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Why FreeBSD
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
He didn't even flag it for the BSD section on the site. I guess this is a step up from that RAID article, though.
Simple, choice is good. As muck as I like Linux, I'm glad to see that there are viable, open alternative OS's.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
Jesus Christ, is this post a bloody propaganda speech or something? Slashdot - keeping the Nuremburg spirit alive!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
"FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been."
Can it get anymore flaimbaitish than this. Ironicaly enought it comes from I.B.M developer works.
P.S: Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
Well, if anybody asserts that "Windows is the operating system that Linux should have been", they clearly deserve a bashing.
IIRC, there was just enough controversy over the sealed agreement in the Berkely vs. AT&T kerfuffle that developers were a teensy bit nervous about working on BSD. By the time that was all properly dealt with, Linux was already gaining speed, and had the additional advantage of riding the back of a wave of MS hatred.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Skippy is the unknown giant among peanut butters. Starting out from George Washington Carver's project, it is an extremely creamy spreadable peanut product mostly for the "& Jelly" sandwich and its clones. In many ways, Skippy has always been the peanut butter that Peter Pan should have been. It spreads on Wonder Bread and artisan sourdough loafs fresh from the oven, and it serves terabites of children a day on some of the largest daycare centers on earth.
freebsd is dying as is macos x and windows. The future is Linux. The future is Free.
FreeBSD is free'er than Linux, or more accurately the BSD license is free'er than the GPL. That said, the less free GPL's restrictions are meant to be benevolent for certain users.
Mac OS X's share is growing wildly. For some it is replacing Linux as their general purpose unix. Now some people have more specialized needs and Linux may be a better choice but many folks using Linux just need a general purpose unix box and are not into the politics and Mac OS X combines unix, a consumer GUI, FOS software, and off-the-shelf retail software very nicely.
In general, it is rock solid; I've seen a FreeBSD server with a load of 80-something (process went nuts), and still been able to login and take corrective action without rebooting. I remember being quite shocked to find a console reporting that / was inaccessible due to a drive error - but server processes on other partitions continued to run just fine anyway. We've had a few hiccups with 5.x (although 5.4 fixed most of them), but our testing of 6-beta is going really well. FreeBSD is the masochist of operating systems: you hit it, and it just keeps asking for more!
There are other reasons to love it. The ports system is very solid, and it's been years since we had problems applying an upgrade due to dependency issues. The documentation is marvelous - man pages are useful, and the handbook covers most things. The community support mailing lists are very useful, too. Jails provide a convenient way to partition processes on a single server, although they are far from perfect at this point (they keep improving, though).
I really can't say enough good things about FreeBSD. It has been running most of our hosting setup, and many of our client's networks for years, and the only time we ever seem to run into problems is when hardware dies.
(For the record, I also use Debian - and it is good, but I prefer FreeBSD for servers that have to be trusted)
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
One could also argue that Linux is what FreeBSD should have been, and cite the huge number of supercomputers using Linux, or the success of Linux on the mainframe. However, it would be nice if the poster realized that it's a pissing contest and both operating systems are impressive and have their uses, benefits, and drawbacks. Neither is what one "should have been". They both have their own, very different methodologies, so let's leave it at that.
Not that it's news anyways...
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
I've admin'd most every flavor of Unix at some point in my life and I really really like how FreeBSD is managed, from development to the ports tree.
Now that there is a push to support binary updates, my last major complaint has been addressed.
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the perl dependancy hell will absolutely love the ports tree - I really don't understand why there hasn't been more adoption of that concept in Linux.
Also, I am suprised that Linux is the platform of choice for all of these appliances that companies are pumping out, like wireless routers, security devices, etc, when the BSD license is so much more attractive to business.
The major stumbling block that FreeBSD has left is their development team. It seems like the way things are organized really creates a lot of opportunity for personality clashes.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Yes but there is the licenses issue. BSD style licenses vs the GPL.
At least for companies to use the OS with there products.
Now the licenses issue is not going to concern me if all I am doing is setting up a machine to run at home. And I think it comes down to what you are use to. I have been mostly a old Sun Admin and I like FreeBSD over Linux, although I do like the rc start up scripts of Linux over FreeBSD.
And it did make the move to OS X easier coming from FreeBSD. However I am not sure I will ever get use to the changes in the startup files that Apple has introduced. Maybe some day.
-S
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
The first time I installed FreeBSD, I looked at the screen and kind of went "What do I do now?". After a bit of digging, my impression was that of a system that had all the kinks worked out of it. After trying many Linux distros, FreeBSD made more sense.
/usr/local, if I upgrade the system, cvsup is simple, the ports tree makes keeping software up to date a breeze, I'm not going to have to hunt for a distro specific rpm or a wierd library just to get something to work. The amount of software available for FreeBSD is astounding, chances are, if a project is in development, it's already in the ports tree.
If I install software, it's going to be in
I've used FreeBSD for about 6 years and I really don't see myself using Linux anymore. The community is very supportive, intelligent and open minded, I always seem to get things done with FreeBSD, I haven't found a problem I couldn't solve within a few hours, it just works, and works well. Try it, you might find that it works as well for you.
I think those days are over...
The PC-BSD project makes it a snap to install a functioning FreeBSD system. DistroWatch mentions a very nice step-by-step guide to installation process but really, you don't even need that if you are already handy at installing various GNU/Linux distros. (Although the guide does go into some custom configuration things that are useful/interesting.)
The torrent for PC-BSD is ready to roll, give it a try. Now there are no more excuses ;-)
Neither FreeBSD, nor OpenBSD scale as well on large SMP systems as Linux. Period. OpenBSD may have more security features and FreeBSD may have its own strong point, but scalability sure as heck isn't one of them.
Why FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD, NetBSD, OSX, etc.?
The article was really sketchy on this point.
I work at a large internet organization that runs thousands of FreeBSD systems. When we need 64-bit though, we switch to Linux because it has a stable 64-bit distribution and FreeBSD does not. I've gone through all the kudo's about FreeBSD being stable, but are you using release 5? and are you using 64-bit? (and don't even get me started about threading support.)
Look, it's a giant troll posting thinly disguised as a news article!
BSD is great, but it's not the only game in town. Suggesting that it is what Linux should have been is nothing more than troll bait.
I disagree with much of what you said:
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
FreeBSD is a full OS. I have no idea what you mean by your statement.
Yes, compiling from source does take a long time. Have you tried the pre-compiled package system? Same dependancy tracking but with pre-compiled binaries?
FreeBSD has the best documentation of any of the unix-like OS's that I have found. The handbook covers lots of cases.
FreeBSD also has softupdates... very much like Journaling. And that is on by default through the auto command in the installer.
And I think you are missing the point of FreeBSD, it is a server OS... I think most of your complaints come from the fact that there is no GUI by default. This is because you don't usually sit on the console on FreeBSD servers.
Linux only scales well on said 'large SMP systems' where there has been a tremendous amount of hand-holding by the vendors of said hardware.
I'm having good experiences running NetBSD on a quad CPU server here, but you didn't mention NetBSD...
And I know that isn't necessarily a 'large SMP system.'
Frankly, who *cares* what proprietary vendors are able to twist Linux into doing on their specific hardware? They could do the same thing with any OS they focused on.
I wrote this a while ago but it seems applicable here.
Linux vs. FreeBSD
since I love both, I'll jump right in and give plus and minus to both FreeBSD and your friendly Linux distro of choice:
1. drivers: more devices supported in the Linux world
2. install: bsd install still primative, and disk partitioning is weird especially for novice, and multiple boot can be hard to set up
3. smp - scaling: 5.x freebsd is still having trouble with its spinlocks, and can still sieze up under heavy load (4.x version with giant lock doesn't have this problem). The core issue is that the freebsd folks don't seem to realize releasing locks in the same order they are applied makes things easy, while what they are doing can make trouble. This is why I use 4. in production.
4. filesystem - ext3 and reiserfs can get into inconsistent unrecoverable state, pure and simple. XFS and maybe some other Linux filesystems don't have that problem.
5. Linux GPL great for some things and horrible for others, BSD license ditto.
6. startup scripts easier to understand in BSD, getting pretty hairy in some Linux distros. My favorite commercial distro SuSE and RedHat are really getting tangled.
7. More Enterprise software available (and supported) on Linux, maybe not a big deal unless you're in big SAN environment or absolutely MUST use Oracle and such. I'm betting though you'll see more stuff popping up for Debian and friends now that Debian has bounded back into life.
FreeBSD is for people who hate Linux.
OpenBSD is for people who hate everyone.
sigs are for fools and trolls. no signature is *always* appropriate. you should turn them off in your preferences.
If you want to seriously compare two open-source Unix-like systems, the only instrinsic difference is the kernel. Arguing that one system is better because of the default configuration of network services, the package system, the organization of the rc scripts, and so on, is a red herring, because there is no reason you can't take all of the userspace from one system and run it on top of the kernel from the other -- and there are projects which do this.
In that light, these benchmarks are the most enlightening comparison I have seen to date. Some BSD users have attacked the methodology, but none of them has gone on to do alternative tests of their own, and the author has been very conscientious about addressing some of the criticism. The bottom line is that FreeBSD is, whichever version you choose, at best equal to Linux in low-level kernel performance, and usually slower.
When you also take into account the greater ease of use of most common Linux distributions, broader hardware support, greater availability of commercial software (yes, you may be able to run it under FreeBSD's Linux emulation layer, but the vendor is unlikely to officially support that, which matters to large corporations), and better scalability, it really isn't suprising that most people considering a free Unix-like operating system choose some distribution of Linux.
Undoubtedly for a long time, perhaps until the 2.4 kernel came out, FreeBSD probably was superior, and had a well-deserved reputation as a better choice for serious usage. For some purposes (there are some routing benchmarks that FreeBSD people always bring up, which I can't find right now) it may still be. But through some combination of the AT&T lawsuit, media coverage, and pure chance (licensing may also have played a part), the commercial support and developer mindshare swung decisively to the Linux kernel, and today it is clearly the best choice for most uses. We can wonder what would have happened if FreeBSD had won out instead -- the resulting kernel might very well be better than either Linux or FreeBSD is today -- but that doesn't change the facts about which is the better choice today.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
A lot of the FreeBSD plusses you listed also apply to Gentoo Linux.
:)
Both are decent operating systems.
What about NetBSD? You forgot NetBSD!
NetBSD is like Poland - it keeps chugging along, but everyone forgets about it.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
I am not going to get into which OS "is better" because actual performance is not the issue here. If I had to rate what I saw, FreeBSD (4.1x) worked okay for the hardware it was put on, although it probably would have worked better on a "stock install" than the kludged clusterfuck that we deal with now.
The background is this: a few years ago, the small company I worked for had two admins who were FreeBSD fanatics. They pressured the IT department to use FreeBSD because it was free, their Windows infrastructure was taxed, and they had just bought a whole lot of new hardware. The pressured FreeBSD over Redhat, and made an impressive demo. So the company started going to FreeBSD. The admins, who had impressive mod skills, "tuned and tweaked" FreeBSD to work under the specific loads of the various server functions.
This would have been a good situation to be in, but then one of them got lazy, and updates got further and further behind. The other quit. The lazy one got fired. The other admins didn't know FreeBSD and barely knew Linux. Both of them eventually quit, too. I don't blame FreeBSD for the personnel problems, but this is leading to the main problem.
The company searched for someone with FreeBSD experience. The few people they found were not the kind of people they were looking for (inexperienced, would not pass clearance, had poor work records), and now they were stuck with a rapidly aging system that wasn't supported by anyone who had a clue. The new admins they hired tried to match the previous admin's skills, but were spending so much time diagnosing crashes, they didn't have time to learn new FreeBSD skills via online sources, which are sparse, confused, unorganized, and unsupportive (don't flame me on this, because this is pretty much the opinion of the whole company). And finding corporate-level supported software and hardware to run on FreeBSD was next to impossible ("We don't support FreeBSD for our fiber channel cards," says a SAN company desperate for our business, "but we hear some guy in the Netherlands had a flaky beta driver that can see things as long as the partitions are less than 256 GB." then the Sourceforge project hasn't been updated since 2002, doesn't work on our kernel version, and the guy's website is 404...)
So they decided to go with Redhat Linux. It just works. It worked faster than FreeBSD. It had an easy-to understand packaging and script-driven administration system, corporate support, and better yet: they could find LOTS people skilled in Redhat Linux in resumes. I was a particular gem because when the hired me I was an RHCT and had experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD experience to boot. My first project was "Get us off FreeBSD!!!" by direct order. Yes, you could argue this is not a FreeBSD issue at all, but some management of people issue, and you would be right, and that is my exact point.
If FreeBSD had a sensible corporate base, a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in /etc and /usr/local/etc... and have you ever had to diagnose which one broke?), better hardware/software vendor support, and a huge skills base, maybe with some certs... THEN we will see true competition with Linux in the corporate sector. Redhat is the type of company businesses want. They understand the support language Redhat speaks. And maybe I'll see stats that the Redhat kernel is bloated, runs 20% slower the what FreeBSD does on Apache pulls, or some fanatic going on about, "Oh yeah? What about PORTS, dumbass???" But you know what? If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.