Disclaimer: No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD or the maintainers.
I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run).
It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job.
Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc.
I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.
I will say the FreeBSD handbook is such a breath of fresh air compared to other OS documentation. Everything is easy to find and well formatted. Same goes for the OS internals themselves. It's just a cohesive project altogether.
I ran it for a while it’s nice. Easy as breathing ZFS on root and zfsbootmenu is really nice. Also the userland is maintained in connection with the kernel (or something to that extent) and it’s just a nice solid whole.
It took 30 years for linux to finally fulfill "x is the year of Linux Desktop", but I don't know if *BSD will ever get there.
Good to RTFM again and learn what's new (from a personal perspective)
e.g. Thin Jails
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailh...
not to pick on OP but what is up with all the links to OS project homepages today? i've seen illumos, LFS, FreeBSD and a handful of others. did i miss something (other than W11 shitting the bed with app launching) that's got people suddenly interested in alternative OSes today?
I had the printed handbook from the 3.x days, was a great resource and I am sure it still is.
I'd love for someone to show us an OS (not just a kernel) that is more secure.
How come this one about FreeBSD is [flagged] and this one [1] about SmartOS not?
Someone should make a new mobile OS like android but based on FreeBSD.
Good OS. Idk what to say. I thought this was a news site.
FreeBSD is nice nowdays if you are lucky with hardware but it has slower RAM memory read and write speed compared to Debian Linux
Does it support arm64?
Posts FreeBSD
Refuses to elaborate
Leaves
It's apparently "post a link to an OS with no further comment or discussion" day, first we get SmartOS and then Linux From Scratch and now this. Nice way to farm karma, I guess. Flagging them all.