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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

You have to clearly and honestly answer "Why BSD and not Linux?" Does anyone here have a concise answer that could apply to many?

The 2nd question is what do folks get with Linux which they don't get with BSD? For me choosing Linux is somewhat off the beaten path, choosing BSD is like vacationing on Mars. There's going to be very little/sparse support living there.

I specifically choose an OS/distro that's well used/tested. That used to be Ubuntu but I don't trust Canonical leadership, so now it's Debian (or at least Debian repository-based). I don't have such a choice with BSD (unless it's a Mac).

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If you want a desktop, it may or may not be for you.

If you rely on VPSes, it may not be for your because your options for providers here are somewhat limited.

However, if you are running your own hardware for your own server, and you are of a sysadmin temperament that likes to know exactly what's going on (because you put it there), then FreeBSD is excellent. Stable, reliable, everything works like the Unix you wanted and signed up for.

I have several decades of experience working through the commandline, and that's how I prefer to do things. FreeBSD makes this a first-rate experience. And I have to say that the deep integration of ZFS on a server under your control is life-changing.

I use a Macbook for the everyday things, like making presentations or playing games or movies. It is by far the best experience, since everything just works. (A Windows machine may be the same for others, I just prefer MacOS.) So a Linux desktop has no particular value for me.

But if you want to keep a stable of servers, each running under your specific control, to the point you have a poudriere machine to provide specifically built packages for your herd of machines and a bevy of automation scripts to keep them under control, FreeBSD is certainly something to look at.

So let's focus on the case where I'm setting up a bunch of bare-metal hosts as servers. What's the value proposition of using FreeBSD over Debian/Ubuntu if we're not counting familarity?

Either experience will be CLI first, so this is a tie.

ZFS integration is one point. If that's important to you, then you'd want to pick a distro like Ubuntu with first-class support. All major development happens on the Linux on ZFS branch as far as I understand, so this should be okay.

As the original post points out, FreeBSD used to have unique features as selling points: zfs, dtrace, the network stack (before SMP became ubiquitous?), kqueue, jails. I'm sure there are others. But these days it seems Linux has caught up with developments like ebpf, cgroups, namespaces and io_uring.

I'm sure the fragmented nature of Linux means that some of these low-level techs are easier to use on FreeBSD. The counterpoint is that the higher-level stack is more well-supported on Linux. You may not have to care too much about the details of namespaces and cgroups if high-level docker/kubernetes/... tooling works for you.

What am I missing?

That's a great summary that details what I was suggesting.

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