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Comment by iagovar | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD is my go-to OS when I need a VM. I have poor sysadmin skills and I find it easier than Linux in general. I still use Xubuntu for my laptop, and Windows for my desktop.

For me, as a low level power user, I just find that searching "how to do something in FreeBSD" feels like always leads me to something easy to follow through and consistent. In Linux many times I find that tutorials don't apply to my version, or this distro has this files somewhere else and a long list of etc. It's fine, I get what's about Linux, It's just that I don't really have the motivation to learn all that quirks + the quirks of the stuff I'm trying to use.

FreeBSD community has always been nice to me too, everytime I needed to ask stuff.

So I just want to thank the FreeBSD devs and community because without them I wouldn't be doing a lot of stuff, or maybe just using Windows VMs.

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For me if I need to start a random cli vm it's debian-minimal stable. Needs very little maintenance besides apt-get upgrade for a non-gui VM, not much special handling compared to other distros, just enough automatism to not need hand holding.

Nowaday my work laptop if also debian + xfce.

There are lots of other distros cooler or with better functionnality, and they're super cool for tinkering, learning and testing, but at the end of the day I want to install something that won't bother me and just let me work without caring (and won't have the cardinal sin of breaking whenever you do a significant update that you need for a software and have broken ripples everywhere), and debian does that: it's not "exciting", it's not "edgy", but it just works, and sometimes that's what you need.

I've heard freebsd can do that too but I admit it feels a bit daunting from a distance with no experience in it, and I have no idea how it fares on laptop (notably power usage and hardware support).

> I want to install something that won't bother me and just let me work without caring

like Mac OS X? :)

These days on my Mac, that's Ubuntu. Xcode and Homebrew upgrades regularly break things for me, and I've never had that issue on Linux. I also don't have to fight with Ubuntu to get it to do what I want like I did with macOS.

Way too opiniated for me

Have you tried the arch wiki?

Will second this, Arch Linux is by far the most user-friendly distribution. It lacks a lot of the kludges and oddities that are especially common to Debian distributions, and the rolling release more often than not prevents you from needing to install a third party repository just to use the current stable release of a package. The documentation is actually helpful, and if you do have an actual novel problem, the community will be there for you (though, like any healthy community, it has defenses against lazy people who won't read the documentation).

This is so true and my experience completely checks out with it.

I started trying out Linux with the usual Ubuntu / Linux Mint distros, but I got so confused by the lack of structure and understanding of what is the correct way to do things - aka what I wanted to understand with Linux, for personal knowledge.

I moved to arch, and ease of use came free: everything you'll ever need is basically on the wiki, no weird PPA to add, nothing on sketchy tutorial sites - just the wiki. Definitely suggested for beginners (yeah the installation can be a pain but it's minimal compared to the advantages)

The Arch Linux wiki is useful even for other distros

The pacman rosetta is page I use the most.

I use Arch Linux and FreeBSD quite a lot and I agree that the Arch Wiki is great but it's not really comparable to the FreeBSD handbook.

The handbook feels... like a proper handbook. It's got structure and is very comprehensive. The first time I installed a non-Windows OS was FreeBSD as a teenager using only the handbook (I had no internet connection). In hindsight it was an amazing learning experience.

The Arch wiki is more like a compendium of arcane knowledge regarding Arch Linux and a lot of Linux software. It's a lot broader in scope but it can be a bit overwhelming when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Compare for instance the entry for OpenSSH in the handbook vs. the Arch wiki:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/openssh.html

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OpenSSH

The FreeBSD page is a lot shorter but it's also more beginner friendly IMO. It ignores the more advanced features and niche use cases to get the user started. If you want to go deeper than that you're supposed to go look for the full documentations elsewhere (man pages, info pages or... the Arch Wiki for instance). It's short and focused. The Arch Wiki page on the other hand tackles many other advanced features of OpenSSH but I fear that a complete beginner might find it a bit overwhelming.

The Arch Wiki is priceless though, it's become my de-facto resource for projects that don't offer good quality first party documentation.

> I use Arch Linux and FreeBSD quite a lot and I agree that the Arch Wiki is great but it's not really comparable to the FreeBSD handbook.

I think it's a depth vs. breadth thing. The Arch Wiki covers significantly more topics, and a vast number of these topics are deep enough to solve your problem or get the job done.

I think the FreeBSD handbook often tries to be "complete" in some sense.

> Arch Linux is by far the most user-friendly distribution

I would put an * next to your statement.

It's more like a user-friendly model airplane kit. It might be overwhelming to a large majority of beginners who would start off better with an RTF model airplane.

As an example, very early in the installation guide you will be choosing EFI vs BIOS boot which you might be able to handle, but not everyone.

To be clear, Arch is my preferred distribution.

Arch is fine, I use it currently on one of my computers, but it can also be a lot of upkeep. Arch's wiki is great, but also different then BSD's documentation. Arch is more choose your adventure, where BSD is more cohesive. I wouldn't choose Arch for a server, in the same way I probably wouldn't choose BSD for a desktop. They both have their place though. I would argue in the past BSD's strong point would have been networking. If you dig far enough though, both Linux and BSD, have positive and negative points in regards to networking. Also even though BSD has jails, Kubernets has supplanted some of what you might of used jails for in the past. Jails are still very useful of course though.

My take on it is, the FreeBSD handbook (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/) will give you answers on how to fix 90% of your everyday problems.

When i'm troubleshooting something weird/infrequently used, and the explanation given in the handbook is inadequate, i usually turn to the Arch Wiki.

Didn't try arch, Xubuntu is nice for my current laptop and didn't feel the need to dig a lot. It's in VM when I need to mess with stuff when I find it challenging.

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