FreeBSD 12.3
freebsd.org
freebsd.org
Everything is very well-documented, you get a fairly clean centralization of configuration, non-base OS software is installed by default in /usr/local while giving you the option to move it elsewhere if you so desire. 3rd party software config doesn't get intermixed with the OS.
It's similar on the surface to Linux but you can really feel the totally different DNA it's composed of. Well worth looking over.
Just make sure you use ZFS as a file system if you have enough memory because the tooling is great and you can resize or reconfigure your storage more easily, or mount it in Linux with ZoL. I recently had to relocate and grow a UFS partition on a VM and it was a bit of a pain compared to ext4 and gparted. Had to grow the qcow2 disk image, make another slice (partition) at the end, dump /usr onto that, remove the original /usr slice to make room to grow /var, create a new /usr, restore onto it, delete the partition that held the dump, grow the new /usr to fill up the empty space. With ZFS, the BSD slices holding UFS filesystems becone ZFS datasets, you have the full zpool free space available on all of them, just like when using a single partition, but it can also span multiple disks.
I have plenty of containers that I'd like to use but there's no way to do it in FreeBSD.
Besides, I don't see benefit of using it over Linux except to learn and keep up with the difference between the two.
Not being able to use the docker container ecosystem is just making me give up.
Any differences between system versions is up to you to learn but having no access to third party resources isn't anything you can get around with.
https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Und...
I use it both as a desktop and on my personal servers (most of them). Also used it in professional capacity in the past.
FreeBSD, and the BSDs generally, are such gems. I use Linux for work every day (mostly Debian based), and that's all good. And almost 100% of that is working on Linux from a Windows device (WSL and/or SSH remote).
When I SSH into my FreeBSD ZFS server, or my OpenBSD router, it feels so clean and pure. A joy.
FBSD is like Arch for grownups, or Alpine if it was more complete.
Modern tech, minimal packaging. If we could get a NixOS style declarative model in here (beyond rc.conf) I'd be in heaven.
SystemD is no where to be seen. Much configuration can be specified in a few simple startup files. Jails offer in built container functionality. Bhyve does virt. Zfs is native. A fresh install uses about 100mb of ram.
New releases have detailed engineering release timeliness and processes, and release notes.
There's a great handbook (though arch wiki is probably better. Brittanica vs Wikipedia sort of thing)