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Comment by fuball63 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge FreeBSD fan because of what the author is hinting at; it's easier to grok because of it's stricter separation of user space and system space and because it has great documentation. I try to use it for any server project, and ran it as a desktop for a little bit.

That being said, the reason I don't go 100% all in on it and use Ubuntu is the upgrade process. The article says they were successful upgrading minor versions, but major version upgrades are a real pain. Last time I did it it was showing me diffs of system scripts and asking me to make calls on what changes to accept; I chose "use latest" for everything, and ended up breaking "sudo" and effectively lost control of my cloud instance.

If there's a better way to perform system upgrades, I'd love to hear it, because I think the OS is beautifully minimalistic and closer to Unix philosophy than Ubuntu/OSX.

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At some point, pkg is to take over the updates of base, kernel, etc.

That isn't to say that the current freebsd-update isn't any good, just that it needs someone knowing they are doing. And even experienced people do make mistakes. Case in point, you tried to upgrade, you were given a locally-modified file under /etc/ to merge with the new version, you made a small mistake, shouldn't result in losing the system.

If I'm not mistaken, when Debian is confronted with the same problem usually asks whether to keep the old file or replace with the new, which basically narrows the ability to merge the two together in many cases. FreeBSD actually is slightly smarter there, in the sense that it can even detect whether the comment header of the file is the only thing that changes and actually merge it on its own. But, if there are real differences (e.g. you modified /etc/ssh/sshd_config), it asks you to merge the incoming with the current version. In any case, I think FreeBSD is extremely stable when it comes to what goes into /etc and how stable the file formats of individual files there are, so I think it would be perfectly reasonable to just simplify the choices presented to the user.

In my previous job we actually had an exhaustive list of IGNOREd files for freebsd-update, just to make sure that nothing was to get clobbered by some major or even minor upgrade. And that freebsd-update would practically run to completion without any interaction of this sort.

I highly recommend zfs with beinstall (/usr/src/tools/build/beinstall.sh ). It automatically creates a new ZFS bootenv, installs world & kernel to it, and upgrades your packages. If there is an issue, you can select the old bootenv from the boot loader prompt and be back in your old, pre-updated OS with nothing at all changed.

Thanks, this sounds like something I will look into.

I’ve thought about BSD before but can never decide between OpenBSD and FreeBSD

I find that the order of most user friendly to least, in terms of the "big 3" BSD's, is FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. But a lot of people love OpenBSD; personally I like it because it has the boggle command line game.

One aspect to consider is hardware. OpenBSD seems to have better hardware support for certain laptops, namely Thinkpads.

Imo OpenBSD on laptop, FreeBSD on server/desktop. But they're both great and I don't think you'd regret either one on any system :)

OpenBSD feels more cohesively designed, in my experience. If you have an older ThinkPad lying around, it should be a dead-easy installation and a pretty easy setup process. Back when I used it on a laptop, I liked its design but I didn't find it practical for my workflow compared to Linux and macOS.

Do you still need to use a third-party service in order to get binary software updates between distro releases?

No. At least not for security updates. There is syspatch for the base system and "pkg_add -u" now also also pulls from a package collection called "packages-stable".

The regular 6 month base system updates have been automated as well with "sysupgrade". Doesn't work for whole disk encryption if you have required networking firmware that can't be distributed (I'm looking at you Intel), For that particular case you have to copy the new ram disk kernel (bsd.rd) to the root of the disk. Regular updates are super easy now.

Openbsd is consistent and minimal. Works out of the box with sane defaults but slow Wifi and IO, no bluetooth nor docker.

FreeBSD is more complicated, less consistent but also faster and integrate novelties such as zfs, wayland, BT ...

I personally prefer openbsd to FreeBSD, but still use Debian Linux for my laptops and servers.

I have OpenBSD on my Thinkpad T480s and pretty much everything worked great out of the box. Even something like the Volume buttons that on Linux with DWM I had to manually map to amixer they just work. Of course there are some trade-offs. Bluetooth is a big one that might not work for people. Overall compared to FreeBSD the setup was dead simple with hardly any work. I know people complain about speed on OBSD, but I have not noticed it being that much slower. I am in love and don't see myself hopping again for a while (famous last words obviously).

FreeBSD is my second OS and has been for over 10 years. Prior to that I was a Slakware adherent. I do dread the update/upgrade process of FreeBSD. Beyond the need to deal with the diff editing, I often need to rebuild/install packages. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong (likely!) but I can't recall the last time I needed to get an update to an application because of any changes to Windows.

But beyond that, I do love FreeBSD

You may want to look at the freebsdX-compat packages (or similar options in config, if you're building your own kernel/world).

If you install those, your software built for older versions of FreeBSD will mostly continue to work (lsof seems to need a recompile almost always though).

Fresh rebuilds are probably 'better', but there's lots of reasons you might need to run something built on an earlier version, and it should work (if not, and there's no clear reason, it's a bug).

This is what happened to me, I did the diffs, it said "if you built packages from ports, rebuild them now". I did everything with pkg (probably had to reinstall those, in retrospect) but I guess sudo was, by DigitalOcean (FreeBSD servers come with sudo and a freebsd user preinstalled there).

May be move to immutable configs using nix? That way provision a latest version and migrate your config and store data separately?

Yeah, my current process is to assume that the upgrade will fail and spin up a second instance with backups restored. This is for the cloud, where I have less root access (DigitalOcean doesn't give you the root password, and can't change it in recovery).

For a box you have full control of, the good news is I can almost always fix it in single user mode.

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