I've also read the original blog that this article spawns from. The gist of it is: "I switched to BSD during Linux's bad period, and now I'm comfortable with it so I'll stick with it".
And hey, more power to you. But the thing is, the world has moved on. Linux is stable now. Linux containerization and VM tech is good now. The storage technologies are cross-platform now (I've had zero data loss since using zfs). The moat has shrunk.
So then, what are we left with?
* BSD is less common, so there are fewer CVEs on it. Hackers aren't stupid; they target popular platforms. You get plenty of CVEs for Apple systems (which are BSD, btw).
* Of course, since BSD is less common, it's harder to find employees who are wizards with it.
* Everyone releases for Linux first, so on some things you either have to wait, or do it yourself (or stick it in a Linux VM, at which point...)
* Licensing bites people all the time, but it's hardly a catastrophic thing; merely the normal politics that occur when things get big enough, and enough money is involved. You win by paying good money to hire the better legal team.
So what true benefit is there to using BSD over Linux? Other than satisfying your own self or going with what you're already familiar with, not much.
I feel that âit just works and you donât need to maintain itâ is less an OS feature, and more about what you are doing with it.
A server whose uptime goes to X years is a server that wasn't updated in X years. I'm proud of my old XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) ~15 months uptime years ago that only a blackout did interrupt (yep, I had no UPS), and I write this as a mostly Linux user, but I'm not sure it's a good thing to aim for in production or in anything connected to the Internet.
From the blog post linked in the article:
> The largest failure was with btrfs â after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working.
RAID is not a backup.
> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be.
I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance
All the home-server setups of my colleagues are tiny Kubernetes setups in various ways. Breaking down in various ways.
Mine is a Debian box. Upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 to 12. Running all kinds of things. I only use Debian packages alongside one or two Docker containers.
Linux can do boring just fine.
I'm halfway through switching all of my personal machines from Linux to BSD for pretty much this exact reason. It's going very well so far.
After reading the article and the comments, I sincerely don't know why use BSD outside programming a server software that use `pledge()` and `jail()` system calls, like when people make [BCHS servers](https://learnbchs.org/index.html).
Maybe I'm biased because I had worse experience making FreeBSD and OpenBSD in a desktop than with Gentoo, but I think working Modern Linux distros are as customizable, as stable, and with a lot more community and professionals working on them than any BSD one, and with a business in mind, that last detail is really important.
Every companies have linux servers with crazy uptimes.
My server never crash, my linux desktop do.
I assume they don't put BSD on their client's laptop.
This is my article -- but it's also a dupe...
I'm currently building my homelab and I'm seriously considering SmartOS as a hypervisor.
I've never used Solaris or illumos before, but I'm looking for something bullet-proof, idiot-proof and maintenance-free. The mainstream solution would probably be Proxmox and while I know how to administrate a Debian system, I don't trust myself as a sysadmin while acting in a personal capacity. Proxmox intrinsically just doesn't bring the peace of mind that I won't accidentally blow it up while away from my apartment.
Just because a solution isn't mainstream doesn't mean it's not worth taking a look at. Even if you don't end up selecting them, it brings a healthy perspective that you wouldn't have otherwise.
> easy deployment isn't as important as easy longterm maintenance and support
This veers close to treating your servers as pets instead of cattle. Which is fine if youâre small ( 99% of services are ), but not great if you have thousands of servers and scale up and down routinely.
That said, I donât feel like that quote actually represents BSD vs Linux at all. You can have easy deploys and long term maintenance on either.
Reminds me of a new cto who, coming from a windows server background, demanded we reboot the servers (Linux) to prepare for the holiday rush (e-commerce site, mid oughts). Our admins had to explain we donât do that. He persisted, so the admins stayed late and then went for beers, not rebooting a thing. Iirc this was outside of a maintenance window, and it simply wasnât necessary.
I just donât buy the story that Linux is unreliable.
Itâs kind of a ridiculous thing to claim without very substantial proof.
I think itâs made up to justify installing BSD.
Sounds fun, not boring to me
I donât buy this article.
> Clients are often influenced by hype. A few years ago, it was "Linux is a toy." Now, it's "Why bhyve and not Proxmox?" They ask, "How can they sell FreeBSD? There's no AI, there's no Cloud, there's no Kubernetes, there's no blockchain â there's nothing!"
I am very confident that this is more âfan fictionâ than the author would like to admit. The sort of hypothetical that someone cooks up on their head to anger up the blood and to then self-soothe by thinking about how much better than everyone else they are.
Why does everything have to be so bloody religious? If you like boring tech, stop politicising it.
Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.