BSD appreciation Thread

Yes totally agree.

Not even saying this as bashing but the "roll your own" distros feel unnecessary.

Only handy of you want to test kernels without compiling.

So besides trueOS what all do you use it for?

I have routers and APs running it, and several servers. I even set up a Ghetto "rack-in-a-box" that hosts my NAS and servers, using a ton of physical nics, a huge zfs storage pool and jails everywhere.

As a side note: I actually like arch-based "easy mode" distros a lot more than ubuntu, suse, fedora etc, because they remove the big inconveniences of arch but give you better flexibility than their counterparts.

I've got FreeBSD on my home server with 14x 3TB disks in a ZFS pool, on my desktop with mirrored SSDs and a GTX 980, usually on my laptop (currently messing with NetBSD on that though), in datacenters on my dedicated servers and VPSs for hosting, and even on a little TP-Link wireless router I use for internet access.

My daily driver is a MBP with macOS, since that seems to count in this thread, too.

I tend to prefer FreeBSD proper over things like pfSense or FreeNAS or TrueOS. I'm perfectly comfortable working on the command line, and fancy user interfaces tend to be buggy, slow, or just get in my way. Not to say that they aren't great for people who don't know how to get things done otherwise.

Nothing's perfect, though. I could talk for days about problems with the BSDs that irk me.

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I mean, OS X isn't BSD in the strictest sense, but we're trying to avoid arguments with Apple fans and GPL3 advocates, as they no doubt outnumber us here, and could easily shit up the thread.

The biggest problems I have with BSDs are the quirks across the different flavors, and lack of consumer grade support ( AMD graphics, wi-fi up until recently, etc) Appreciation without recognition of flaws would just be blind devotion.

The driver itself seems to be on par with linux 4.7. My problem is that the driver just wont install. TrueOS didnt compile the module and I dont know how to compile a damn freebsd module

Doesnt nvidia have a general unix driver. I mean i havent tried it out but i saw something on the website

afaik Only freebsd based stuff supports their proprietary blobs

good talk if y'all want to check it out:

https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/

I looooooooooooooove Unix!

Lunduke & George Neville-Neil discuss BSD:

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who else here is hype for Lunduke's puppet going on a racist tirade?

I think something that Neville-Neil didn't explain adequately in the licensing discussion was that corporate BSD is still bsd, where corporate linux gets twisted and perverted to avoid the gpl.

Look at android, where it's basically the kernel, and that's it. Nothing in android dev benefits linux. With BSD they don't need to do this to sell a product, so they just give back.

Same with Embedded dev when you compare netbsd and linux based solutions.

Juniper's Junos OS is based on FreeBSD although most of the time is spent in their cli to do the config but you can always jump into the shell and edit a config in vi if you like :)

I haven't used it that extensively in servers or desktop but I remember when heartbleed became known that (most?) BSD wasn't affected as it didn't include the vulnerable versions of OpenSSL. That's worth some appreciation :)

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Let me correct that for you ;-)

You raised a good point there though, although I'm not quite sure on corporate GNU/Linux being twisted? What's the example, I can think of things like Oracle Unbreakable Kernel; but I thought that was fully compliant with the GPL and available to anyone (should they want it)?

That's my bad, I meant corporate use of linux (in products) and, again, I'd point at android as the prime example. It's built from the ground up to circumvent the limitations of the GPL. Had the common linux base system not had these licensing limitations, google could just have shipped a system with far more commonalities, and a lot of stuff outside of userland would have benefited from years of google contributions.

Instead, you have a system that does none of this, and in many cases works against the aims of free software. It makes no sense for google to support the FSF ecosystem with android, because they had to build their own ecosystem to avoid the bullshit that comes with shipping GPL based products. same goes for a lot of industrial and embedded products that run on linux. there are even firmwares and drivers that are designed with way more features than the hardware explicitly supports specifically to avoid having to interface directly with GPL code.

So, in linux products, things get twisted to the point that it doesn't make sense to engage with the OSS community your product was based on, because their philosophy and licensing it makes it a lot harder to sell your product.

in contrast, pretty much every BSD product gives back to BSDs, because they don't have to do the engineering gymnastics that google did, and it's a lot cheaper than maintaining their own snowflake fork.

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There is at least one company I'm aware of that offers a FreeBSD based general purpose operating with commercial support contracts (a sort of Red Hat for FreeBSD) that GNN overlooked. http://www.xinuos.com/menu-products/openserver-10
They don't get much attention though, and I'm not sure to what degree they play a role in the community. I know they did sponsor one of the conferences not too long ago.

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ayy lmao

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No BSD appreciation lately. Makes me sad.

Rise from your Grave:

@tkoham What do you think of SmartOS and or Illumos?
Been enjoying Brian Cantrill videos covering different topics.

I'd say SmartOS is great, but better suited as a base to build a commercial solution or product than as a pick-up-and-go type of thing. It's designed as a template to build big-ass infrastructure and byzantine app stuff. Home-gamers are better served sticking to FreeBSD in most cases.

Illumos is interesting for sure, I'll give it that. My understanding is that it's a bit like the gnu or BSD projects of yore, where they're rebuilding solaris (instead of system V) around open alternatives. Their Development model is more GNU than BSD in their 'core only' approach, and more BSD than GNU in the "OK with commercial adoption and involvement" and "Not fanatically trying to enforce ridiculous ideologies" department.

The result is a strange hybrid that's resulted in some interesting projects, like OpenIndiana (Desktop OS), NexentaStor, napp-it, Dyson (a debian port based on illumos core) and SmartOS.

It's an interesting, dynamic environment, a lot of interesting work is getting done there, and it's where you should go if you want to be doing interesting OS development, but it's still in it's infancy.

A simple way to characterize it might be "Linux done right" or "BSD done differently"