A brief look at FreeBSD
yorickpeterse.com
yorickpeterse.com
The killer features for me:
- The pf firewall. Rules you actually understand!
- Jails! When you cannot have Zones this will do.
- Native ZFS. Stable, mature, safe and with all the features you can dream of.
- Linuxulator. Binary compatibility with Linux if need be. Can be put in jail as well.
- pkg/ports. I really like it but I might have been indoctrinated.
- Networking stack. Good. Stable. Makes sense to me.
For a nice graphical UI Linux is more smooth but if you are willing to tinker it can work. As Linux gets all the attention you will see stuff such as Chromium lag behind.
I can understand that can scare people off. But FreeBSD feels like a comfortable old glove for me. I will suffer the minor holes. My beard has grayed and my hair line is non-existant.
If waiting for a laptop I would perhaps wait for FreeBSD 15 for much needed improvements in WIFI. If you want fast WIFI today you need weird hacks routing through a Linux VM[1]. It works rather well but it is honestly a bit clunky.
I stick with a single 43" 4K@60 but it was a bit of a challenge to get on the happy path:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-fli...
All systems can have issues. But the more widely used systems are at an advantage.
Although the 2x4k monitors are daisy chained. I was surprised when it worked first time.
My wife and I have identical HP laptops. Her's runs Arch (as you do), with KDE and mine runs Kubuntu 25.10 at the mo. Both use NetworkManager.
I look after both.
Randomly after wake up from suspend, wifi may or may not still be working. When I say random, I mean after a kernel update or the wind changes direction. I think wifies lappy is OK now because I seem to get a lot less "support" calls for the last few weeks.
To be fair, there are a lot of moving parts from a lot of bits of Linux involved in a modern distro these days.
When I say hard to decide what solved looks like: if Samba or SSSD crap out, is that wifi's fault or the kernel/driver? This is exactly what Windows has had to solve over the years and I do note things like credential managers and mounts that manage to survive disconnects being bolted on to Linux.
All that scrappy stuff needs to be passed on to the BSDs too. Getting a laptop with file systems that come and go, with a dickey clock tick and networking that comes and goes and VPNs and all the rest.
Getting all of that to work is quite a job.
The reason all this is hard is likely a remnant of what Microsoft did in the 1990s to the point where Non Windows OSes are given the shaft
Nvidia, Broadcom, Wifi generally, whatever
I think they assume people know what they're doing but a little x session never hurt anyone?
Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools. Any other tool is either an alternate version, or a UI paint job.
Fast still means beyond 802.11g? (11n support is incomplete, last time I checked)
Because there is no corporate sponsor that needs good Wi-Fi drivers on FreeBSD, I doubt it will ever be better. I guess Sony, but it's all custom for them. I doubt there is anything to contribute back, even if Sony was open to that idea.
Back in those days I could make any Windows installation unrecoverable. I could severely botch a Linux system. But FreeBSD would always keep chugging, no matter what crazy idea I wanted to try.
It may not be the fastest. It may not be the flashiest. But in my mind, it has this whole "reliability" thing written all over it like no other OS has.
For instance, when I was a student (and thus poor), I had a PC made of (free) scavenged parts. It wouldn't boot Windows. Linux would crash during boot. But FreeBSD just chugged along like there were no issues at all.
I later discovered there were some physical issues with the UDMA mode on the IDE controller, and that's probably what tripped of the other OSes, but FreeBSD would just work. Albeit slowly, but it actually ran fine. For years.
So while I no longer rely on FreeBSD myself, I look back on it with fondness. That's also why I decided to help port .NET to FreeBSD when the first cross-platform version of .NET Core was launched (for Windows, Linux and Mac only). I thought every decent OS deserved to have a working .NET version ;)
I'd put together one or two public-facing mail servers before, but it'd been a few years and the landscape had changed (postfix was the new hotness, sendmail was old news, etc). And I had a FreeBSD machine at home that I'd previously built from garbage that I was using for NAT and a few other things.
So, wanting to appear all slick and stuff at the new job, I built a prototype at home on that FreeBSD box using a freebie dyndns subdomain (which was still practical at that time).
It all worked great. For a couple of years I even used it to host my own email at home. It was less trouble to maintain than the Linux-based thing I'd built at work even though they both started with the same software configs.
But that FreeBSD box was only ever a little forgettable trash-built machine, so there were no backups at all when the hard drive crashed completely (there were grooves worn into the platters) while I was out of town.
Which might normally be the end of the story, but: FreeBSD kept rolling just fine. Whatever data was in RAM (which apparently included at least sshd and bash) remained in RAM and stayed usable, and it kept routing packets like nothing had ever happened at all.
I marveled at this for a few weeks as this very broken machine kept flawlessly doing its NAT duties and providing solid Internet access for my LAN until I scrounged up enough pennies to buy my first "home router": A Linksys WRT54GS. (That little hackable Linux box was a very fun introduction to the rabbit hole of using hardware in unintended ways, but that's a story for a different comment section.)
I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.
You can read the source without worrying about getting sued for violating the GPL
Pros:
- It is actually in a way easier than Linux. The installation is less complex and more reliable than a Fedora if you are not afraid of the TUI. More important it will soon include a desktop installation script.
- All the software you will ever need is in pkg or ports unless you are a degen
- You will pick up jails for container use cases in 10 minutes and will never want to go back
- VM with vm-bhyve is simpler than libvirt and no XML to deal with.
- Same with networking, you will pick it up quickly and no more confusion between NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, ifup, etc.
- The linux-compat feature will get you very far and there are a lot of Linux apps packaged already
- Hardware support is ok if you check first on https://bsd-hardware.info/
- The wifi thing is no problem with https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
Cons:
- You won't be able to mount/read your LUKS drives from your Linux era.
- Sometime very critical packages like Chromium disappear because they won't build (for example no chromium in pkg on the current FreeBSD 15 BETA)
- Bhyve do not support SPICE so you are stuck with the perf of VNC.
- Bhyve do not have vsock so no blazing fast waypipe
- You basically loose a lot of security feature of web browsers, most of the sandboxing of Firefox and Chrome. This is really bad.
- I haven't really dived into it but it seems there is no Bluetooth LE
- It is fast but doesn't feel as fast as an Alpine
If you are thinking about it and this is ok for you, I would say go for it.
> The wifi thing is no problem with...
You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?
A lot of wishful thinking in this thread about FreeBSD on workstations.
It is just that the Fedora installer is more complex... and also will fail often at partitioning or during install. I've done it hundreds of time and it failed dozens on time.
I would still recommend Fedora to Linux users but the FreeBSD installer much more simple and straightforward.
> You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?
It is an Alpine running on the hypervisor you won't even notice it. It consumes less than web browser tab...
Plus it has benefits from a security point of view.
I would rather FreeBSD devs focus on other things than porting all wifi drivers.
As for the whole wifi thing... Yeah man, FreeBSD isn't ready for vast majority of people, even linux veterans. I know getting the manpower to write those drivers isn't always possible, but we're talking years of this being ignored. Which has led to solutions like yours.
Something trivial to us, is not for others. It's pretty insane to even think that is a supported solution to that problem.
It is actually a very simple and elegant solution to an horrible problem.
Personally even as a FreeBSD fanperson I wouldn't want to rely on wifibox no matter how elegant it is to use. It would forever irritate the “omg ugly hack” part of my brain lol
I installed FreeBSD 14.3 on my Framework Laptop 12 and the stock Intel AX211 Wi-Fi card Just Worked™ out of the box in FreeBSD 14.3 after a `fwget` to download the proprietary firmware blobs (removed from base between 14.2 and 14.3, FYI) while USB-tethered to my Android with a simple `dhclient ue0`:
I did this a few times by just running Linux in bhyve and mounting from within that. Not ideal, but worked for just accessing old files on an old LUKS partition.
Maybe on some distros, but on Ubuntu is just an `apt-get install` away, or can be even be added from installation time. I've been using it for many years without any issues and the experience is great.
I actually combine some non-ZFS filesystems with ZFS with encryption and compression for all my setups, including my laptop. I plan to blog shortly about it and how I'm automating it all. Target is also a Framework laptop, too.
This is one of my favorite things about FreeBSD, I love being able to take a snapshot of my system before doing an update.
FreeBSD is much easier but I needed better Linux compatibility for this machine
- https://www.freshports.org/lang/dotnet/ - https://wiki.freebsd.org/.NET - https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537
Currently it looks like it's currently just 9.0.10
They're still considered experimental so I wouldn't run it for production but I wonder how well .Net would run in one. The whole container could be a zfs dataset, which would be interesting.
[0] https://docs.bastillebsd.org/en/latest/chapters/gettingstart...
I use the Linuxulator for a few different tasks.
I still prefer to do root on ext4 and then a proper ZFS pool for all the mountpoints I want, where I can configure as I wish with encryption and compression. Primary reason is that I don't keep sensitive data on root, but I want a bootable system whatever happens. And this use case is perfectly supported, so it's more than enough for me.
I've tinkered with it in the past and I once had a job where we ran in on our servers. It seems pretty nice, but it never gets the attention Linux gets and the hardware support situation is sorta sad. I always chalked it up to the license and assumed people using it just don't contribute anything back. I love Linux and the support it receives from seemingly everyone these days, but it would be nice to have other options too.
If they do I might try it. However I've had issues getting the video drivers to behave on BSDs even ones that "should" work. Hopefully podman and/or docker is something I can use easily.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd_desktop/comments/1opmb9k/op...
Then somehow freebsd becomes a new darling and they just got done spending a couple years going out of their way to make sure they miss out on that wave. Or worse try dust off their last version of Core and act like "our proud tradition ..." Ugh I'm so not happy with that company...I paid way too much for one of their official own-brand servers instead of just running it on whatever random way better hardware I want.
But I'll say that even I only use freebsd for zvault and opnsense. I try every now and then to make it my laptop daily driver but there are just too many annoyances and things that don't work or aren't supported well enough or that break with updates or that aren't automated or preconfigured well enough etc. I cannot give examples without writing way too much. This is the short version. And I've been a linux daily driver forever without really minding those same sorts of extra efforts needed for linux vs windows or mac, so this does not come from someone who just can't tolerate rough edges or can't figure things out.
But I have also avoided "cheating" by using one of the purpose built desktop distros like ghostbsd or dragonfly etc, so I might be shooting myself in the foot. I do have an old laptop with freebsd 14.something on it currently which is more or less working but not all the hardware works and it kills the battery in 20 minutes. But it runs, even the weird proprietary Sony 2-in-1 ssd and the wifi. Probably not the bluetooth and I never even dared to hope or try the webcam or the fingreprint. I don't remember about backlight or keyboard backlight control.
Would love to see it surge in popularity. Underrated OS.
Not sure where I'd jump to next as I enjoy my OS's non-mainstream but life is life. Maybe Open Indiana or TempleOS.
Even under Linux DisplayLink support was a bit iffy, with kernel updates breaking support with frustrating regularity, but that hasn't happened in the last couple of years.
Apparently FreeBSD has had DisplayLink support built into the kernel since 2015[0], and I'm sure I've tried it since then and couldn't get it to work. However it's been at least five years since I tried it last, so maybe I need to try again (although I'm very comfortable with my Linux desktop flow now).
[0]:https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-DisplayLink-Support
I have been a happy FreeBSD user for 25 years. It is a FAR SUPERIOR server operating system compared to the rest.
Similar or usually the case more flexibility than Linux due to the excellent ports system that lets you finely tune what you install and the equally excellent binary package system(pkg), while at the same time, base is stable.
No ons is dicking around with the basic system tools, they just keep getting fine tuned.
I would guess 10-30 years down the line we will have an excellent BSD desktop.
The onboarding rails just aren’t there these days. Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.
One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience.
If you try it again, the FreeBSD Handbook is the onboarding guide. [1] It's been a long while since I've set something up going from the Handbook, so I can't personally attest to its quality, but it's supposed to be good.
> One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience
I can't imagine they work well on Linux either, because different distributions have a different selection of tools, especially when you consider older documentation that's still out there and no longer works on mainstream distributions as tools have been replaced. The same is almost certainly true for MacOS and probably Windows as well. All of the OSes I can think of where most of the online documentation should be consistent probably don't have much online documentation. I'm not a LLM user (which is probably obvious), but I can't imagine how you'd get good information from it... at best, maybe you could get pointers to documentation you should read and understand yourself, or you could find the documentation and paste it to be summarized? People that use LLMs that I've tried to help with problems will tell me that the LLM told them X when it doesn't make sense and it actively contributes to their problem, so that doesn't give me confidence; of course, people who use LLMs and it solves their problem don't need my help, do they? :)
They do, and they work better on Ubuntu/Debian than on e.g. Alpine, which in turn works better than some wonky Yocto build (ask me how I know). The mere existence of different distributions and tool selections is not the important factor here, but the amount of discourse there is in the training data. Debian and Debian-likes run the table here.
I'm not sure about that. This isn't FreeBSD specific so it's a bit tangential, but I've certainly debugged systems where someone thought it appropriate to run their intensive job on a live box (mind boggling, yes). Seeing it smack dab under their name is kind of important.
Am I missing something?
If you have them unset, you can login to the server as you, see what your service user is up to, and only have to do interventions as the service user or root depending.
If you don't want your service to see what else is going on on the server, you can put it in a jail and not allow jailed processes to see out; not a bad idea to do that anyway, although it does mean starting the service needs root when it likely wouldn't otherwise (you can drop the high priviledged port to 79 and then your service can listen on port 80 without root)
I haven't tried podman in FreeBSD yet because from what I understand you can only run it as root right now, so it kind of defeat the purpose.
Wonderfully under-rated. Robust as anything and SO FAST. It was my sole desktop OS for years, and while I’m dabbling with Debian right now, I miss Void the most. So lean and snappy.
Coming from OpenBSD and FreeBSD, Void Linux feels almost the same. Same rc init scripts and such.
I grew up in times when people were using stuff like Solaris, Novel and my older friends would occasionally gift me a whooping set of 7CDs with something like SUSE or RedHat so I could join the cool kids club.
While former - in my headspace - were like Oracle - specialized, enterprise solutions, the latter were just different breeds of Linux trying to compete with Windows. Nowadays, for an ordinary dude like myself, we pretty much settled on Ubuntu with plethora of different distributions for hackers and tinkers, but, at least for me, there's not much difference between Mint or Arch. It's like sports team, everyone has their own favorite team, but at the end of the day the all play football. Or fashion.
It's like if you'd ask me about a bike I could go for an hour long tangent about different breeds and brands, but at the end of the day if you just want to cycle around the neighborhood just pick any bike you can that more or less fits your size and you're set.
But for whatever reason BSD seems to occupy different space, why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
I mean, if I want to deploy a service on the internet and I need a server, or I want a computer that would work as a weather station around my house, or simply a NAS - I need to pick an OS. At this point I may come to realization that there might be better solutions that my usual desktop system (ie Windows/Mac) and opt for more streamlined solution. But then I have all flavors of Linux. Why is BSD relevant?
Sorry if this sounds stupid, but this questions pops in my head every few years and every time I fail to find the right answer.
I grew to appreciate stability, over time - I don't want to have to fix things after updates, including my tweaks and customizations. I want complete control of my computers. I appreciate a cohesive and well documented system. I want simple and consistent and secure. I don't want the OS to take up more of my time than it needs to.
Perhaps you should consider the BSDs to be like different linux distributions, having their own priorities, pros and cons. Some people don't care. Some do. It's all good, having more options.
On Ubuntu, Arch, Mint, etc. there is no such distinction. Everything is made of packages, including the base system. You have packages for the kernel, the init system, logging, networking, firmware, etc. These are all versioned independently and whether or not they are considered "essential" is up to the user to decide.
On BSD, the base system is not composed of packages. It is a separate thing, with the kernel, libc, command line utilities all tightly coupled and versioned together. This allows the components to evolve together, with breaking ABI changes that would not be practical in Linux. This makes BSD better for research, which is why things like IPv6, address space randomization, SSH, jails, capabilities were developed there.
Packages are used for applications and are isolated to /usr/local. Dependency and compatibility problems only exist for packages. The base system is always there, always bootable, and you can count on being able to log in to a command line session and use the standard suite of tools. It is sort of like a Linux rescue image, except you boot off it every time.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWuZLJkUBfw
- https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/three-ways-to-try-freebsd...
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=34396...
Is security not a priority for their developers?
They are not directly comparable since ZFS is also the volume manager for your ZFS filesystems, enabling features like `zfs send` of snapshots or entire filesystems for easy backups.
> Let's start with the first and probably most important step: setting up the network. […] I don't fully remember how I actually set up the network as it's been a while, but it involved adding the following to `/etc/rc.conf`
This would be a great time to show off FreeBSD's documentation. A great “Step 1” would be https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?networking(7)
And then later on when people reasonably wonder what the heck else is going on in `rc.conf`: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rc.conf
All of the modern `rc.conf` examples will also be using `sysrc` instead of telling you to edit the file directly, at first as a first line of defense against fatfingering the file formatting, and later when you get more advanced as a way to transparently descend into Jails' `rc.conf`s without having to think about it: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysrc
One thing FreeBSD's installer does not do a good job with that's very relevant for laptop usage is any automatic setup of hardware-specific kernel modules. You will want to enable either `coretemp` or `amdtemp` (depending on your particular Framework model) which will automatically populate all the sensor data, easily queried via `sysctl`:
- https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?coretemp
- https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?amdtemp
[Lammy@Emi] sysctl dev.cpu.{0..7}.temperature
dev.cpu.0.temperature: 40.0C
dev.cpu.1.temperature: 43.0C
dev.cpu.2.temperature: 41.0C
dev.cpu.3.temperature: 42.0C
dev.cpu.4.temperature: 40.0C
dev.cpu.5.temperature: 40.0C
dev.cpu.6.temperature: 42.0C
dev.cpu.7.temperature: 43.0C
Btrfs supports both snapshots and sending/receiving them between different hosts. You can also create additional Btrfs subvolumes.
This is mostly what I meant with the differences between zfs and btrfs not being that significant for most: they largely seem to give you the same end result, instead taking a different path to get there. I do know that zfs is better in terms of reliability (or at least people love to bring that up), but it's something I don't have any experience with myself and thus can't comment on.
That document is a stunning illustration of beautiful simplicity.
On the other hand, the lack of broad HW support means that my FreeBSD server burned 2x more power at low to mid usage levels than the same HW running Proxmox.