Hacker News Reader

Comment by olavgg | Hacker News Reader

For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One pain point I recently struggled with was RocksDB with Rust, data got corrupted.. But the same code works great with Linux.

I really like FreeBSD, but I do not have time for it anymore. I really think FreeBSD is important, and I appriciate all the great work. But it needs to help me save my time.

I think spending effort and money on getting it to run better on laptops will not help adaptation. We have macs, which are a lot better than anything else at the moment. Even Linux on a laptop is a painful experience.

View on HN

FreeBSD upgrade and packaging will change a lot in 15.0.

Currently - up to 14.x - the freebsd-update(8) command is used for upgrades - and yes - it can require manual intervention - but one can also use it in unattended mode like that:

    # env PAGER=cat freebsd-update fetch
    # env PAGER=cat freebsd-update install

But the FreeBSD 15.x will use PKGBASE concept [1] and [2] and parts of the system will be 'just' pkg(8) packages and also maintained by pkg(8) - so FreeBSD Base System upgrades will be just pkg(8) commands - just like now with non system packages.

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase

[2] https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/12/09/personal-freebsd-p...

Switching (back) from om Mac to Linux, I can definitely say that the painful experience was with the Mac, I just got used to it along the years.

The Plasma desktop is now a breeze (literally ;-)). Battery is surprisingly long lasting, too (7 year old Thinkpad X1, easily 7-8h of battery).

It just works.

Out of curiosity, which flavour of Linux are you running?

Arch. Used to use sway, now plasma 6

Agreed. I used to run FreeBSD as a desktop OS way back when (early 2000s), but there's really no reason other than cachet to use it instead of Linux. It is a nicely coherent system with good documentation, but it also has its share of bonkers idiosyncrasies (e.g. root and other users having a different shell by default, and both of these defaults being awful).

For what it's worth, the default root shell is now /bin/sh instead of csh. I think that's true as of 14.0. /bin/sh is also a better interactive shell than it used to be, though yeah, I don't use it to do anything other than install my preferred shell.

Right, but isn't the default non-root shell still tcsh? Zsh and ksh are both under BSD(-compatible) licenses, and it would be a huge usability upgrade if they could just set one of those as the default shell for everyone.

So true!

My family have a secret holiday destination. It has unspoiled beaches, friendly locals, cheap beer, amazing restaurants. When people ask where we went for summer we lie. "Oh we went to Ibiza again". Some things are best kept for yourself, not to be popular. We don't want "those sorts" dragging the whole show down to the lowest common denominator.

So listen to the parent poster, and trust me, BSD is a piece of crap. It barely works. the documentation sucks. And it definitely is no use for servers, desktops, laptops or embedded systems.

Go where the crowds are! Linux has something for everyone, with over 8 million lines of code in the kernel! You never know, you might even meet a celebrity like Lennart Poettering hanging around your hotel.

Yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. For me, FreeBSD is rock-solid server and workstation OS. Documentation is very good, the Handbook is great, and most of the time the manual pages is all that you need. The ports collection is large and it’s not very hard to package your own software as a port. The OS is predictable and this is something I value highly.

You might want to read the comment you're replying to again.

Oh, didn't I get the sarcasm of the comment I replied to... Thank you for making me reread it, really.

>like Lennart Poettering hanging around your hotel.

Yeah or Ricard ask you to clean he's feet at the pool.

And absolutely with you, please Linux user don't try FreeBSD it's terrible, no device drivers, no docker and ZERO Linux compatibility, and as Linus himself said: ZFS is really not that special. Dear Fedoras and Arch-Fellas, just don't touch it ;)

Did you create an issue about this data corruption?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com