As mentioned previously, because FreeBSD is a real multi-purpose operating system with many different use cases, FreeBSD is very flexible and tuneable. Whether you want to run FreeBSD on your desktop computer or on your server, it provides many tuneable options that enables you to make it very performant. The options set out-of-the box may not suit your needs exactly, but then FreeBSD provides lots of documentation on how to get it to work as you need, and it provides a very helpful community with many people who has experience in dealing with many different situations and problems.
I believe it is important to understand that FreeBSD is not like a GNU/Linux distribution. FreeBSD is an operating system made by developers who are also system administrators. This means that FreeBSD is supposed to be run by system administrators who understands how the system works. You cannot simply jump from something like Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE and then expect that you get the same experience on FreeBSD (I and a lot of other people would be extremely sad if that were the case).
The BSDs just aren’t my thing. I’m not a developer, and I’m not a system administrator. Over the past six months or so, I’ve moved all my machines and all my workflows over to Linux – my laptop, my main PC (used for everything that isn’t translating), and my office PC (for my translation work), and I couldn’t be happier (in the interest of full disclosure, I do keep Windows around on my main PC for possible future Windows-only games, and I have a Windows 10 virtual machine on my office PC for some Windows-specific translation software I need to keep around).
As I was planning this careful migration, I never once considered using any of the BSDs. For the simpler, almost exclusively desktop oriented work that I do, BSD just doesn’t seem like the right tool for the job – and that’s okay, I’m not the target audience – and I suspect there are many people like me. I think the BSDs are stronger for not trying to be everything to all people, and this more focused development seems to be exactly why someone chooses BSD over Linux.
And I see no reason why anybody should want to change that.
Well……..this article conclusion seems to be at odds with the marketing efforts of various BSDs.
In my experience many varieties now promote themselves as being an OOB Desktop experience, just like Linux, MacOS and Windows. Some BSD even offer bling like Compix.
BSD is not some closely guarded secret or a pot of gold at the end of some leprechaun’s rainbow!
The BSDs lag behind on the desktop. They just don’t have the support for desktop applications the way certain Linux distros do.
At home, I’m experimenting with OpenBSD as a desktop. Of course, my workflow for it is primarily working with Unix-like servers and writing code to run on those servers, so it works well for that. When I need more, like at work, I run Fedora.
While OpenBSD has its advantages, it is just not a system thought of for end users. I mean, they wont hesitate to remove any feature they consider a security risk so linux emulation, kernel modules, and they are not in for exuberant features, so all the cool things are simply not there.
FreeBSD may be more familiar for people used to linux but it is cleaner, and , unlike GNU, it *is* UNIX-like.
Nowadays FreeBSD is the place for LLVM and ZFS so it has become really advance in niche areas.
As long as it’s running the same software as a Linux distribution (Gnome/KDE/whatever + package manager), to end users it’s effectively just a worse version of Linux with more problems and less driver support. The Linux GUI stack is a quick way to get your alternative OS up and running modern programs, but it also poisons any chance of success beyond whatever Linux has already achieved.
Dunno if anything has changed, but FreeBSD used to be driver-regressions land. It was so pleasant to have your high end 3Com network card turned suddenly into a paperweight thanks to a bad update.
I had the opposite problem. I was endlessly fighting with Linux distros that would crap out some driver every time it did an apt-get update, but my experience with PC-BSD was solid as a rock. I ran PC-BSd as my main OS, alongside Haiku, on my desktop for a good 6 months about 8 years ago.
Times change,m i know, but i’ve only ever had pleasant experiences with BSD. The opposite is true for my experiences with Linux
The123king,
Yeah, I’ve also been bitten by linux distro updates breaking things, to be fair it’s not so frequent, but still problematic when it happens. Drivers for the most part have gotten better over the years. Nvidia drivers are a glaring exception that can provoke a really sour experience though. Sometimes they work flawlessly, but other times they botch everything. The underlying causes have been discussed to death: lack of stable ABI on linux side, no source code and completely dependent upon nvidia for drivers. Yet, the linux community is no closer to resolving these problems than it was a decade ago. Short of somebody reverse engineering nvidia’s drivers, which is forbidden, I think it’s just going to be more of the same.
One of my worst experiences with linux drivers was with an asmedia SATA controller because it would boot up successfully and kind of work on low loads, but would silently cause data corruption with more intense disk activity. Fortunately this was happening on a new system that didn’t contain valuable data, but it highlights how dangerous buggy drivers can be.
On the other hand I’ve been happily surprised several times when linux worked out of the box on computers that windows needed extra drivers for (networking, USB3, etc).
I think that as long as you buy hardware with linux in mind, and search user reviews for linux support, you can usually get an idea for how well the hardware will work. I’m guessing the same would be true for BSD, however I cannot remember the last time I looked at a hardware review and saw BSD mentioned. I’m sure you can find pertinent information in BSD forums, but clearly it is a much smaller market.
I always thought BSDs were more for those that need to be really bare metal and are willing to do the work to get to that level while Linux was more end user focused.
I’ve been running FreeBSD and OpenBSD on my servers and desktops for years, even decades now. Everything network-heavy gets OpenBSD with pf, servers are all FreeBSD and I’m posting this from my laptop running FreeBSD tracking CURRENT. And there’s the problem: Wifi support for my laptop has only recently landed in the source repo, which is why my laptop runs the bleeding-edge utterly unstable version which I’m able to keep working due to decades of experience. Hardware support really is a problem with FreeBSD on desktops. For servers, though, the OS is second to none.. however, there I’m seeing it getting left behind in the automation arena. Sure, it’ll run Ansible, Puppet and the like but just about every Puppet module or Ansible role encountered in the wild runs on RHEL, Unbuntu and/or Debian.. hardly ever a BSD. I’m personally changing some of that by publishing Ansible roles for the BSD’s, but I’m afraid BSD will rapidly become a non-starter in the enterprise arena.. which saddens me greatly.
BvdW,
That’s the problem, everyone supports the operating systems at the top of the market first, and other operating systems including freebsd gets less support, if any. This says absolutely nothing about the merits of BSDs or their developers, but it’s a struggle they will like face in perpetuity simply because they don’t have the market share to attract swaths of developers. Developers like myself use linux because it’s popular in spite of it’s flaws, same with android and many other things, it’s a self reinforcing cycle. Positive feedback loops are extremely difficult and expensive to break out of. Can a small but skillful team develop something better than linux in the open source world? Absolutely they can. Would they be able to achieve critical mass without being able to leverage some preexisting monopoly over the market? It would be extremely unlikely. Linux, despite it’s flaws, will continue to thrive because it’s good enough and being a good enough OS with good support is more important to the market than being a better OS with poor support.
On a related note, once browsers start blocking the user agent, data regarding platform usage is going to become much more difficult to compile since I believe that UA strings used to be one of the most reliable indicators of consumer device market share.
Trannyfied? Really? It’s characters like you that make CoC’s like the one FreeBSD has a necessity.
And people like you that write that shit. Don’t want to be socially alienated by > 90% of the population stop being a freaking weirdo. I mean its hard enough to find just a plain normal person anymore without tattoos, extreme piercings, doesn’t do alcohol or drugs… I mean seriously stop just stop encouraging people to embrace all their vices. You don’t need to be mean or rude to people that do these things but you also don’t need to glorify it and set them on a pedistal because they “dare to not fit in” or some BS.
Hardware support is a big issue with FreeBSD unfortunately. In my experience, the big issue is wifi hardware.
I picked up a Raspberry Pi Zero W for $10, without checking how FreeBSD supported it, to use as a very lightweight server for a personal wiki – a fine use case for FreeBSD, but the wifi on it isn’t supported. I blame Broadcom.
My Dell laptop should be supported, but the WiFi is highly unreliable. This seems to be an issue specific to my laptop, though, and not the Intel WiFi hardware which should be pretty well supported. I blame the small install base, and laptop quirkiness in general. I have gotten it to work reliably in the past, but I can’t remember what I did, nor how I found the solution. Switchable graphics works well, though. Lid switch doesn’t. That’s fixable, but it’s hard to read help docs with the WiFi problem.
I have a Macbook that FreeBSD runs on very well on. Only, no WiFi. The Broadcom chipset isn’t supported. I blame Broadcom. With only two USB ports, it’ hard to sacrifice one just for WiFi. Maybe I should investigate Thunderbolt WiFi adapters? Thunderbolt is supported in FBSD.
I used to run FreeBSD exclusively on the desktop about 15 years ago, and it was utterly fantastic. OpenGL performance with the Nvidia drivers was 3x as fast as on Linux (No joke!), and everything was stable and compatible. Sound also worked flawlessly, something I’ve always had minor issue with in Linux. Hell, it even ran Linux games better (namely, Unreal Tournament 2004, which in the release notes for the Linux version said that problems running on FBSD under Linux emulation was considered a bug)
Linux distros lately has a lot of user friendliness to it that FreeBSD hasn’t caught up with, but I’d love to run it again, since those UF features don’t matter to me as much. Still, no WiFi is a deal breaker, and at the moment that’s a recurring problem for me.
What’s the point of this post ? Simply to disagree with the article referenced ? What am I missing ?
My experience has been that FreeBSD basically behaves the same way most Linux distros do. If you never hit uname and didn’t pay attention to the name of the package manager or firewall, you’d rarely notice.
I use OpenBSD quite a bit, and I think Thom’s impression of FreeBSD is much more on the money for OpenBSD and NetBSD. They don’t try to act like something they are not–if something is plausibly more secure but reduces performance, OpenBSD will usually have it. If something makes development of the system easier or improves code reuse and portability, NetBSD will usually have it. And you can tell–OpenBSD is noticeably slower than Linux or FreeBSD. Because they aren’t optimizing for performance.
I know people shout about the poor driver support, but with one exception (a very off-brand storage controller in an ASUS laptop) I’ve never had hardware that FreeBSD doesn’t support. All my wireless cards, all my sound cards, it all just worked out of the box. I know some won’t but…that’s far from universal, and it’s also far from perfect on Linux, too.
I think the author of the article does not understand the rationale behind FreeBSD, nor the BSD philosophy. BSD is the base for many modern operating systems, such as macOS, Playstation, JuniperOS, etc. Also, its TCP/IP stack is the base for most modern TCP/IP implementations, even Microsoft Windows.
FreeBSD code is clean and compiles with no or very few warnings; the Ports system is a great way to install applications.
FreeBSD is stable and fast.
Long live FreeBSD! 🙂
I agree FreeBSD is a great operating system, especially for large companies like Apple, Sony, Juniper and in the past Microsoft. It allows you to take the work of others and not have to contribute all of the changes back.
If your business model doesn’t require or allow for contributing changes back the community, and you can live with the gpl or agpl, then Linux is probably a better choice for most use cases. I begrudgingly came to that conclusion as even open source projects were started to develop for Linux only environments, with *BSD being an after thought.
I used FreeBSD as my main system for several years in the early 2ks. I had to switch back to Windows beacause of my work.
Now I am trying Linux, but I find it so utterly messy! You need to dive into the right documentation (that of your distro AND version) and finding the updated official documentation seem to be impossible.
The FreeBSD handbook seems to be the good starting point it has always been.
BUT I really don’t miss the «make world» command to rebuild all packages (in only a few hours …) from i386 to i686 to regain performance.
Setup a tuned BSD with only the services I need is a matter of less an hour or two. Tuning a debian with the services I need… I a on it for more than 5 hours now (blame the documentation that is difficult to find, not installed with the distro (i think) for custom services, network configuration, etc)
Actually, FreeBSD is a joke. They don’t take security serious. They are still lagging Intel mitigations https://wiki.freebsd.org/SpeculativeExecutionVulnerabilities and the HardenedBSD comparison table shows the sad state of current BSD security implementations https://hardenedbsd.org/content/easy-feature-comparison