hours ago

    > I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD.

    Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources:

      FreeBSD Handbook[0]
  FreeBSD Porter's Handbook[1]
  FreeBSD Developers' Handbook[2]
  The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System[3]

    Not to mention that the FreeBSD man pages are quite complete. Granted, I am biased as I have used FreeBSD in various efforts for quite some time and am a fan of it. Still and all, the project's documentation is a gold standard IMHO.

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

    1 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/porters-handbook/

    2 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/

    3 - https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Design_and_Implemen...

  • adrian_b  3 hours ago

    I would not be surprised if FreeBSD NFS is slower than Linux NFS, but 10x slower is too weird to be correct. Have you used the same NFS version, e.g. NFSv4, on both FreeBSD and Linux?

    I have used for many years file servers on FreeBSD, servicing a great number of users and they certainly were not slower than Linux and they had perfect reliability. It is true however, that I have used Samba, not NFS.

    I have also used NFS in a few cases, but I have not run benchmarks. I mean that I have not tested intensive random accesses, but I have just copied entire disks through NFS and that worked at the speed limit imposed by a 1 Gb/s Ethernet link, so at least for sequential transfers NFS did not seem to have any speed problems.

    The speed of NFS also depends on the speed of the file system used on the server. If you have tested a FreeBSD with ZFS versus a Linux with XFS or EXT4, than your benchmark might not reflect anything about FreeBSD vs. Linux, but only about ZFS. ZFS is significantly slower than XFS or EXT4, regardless if it is used by FreeBSD or by Linux.

    Nobody uses ZFS for speed, but only when the extra features provided by ZFS are desired. ZFS is still faster than BTRFS, but not by so much as XFS/EXT4 are faster than ZFS.

    On FreeBSD, its older file system, UFS, is faster than ZFS, though not as fast as XFS/EXT4. But if you use NVMe SSDs on the file server, the speed of NFS should be mostly limited by Ethernet, not by the file system of the server.

atmosx  9 hours ago

Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through emulation yes but bhyve is a thing… so why not? :-)

  • HackerThemAll  7 hours ago

    Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much better security than Docker has had for a long time (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).

    • overfeed  6 hours ago

      Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest, and is often the more convenient solution because of it, in a worse is better way.

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