Whilst BSD isn’t linux per se, it still has a lasting legacy in the unix like space and notably has been used in game consoles like the PS4.
For you in your personal use case, have you tried a bsd distro? What was better compared to the average linux distro?
Apparently BSD is more modular with its jailing system and seems to have a lower resource usage.
I look at ones like NETBSD and FreeBSD and think, "what exactly do I get out of them that I wouldn’t with Linux say, Ubuntu or Void as an example?
What are your thoughts on BSD, you use FreeBSD before?
I use FreeBSD on a desktop as a server and for desktop usage with a touchscreen to run a virtual pipe organ that needs an obscene amount of resources to run. There’s a few things that I see as pros:
-
Zfs on root/by default. Absolutely love zfs and not having to screw around with dkms/kernel issues etc to get it running is a huge plus imo
-
Jails - I cannot stand docker. It’s opaque and I’m stuck trusting that whatever image I’m downloading is updated/secured and or running multiple extra containers to stack together. With jails I spent my time setting up the jail once (installing services etc), and using a jail manager (bastille) I can maintain what I think is better control of the internals and updates etc. the commands mirror the os as well which is nice
-
Integrated world - the way bsd integrates the core system and separates out the packages means most security updates just need a service restart not a full reboot so uptime between OS patches can be months at a time. They’re also very conservative about changing how the core system functions so how I install/set up/maintain the system in 2007 is the same as today.
-
The manual. Anything I need to know when adding services including edge use cases is in the manual on their website. Much cleaner written than the arch manual, and has a pdf download available if you aren’t going to always have the internet (and a terminal interfaced manual option to download).
For my usage there’s not much I can think of for cons, but I will say laptops and particularly WiFi suffer currently. There’s funding and works in progress to fix this but still idk I’d use it on a laptop today without carefully checking support for the hardware like I would’ve with old school Linux. They’ve come a long way recently with edge cases for instance I’m currently running a windows vm with gpu pass thru using their bhyve vm manager, something that wasn’t supported a year ago, so I am optimistic the funding will help in the next few years on some of the laptop issues.
The majority of the Internet’s routing and switching architecture is BSD based. Historically it had the most stable and performant network stack of all the OSs.
I used it extensively at one job in a previous life when I was a network appliance developer. It was rock solid and lightning fast. Tried it as a desktop at home and had a terrible experience.
The little differences in the Unix commands used to drive me nuts as well…
I tried FreeBSD on a laptop.
It spammed error messages all over the installer’s TUI until I disabled my fingerprint reader in BIOS.
Then I had to patch and recompile the kernel to get it to talk to my laptop’s battery sensor.
Then there were half a dozen other issues I solved one by one, like getting the touchpad and the camera to work, and auto-detecting my networked printer/scanner.
Then I read up on why WiFi is so unbearably slow, and the solution was to pass-through a WiFi driver from inside a Linux VM.
I didn’t actually notice any end-user advantage of having a “fully integrated system” either, so I gave up and went back to Linux.
I’ve not used BSD, but this is cracking me up because this reads like the “Linux Sucks back to Windows” threads from 10 years ago.
While you’re not wrong there are still FreeBSD pain points particularly around wifi that remind me of 2007 when I first moved to Linux (and then FreeBSD). They’re working on it and have some funding put aside to pay developers to help remedy this. Laptops also are very likely to have odd and end edge cases, for instance my chromebook needs to pass audio over i2c which FreeBSD doesn’t support and even linux needs some hacky scripts to run through the commands to enable this (and the script needed an update because THIS particular model was slightly different from others by the same brand…). Linux in this regard moves much faster in getting support going and requires little to no pain especially in comparison. I love FreeBSD and use it everywhere I possilby can but there’s certainly things it’s just not easy/practical to use it for right now.
One thing no one mentioned is the license. I won’t touch BSD because if any BSD system gets good enough, a big corpo can fork it, get slightly ahead, and then never give back.
Source: MacOS
BSD developers: who cares about that. And, it is already happen. Android libc use lots of code of OpenBSD libc. OpenSSH is used everywhere.
GNU’s ssh implementation seems to be some abandoned trash, even though it was started in 1998, before OpenSSH. If OpenSSH doesnt exist, we can hope that everyone will be using differently broken ssh implementations; I’d expect gnu ssh to be a buggy, unreliable implementation which support hundreds of thounsands of flags and configuration options. Workers everywhere will be punished because of their buggy implementation of ssh. Why workers in every companies have to make their own ssh implementation? They should be doing something else.
That’s a very good point. If memory serves Netflix streaming servers did a similar thing.
BSD works great on my firewall, but I’m certainly not going to run it on my desktop. The hardware and software support just isn’t there yet.
