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Comment by TheIronMark | Hacker News Reader

Years ago, I wanted to learn Unix so I installed FreeBSD and ran mail and DNS on it. I thought, this will be a great learning experience. Except...it never broke. There was never anything to fix, so I didn't really learn that much from it outside of how to set things up (but just once). Then I installed linux and so many things broke all the time that I was learning everyday.

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That, in a nutshell, is what I - and no doubt many others - appreciate deeply about FreeBSD. Getting it to do what you want may not be trivial, but once you got it working, it stays that way. (The same can be said about OpenBSD and NetBSD, too, with the caveat that the OpenBSD developers do not put such a premium on backward compatibility.)

Relative to Windows, this is what I like about GNU/Linux, too. I used to work as an admin/helpdesk monkey, taking care of ~75 users and about 10 servers. And things would randomly break all the time. Having used mostly Linux and BSD in my private life for more than a decade at the time, I constantly found myself wondering how people can live like this. FWIW, on Debian and openSUSE, I had no trouble with things breaking randomly except on Tumbleweed. But there, it's usually just a question of rolling back to the latest snapshot, waiting for a week or so and running the upgrade again.

My experience of learning Unix from the installation process back in 2001 or was kind of the reverse. I installed Red Hat on an old machine and it the desktop GUI worked out of the box. That wasn't really what I was going for, so I installed FreeBSD instead and I had to configure X11 and everything else manually, and I learned a lot.

Totally agree that once up and running, FreeBSD is extremely reliable. Linux can be reliable, but it depends a lot of the distribution, and what you're doing with it.

Yeah I would say FreeBSD is about on the level of Arch as far as where it starts you off after the installation. But it makes configuring either one a great learning exercise.

I would argue that you really did learn the Unix way with FreeBSD.

Yeah, this matches exactly my experience from two decades ago.

I have also learned much more by fixing Linux, while my FreeBSD servers ran unattended for months or years.

You guys never update your servers?

I am infinitely more likely to setup unattended updates on a BSD box.

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