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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

I would love to be able to switch to FreeBSD but the one thing holding me back is support for .NET Core (and lack of VS Code support if that also doesn't run on FreeBSD -- but that's moot if .NET Core support isn't there). Docker support would be nice but isn't essential since code can be checked in to a Linux-based build server and VS Code can attach to a Docker instance on another machine.

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(A port of) Visual Studio Code is available for FreeBSD (using it myself); `pkg install vscode`. If you would like to use docker, you could run a Linux distro in a virtual machine with docker daemon and configure your host docker command to use the daemon inside the VM. That's basically how docker works on macOS.

For docker on freebsd to get any traction, it would need to be implemented with the vm behind the scenes. The beauty of the macOS/windows versions are that they require 0 setup/maintenance and are an implementation detail.

>docker on freebsd to get any traction

Yeah no thanks....run bhyve..with buntu and than your docker...have (no) fun.

That's "docker" for freebsd:

https://bastillebsd.org/

Wow... bastille is a pretty capable container manager!

Yes! I love to work with it.

It seems like this should be relatively simple; build docker-cli as a native FreeBSD program, make a docker-machine backend for bhyve... port docker-machine to FreeBSD, I guess (I hope that's not hard; it's not doing anything OS-specific), and you should be good to go.

Instead of _switching_, I just got a used ThinkPad from ebay for a secondary OS, installed FreeBSD to it and I'm having a blast exploring a non-Linux OS and trying things out on that side. You don't need to go all-in, but do things gradually and see if FreeBSD offers you any new insights how an operating system could look like.

I also have a NixOS laptop and my main Arch Linux workstation for work use.

.NET Core can be build for FreeBSD [0] but it looks like there isn't official support.

[0] - https://github.com/jasonpugsley/installer/wiki/.NET-5.0-Prev...

I guess that is the question, is it the fault of .NET core or FreeBSD , that it is not availabe for FreeBSD?

I blame Scott Hanselman for not achieving "dotNet Everywhere." :-)

Funny thing is there was a .NET Framework "port" to FreeNSD a long time ago called Rotor...

Looooool

Well, it's not the hardware vendor who is usually blamed for a lack of a device driver for Linux (or a BSD).

Unless the vendor in question actively takes steps to make this more difficult.

Maybe it's nobody's fault?

I don't blame Microsoft for not spending limited resources on providing official support for an OS with (wildly guessing) 0.25% marketshare. And I don't blame FreeBSD for not spending limited resources on maintaining their own packages for an SDK with (wildly guessing) 0.75% marketshare among non-Windows users.

It's coming. Progress is being tracked in these places:

https://github.com/dotnet/source-build/issues/1139

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537

I dunno.. but the very first betas of dot net were actually available for FreeBSD. I remember downloading the spice for it way back. I’m surprised if it’s not available.

Are you talking about "Rotor" back in 2005 or 2006 right before Silverlight came out?

Uff I think it was actually before 2005. Was a long time ago. I recall it was open source, which was a surprise to me. It was definitely called dot net.

I think it was more towards 2001 or something, with the whole Java dispute between SUN and Microsoft. Visual J++ had some sort of dialect. (loved the IDE though, microsoft has always been good at developer tools).

Before that I was more interested in fahrenheit // openscene graph between Microsoft and SGI.

You mean mono(1)? From Miguel de Icaza & Ximian - started around 2001?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

Big sticking point for me is I'm doing development targeting Linux. As much as I feel *BSD is superior, I need the right tools to do my job.

> I would love to be able to switch to FreeBSD

Curious what you think you would personally gain other than the much-repeated mantra of "they have organized man docs and a strong set of CLI userland tools because they are developed alongside the kernel"

Well, I was thinking more like “They have organized man docs, and a strong set of CLI user land tools because they are developed alongside the kernel.” But I’m an Oxford comma man myself.

Google Oxford comma. It’s not simply a comma before an ‘and’.

I know, it was a joke on His dismissiveness. I'm only half as clever as I try to be

Those sound like excellent gains in and of themselves.

ZFS DTRACE and pf....oh and the mantra.

BSD ZFS I believe uses the same code as Linux nowadays or was at least planning to.

eBPF should cover your other two needs, by way of itself and through bpftrace.

> BSD ZFS I believe uses the same code as Linux nowadays or was at least planning to.

Just because FreeBSD and Linux share the same ZFS upstream it doesn’t mean the experience of running ZFS on Linux is in any way comparable to running it on FreeBSD.

For starters, it’s a default in FreeBSD rather than an optional driver you have to install yourself (or even compile yourself on some distros). And that along makes a massive difference when it comes to maintenance.

What is the benefit of using ZFS on a personal or dev machine? I almost never tinker with filesystem partitions or allocation once I set them up as part of installing an OS. I occasionally do on a production machine if I've misjudged space needed for something, but there again it's pretty rare.

Oh it's massive especially for kernel-devs/os-devs, snapshots and boot-environments (bectl)....for personal machines...zfs-send..never have to think about correct backups/restores anymore.

Boot environments for operating system upgrades. They take advantage of ZFS.

Snapshots was the biggie that made me switch to ZFS more than 10 years ago. Never looked back.

I run Windows and macOS on my personal and dev machines (so don’t use ZFS), but I’d really appreciate the peace of mind of bit rot protection.

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