The Case for FreeBSD

essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."

Comments

hmmm

[Quasar1999]

I just installed FreeBSD this morning... I must say, straight off the iso, a quick install had me up and running pretty darn fast... much quicker than any linux distro I've tried in the recent past... Now if only I could figure out how to get visual studio to run under it, I could ditch windows... stupid work... stupid requiring development on Windows...

One serious thing about FreeBSD over linux distro's... It feels like it has more of a structure, especially when installing utilities and apps... I find with linux distros, the stuff included feels like it's all over the place, hard to find where things end up installing... but I'm really a vxworks fan... so take what I say with a grain of salt... ;)

Re:hmmm

[drinkypoo]

Some linux distributions are more fragmentary than others. Gentoo linux in particular tends to put things in the same place every time; /etc/conf.d for commandline and environment options, and /etc/ for that package's config files. On the other hand I've been mulling over the possibility of putting QNX on my laptop, which has only 128MB ram :)

Who cares about this battle?

[drinkypoo]

I don't see why people are so worried about advocacy. If you're not making money, what is the difference? Continue to refine the thing and get what you want out of it, and if other people don't get it, who loses? Personally I have a use for only a couple of operating systems now, and they are Linux and netbsd. netbsd because it runs on just about everything, and Linux because it's most supported. It's nothing against FreeBSD, which I simply don't need. The point is, I use whatever fits the job and if that was FreeBSD then I'd use that. The best fit is determined partially by functionality and partially by familiarity...

Re:Who cares about this battle?

[thepoch]

You see, people are worried about advocacy because these create mindshare. Without advocacy, people won't understand what the advantages are with using/supporting whatever it is you are advocating.

Without advocacy, your product/whatever will seem inadequate, small, meaningless. This will make your whatever simply useless in the eyes of those who have not decided for themselves at the moment.

People who are not making money out of this have all to lose if they don't get the advocacy they need. They don't have marketing might, and advocacy is all they have. The moment they lose advocacy, they lose mindshare, they lose users. They will them either wither and cease to exist, or become mediocre and simply unimportant, a relic of the past, with the people unwilling to just move on.

You have already decided what you need/want. This makes advocacy useless for you. For the rest of those who have not finalized that decision, they need this stuff to understand the advantages as viewed by those who use the stuff.

Of course, you are also advocating Linux and NetBSD by stating you use those. You didn't give hard facts, but it's still advocacy in a simpler form.

Re:Who cares about this battle?

[cperciva]

[If other people don't know about FreeBSD], who loses? Personally I have a use for only a couple of operating systems now, and they are Linux and netbsd.

To answer your question: You lose.

Linus Torvalds has said that the idea behind Linux is "do it yourself". The idea behind BSD -- coming, as it does, from an academic background -- is "there's lots of trash out there. Let's give people something better".

As far as providing people with a better alternative is concerned, writing FreeBSD doesn't accomplish much if everyone keeps on running the Linux distribution of the day.

Re:Who cares about this battle?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Advocacy is to free software what marketing is to commercial software

Actually there's a key difference. Most marketing is carefully directed at potential new customers. Most "advocacy" takes place in forums specifically designed for advocacy (comp.*.advocacy, slashdot, ars technica battlefront, etc), where a tiny number of relatively knowlegable users quibble amongst themselves for kicks.

Let's take this very article as an example. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have relatively small userbases which primarily consists of Unix and BSD-saavy users. Neither project has very much to gain by converting the other's users. (Unless there really is some threat of one or the other dying.) Either project would have much more to gain trying to convert the HUGE market of fleeing commercial UNIX users instead of arguing amongst themselves. You'll notice that's what RedHat is doing rather than trying to pick off Debian customers.

Not to mention...

[elid]

...FreeBSD is getting a new logo (well, 0 submissions to date, but still !

More people need to try and use FreeBSD

[Kip Winger]

Repeat a lie enough, and it becomes true. That lie, mostly being, that FreeBSD is dying, or is some arcane system only to hack around on, similar to Plan9.

In fact, for those who haven't tried it, it's quite an excellent full-featured Unix, with everything you'd find under Linux. In fact, it's fully binary compatible with Linux.

The only difference is that it does things the old way -- vi is vi, not vim, and you get sh, csh or tcsh instead of bloated bash. It doesn't have anyone pushing for "ease of use," though it's about at the level of slackware, except with ports, the greatest package management system known to man. Gentoo's portage doesn't even come close to the flexibility and reliability of ports.

Internally, it runs great, because it's not doing things the kernel shouldn't do to boost benchmarks. It's not deeply involved in corporate America, but remains strong due to good management.

Plus it's far more secure. With how much Linux websites are hacked these days -- see http://zone-h.org/ and check out the statistics section, at least 70-80% of website hacks are Linux based -- I wouldn't run it on Linux. FreeBSD is the obvious choice, as it runs its services flawlessly.

I agree

[bogaboga]

Yes, because the BSDs continue to shine where Linux and Windows seem to fall short IMHO. This is software pakgage management. I am using Debian now and was shocked to find that even for Debian, with its much acclaimed apt tool, Debian got confused and made my system unstable when I decided to upgrade it.

I also heard that Windows used or at least used some BSD work in it's internet capability push years ago. One question will always dog me: Why aren't the BSD's as popular with their very good license at least in the eyes of the IBMs and HPs?

Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

// Please *don't* mod this up. It has already been done! Thx

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Getting defensive?

[idiotnot]

NetBSD 2.0 is a higher-quality release than FreeBSD 5.3 on the IA32 platform. There's just no other way to put it.

My experience with FreeBSD is that the 4.x branch is rock-solid stable, fast, and everything works as it's supposed to.

NetBSD has basically reached that level of quality, with better performance.

FreeBSD 5.x has been unstable for me at best. While the userland programs are pretty much the same, the kernel-level changes have killed reliability. Furthermore, some of the much-touted new features simply do not work yet. I'm sure the SMP performance is much better, but I don't have many SMP machines. I've had problems with hard lockups, just doing things like trying to combine vlan and pf. The bridge interface, afaik, also, still doesn't work with pf.

As far as packages go, ports has more packages, true. Still, rarely has there been something not in pkgsrc that I absolutely needed. Pkgsrc is also much easier to work with, and far more friendly when it comes time to upgrade things. Portupgrade is an abortion, especially compared to even *gack* portage from ricerloonix.

There are reasons there's a buzz around NetBSD these days -- and reasons FreeBSD isn't getting the love it used to. I don't know whether the FreeBSD developers bit off more than they can chew, or if they just are rushing things out the door. But until they get their act together and put out a 5.x-RELEASE that truly is release-quality (by which I mean, all the features *work*, and the drivers are supported the same way), I'm going to be using NetBSD and advising my friends to do the same.

Re:Reliability of ports?

[cperciva]

A decent number of them are marked BROKEN.

If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.

Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.

Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?

just to be clear

[mqx]

The NetBSD team were not criticising FreeBSD: basically, NetBSD stepped up their advocacy as part of NetBSD 2.0 release, including some whitepapers on performance comparision between NetBSD and FreeBSD. If anything, the BSD camps all have decent respect for each other, and honestly, Scott suggested that there was more animosity from the NetBSD camp that I think is the case in reality. All of the BSD camps could do with better advocacy, and Scott's post is more an indication that none of them are doing very good marketing, and as soon as NetBSD stepped up the marketing, the other camps (i.e. FreeBSD) felt they weren't getting a good rap: but really, the issue is, that FreeBSD guys just haven't been out there pushing their case as hard as they should really be.

A one time try is all that's needed for success

[Zedrick]

I've been using Linux since around '96 something, first Redhat, then Slackware and recently Gentoo when I got my AMD64. I tried FreeBSD for the first time a few months ago when I had an old 200mhz machine that I just wanted to use for something, and since that seemed to work ok (a very basic install, no X or anything like that) I decided to give FreeBSD/AMD64 a try when I had to do a reinstallation due to hardware changes.

I downloaded a minimal boot CD, burned in, booted installed the base system over FTP and then X, KDE etc via ports...

After only a few hours I was totally confused. Everything just worked!! Well, almost everything. I had some problems with the soundcard, that was solved thanks to great documentation pointing me to a very logical solution.

I'm still a bit lightheaded. An operating system just can't be this good, I'm probably going to wake up soon.