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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

It's a great pity more ZFS advocates are taking this as an opportunity to get better acquainted with FreeBSD.

I've been running FreeBSD on my home server for about a decade now -even before ZFS- and have loved it. But I used to run Linux VMs on top of it. However it's only recently that I've decided to go fully FreeBSD on it, using jails instead of hardware virtualisation. I honestly can't understand why I waited so long to do so. It's proven to be a far more elegant solution for what I needed.

While I do still run Linux on my desktop and work with Solaris and linux as my day job; FreeBSD seems a vastly overlooked alternative these days, which I think that's a great pity. its stable, proven and dead to administrate. But each to their own I guess.

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My story is somewhat similar to yours, and I also regret not giving FreeBSD a try sooner. I guess hardware has a lot to do with many people's reluctance in using FreeBSD, and in that regard I was lucky that my netbook was compatible right out of the box so I didn't experience any of the issues others had.

May I ask which netbook you have?

I have an Acer Aspire One, ZG5. Intel Atom N270 1.6Ghz 1 GB RAM 160 GB hdd

I bought it about 5 years ago for a whopping $99, but it has an issue with shutting down about 30 to 50 seconds after POST.

I figure that I got my $99 worth out of it, and have acquired a new HP Envy 15, which is, unfortunately, equipped with a Broadcom 4313 wireless adaptor, thus I haven't yet taken the time to attempt getting the WiFi card to work in FreeBSD, but I intend to do so soon. (time permitting)

I also agree. I run a pretty heterogenous set of servers, mostly linux, with a single FreeBSD machine using ZFS with about 100TB on it, and I really like it. There's a lot of missing conveniences from Linux, but overall FreeBSD seems better thought out and orchestrated. It also has some really cool technologies that receive little fanfare, while newly arrived linux equivalents get hailed as the "next best thing™".

Given your sentiments about FreeBSD, I'd imagine you'd find an OpenIndiana based platform even more compelling.

While I haven't used OpenIndiana specifically, I have used OpenSolaris and a great number of it's forks, and honestly I didn't like them much (preferring pure Solaris).

However even that aside, I couldn't see myself prefering OpenIndiana; FreeBSD is a very different kind of 'UNIX'. While SunOS does historically have some roots in BSD, it's still very much a SysV-style UNIX; and as much as I use SysV-like systems daily for work, my true love is for BSD.

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