Not too long ago I linked to a blog post by long-time OSNews reader (and silver Patreon) and friend of mine Morgan, about how to set up OpenBSD as a workstation operating system – and in fact, I personally used that guide in my own OpenBSD journey. Well, Morgan’s back with another, similar article, this time covering FreeBSD. After going through the basic steps needed to make FreeBSD a bit more amenable to desktop use, Morgan notes about performance:
Now let’s compare FreeBSD. Well, quite frankly, there is no comparison! FreeBSD just feels snappier and more responsive on the desktop; at the same 170Hz refresh it actually feels like 170Hz. Void Linux always felt fast enough and I thought it had no lag at all at that refresh rate, but comparing them side by side (FreeBSD installed on the NVMe drive, Void running from a USB 4 SSD with similar performance), FreeBSD is smooth as glass and I started noticing just the slightest lag/stutter on Void. The same holds true for Firefox; I use smooth scrolling and on FreeBSD it really is perfectly smooth. Similarly, Youtube performance is unreal, with no dropped frames at any resolution all the way up to 4Kp60, and the videos look so much smoother!
↫ Morgan/kaidenshi
This is especially relevant for me personally, since the prime reason I switched my workstation back to Fedora KDE was OpenBSD’s performance issues. While those performance issues were entirely expected and the result of the operating system’s focus on security and hardening, it did mean it’s just not suitable for me as a workstation operating system, even if I like the internals and find it a joy to use, even under the hood. If FreeBSD delivers more solid desktop and workstation performance, it might be time I set up a FreeBSD KDE installation and see if it can handle my workstation’s 270Hz 4K display.
As I keep reiterating – the BSD world has a lot to offer those wishing to run a UNIX-like workstation operating system, and it’s articles like these that help people get started. A lot of the steps taken may seem elementary to many of us, but for people coming from Linux or even Windows, they may be unfamiliar and daunting, so having it all laid out in a straightforward manner is quite helpful.
Actually here are the exact reasons why I use freebsd as daily driver. I prefer openbsd wherever the performance is not an issue.
As I get older, linux seems too messy for me, but I can still handle it; Alpine and debian are my choises. 🙂
If you don’t need graphics performance FreeBSD would be fine.
FreeBSD knocked it out of the park with their early embrace of ZFS.
The FreeBSD Forums are a clique of deliberately obtuse people. Avoid.
Having to choose between smooth performance and security seems like a false dichotomy. One would think that a well designed system would be inherently more secure without compromising parallel processing performance.
shadowhand,
I understand where you are coming from, but I think it’s a bit overstated. Engineering can involve compromising between goals. As a general example, software & hardware can exploit speculative execution to increase performance, but this can result in decreased security ala spectre/meltdown. Same with Hyper-threading.
https://pupuweb.com/hyper-threading-security-risk-performance-boost/
Managed languages can improve the safety of a project by eliminating the risks of manually managing objects and preventing invalid memory access, but this may add extra runtime costs and garbage collected software increases memory footprint as well as runtime jitter. A language like rust is an attempt to maximize safety and performance at the same time, but that’s hard and even there we see other types of sacrifices like language simplicity. If we look close enough, compromises are everywhere. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, but the tradeoffs are real. For this reason I’m not that comfortable describing the security/performance balance as a “false dichotomy”.
Of course I’m only speaking in generalizations, can anyone here offer specific examples as it would relate to design differences between openbsd and freebsd?
FreeBSD isn’t an unsecure operating system – far from it. Some defaults could be more secure – it is up to the user to configure it so. If you will, you can say that the main focus of OpenBSD is security. FreeBSD focuses on other things beside security.
tingo,
to expand on that: thanks to cross-pollenation, all the BSDs (Free, Net, Dragonfly) benefit from OpenBSD’s single-minded focus on security, just as the other BSDs benefit from NetBSD’s focus on running on multiple architectures (like ARM), and the other BSDs benefit from FreeBSD’s focus on performance and ZFS, etc.