Does anyone actually use FreeBSD How is it?

>>57165647
It's Unix and does Unixy things pretty good. I'm a SysV kinda guy, so it's not for me.

>>57165647
is this the only way BSD cucks can get some attention?

it's exactly like using linux, with KDE it's like using Debian. you don't have that many packages and the ones you have have dust on them because they are so fucking old

plus no systemd (in b4 edgy fedoraheads) makes it annoying as fuck to configure

>>57165647
As my daily desktop and laptop driver. Also as all of my routers and firewalls. And 3 servers.

Basically what >>57165809 said. It's a unix. It's got some really nice tools inside it, such as DTrace which helps with development on my main workstation tremendously. ZFS is basically my go-to for servers and my NFS. Doing large scale network emulations is very easy in FreeBSD, as it has an ULE scheduler and jails. I ran into serious problems post 10,000 nodes in Linux. I easily run over 100,000 in FreeBSD at 10% CPU usage and about 20% of 12GB of RAM.

If you're interested in some details, feel free to ask. I can provide a comparison to the Linux kernel, as I've worked on both.

>>57165865
what the hell are you developing?

>>57165855
That couldn't be further from the truth. The packages are quite new actually. The parts missing are the new DE packages, which are completely irrelevant unless you're fanboying a certain DE.

I personally use a WM and have never had any issues with those. Eventhough FreeBSD dropped support for GCC, GCC7 is in ports to give it a test drive, so is the latest version of GCC6.

All of the software you would need on a server is up to date, especially NGINX, as it is developed on FreeBSD primarily.

Systemd is a nightmare for some people, including myself. That's subjective, that's why there are so many arguments about it.

>>57165904

what makes it a nightmare? I have not yet heard one solid reason on /g/, and I've asked this question a lot

>>57165647
I use freenas which is freebsd
I like it as a nas, not sure I'd use it for anything else though.

>>57165930
For me personally it's been the replacement of other standard tools. I'm used to working with the standard UNIX-like tools and the systemd replacements change many things.

It also has some issues with stability if you want to change some things around, which you don't have a problem with while rc-ing. You can look at how to crash systemd with one tweet. Things like that happen, it's just that systemd is so complex that it has more of those.

It tries to replace many of the standard tools and reinvent them. Bugs are inevitable. The systemd devs aren't idiots, they're just developing way too many things and it's still growing. It also breaks compatibility with my scripts.

Those are mainly my reasons.

>>57165974

dude you don't know how long it took for someone to come up with a solid reason

>>57166080
People like jumping on hate-trains or fanboy-trains. Giving things a chance and educating yourself about them is always a good thing. Helps one draw their own conclusions.

Who sponsors these BSD shill threads?
Nobody could be a irl fan of this shit os.

>>57166473
The only people that thinks it's a shit os are /v/ tier manchildren.
>muh vidya drivers
>muh steam games

>>57166534
OK.But what I wanted to know is who's paying you to say that.

>>57166588
Alright cut the crap, who's paying you to come here and stir shit you GPL shill?

>>57165647

Netflix, Whatsapp, Sony...

>>57166600
It's obviously MS shills. They love Linux and GNU now and BSD is keeping them from the:
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish
gameplan

>>57166588
>pay
>bsd
Choose one, champ.

>>57166639
Juniper, NetApp, iXsystems, Isilon, Dell, Cisco, Limelight, Sophos, Verisign...

>>57165647
FreeBSD is always perfect vanilla cream cake!

Make clean depend && make all install

>>57165865
Provide it, please. I'm interested

>>57166641
Why don't we have both?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ88B8aWdk0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-iHMWENeys

>>57166718
[1/2]
From my experience, the FreeBSD review process is far more thorough. The recent situation with the Linux BUG_ON misuse simply could not have happened in FreeBSD. The reviews are very thorough and conducted by plenty of developers. It is also the kind of community that believes in correctness, so the resulting conclusion of BUG simply being deprecated would not have happened either, as it's an invariant of the kernel. It simply has to be used in places where the system would otherwise be in an undefined state.

A more technical comparison is mainly in favor of Linux on the driver side. It supports newer and better devices than FreeBSD does in terms of wireless especially. Where Linux lags behind FreeBSD are the actual OS technologies. Things like DTrace and ZFS are actively developed on FreeBSD and illumos, while Linux is still struggling with a decent tracer and software RAID. Containerization is also something Linux has struggled with. Docker provides application containerization, however full systems are another thing. I believe google recently ported jails to Linux and called them minijails.

Networking wise, FreeBSD wins here hands down. It provides vnet, is the home of netgraph, and has a far superior forwarding table implementation than that of Linux. In particular, a prefix tree is used, as opposed to hash tables in Linux which get significantly slower on a high number of entries. Another critique on the Linux networking stack would be the sk_buff, which holds everything from device register pointers to a socket, requiring 4KB of memory to send an ACK.

Security wise, Linux has a grsec and PaX patch. Now, HardenedBSD provides a similar thing for FreeBSD, but I will stick to FreeBSD here. Both Linux and FreeBSD can act as a Trusted OS. They both have quite a few ways of doing MAC. The advantage of Linux here is an ASLR implementation, albeit a weak one, but still an implementation.

>>57167022
[2/2]
FreeBSD is getting an ASR(not ASLR!) implementation right now, and is available as a patch. It might prove more effective, it might not. That's something we will see. Linux offers a syscall filter, similar to what OpenBSD had back in 2002 called seccomp. Seccomp uses eBPF in order to filter out certain syscall for applications. This is a great concept for "sandboxing" applications. FreeBSD takes this a step further with capsicum. Instead of simply filtering syscalls, it limits the namespace of the application. It operates on file descriptors and allows for the application developer to drop capabilities of the application and effectively sandbox it. This is a true sandbox, as a capsicumized application that might allow exec gets a payload on it that allows for remote code execution, that process being spawned is also sandboxed in the same namespace that the application itself is. There is no way to escape this sandbox once entered, as that is by design. You can read a paper on this from Dr. Robert N.M. Watson from the University of Cambridge.

Desktop-wise, Linux wins hands down. FreeBSD lacks newer DEs, some of them are even depending on systemd. What might be possible is to run them to a linuxulator, which maps Linux syscalls to FreeBSD ones and uses the Linux calling convention in order to call them, however it most certainly is not the same.

For virtualization, Linux is still ahead for certain usecases, however bhyve is making tremendous progress and will soon allow for very complex operations without much overhead. Namely, it will soon be able to emulate other hypervisors with no overhead whatsoever(not nested virtualization!). It also allows for use of zvols to greatly increase performance with disk operations, as there is no need to emulate a filesystem in a disk image.

Hope I answered some of your questions.

>>57165809
>I'm a SysV kinda guy
So what the hell are you running? Commercial UNIX?

>>57166640
That's not it. Keep in mind MS has donated to BSD's before.

>>57167150
Illumos/OpenIndiana. It's straight-up open sourced ATT/Sun SysVR4. But yeah, I ran Solaris before.

>>57167234
So how is it? I've been thinking of using it for shits and giggles.

How recent are the packages?

>>57167022
>>57167088
tl;dr

>>57165930
I've had systemd fuck up with ntp and make ~10k nodes unreachable on AWS __in production__.

We've since moved over to FreeBSD on our ec2 instances. Very pleased with it and have had 0 issues.

>>57167437
FreeBSD is perfect dream in reality of *nix user.

>>57165647
It's shit.

>>57166080
Those reasons have been stated for a very long time; you haven't looked very hard.

Add one more: Systemd fucked up a chroot by shitting /run/usr all over it. I couldn't unmount the chroot because systemd kept it busy.

>>57167260
Hipster is rolling release and keeps up with stable upstreams of most software ie Firefox is ESR 45.x
If you want the latest stuff it's easier to use joyents prebuilt pkgsrc repos as they are tested on openIndiana.

Don't expect the latest and greatest media applications.

>>57167665
Oh, neat. Thought pkgsrc was ported to SmartOS.
>Don't expect the latest and greatest media applications.
Yeah, I use BSD's.

Last question though, I heard it comes with multiple userlands? Do the man pages reflect that? Can you change the MANPATH variable?

>>57167675
>change the MANPATH variable?
Yes, but man is smart enough to use your PATH variable too to sniff out what you mean. like if /usr/gnu/bin is in your path before /usr/xpg4/bin then it knows to use the GNU manpages. I'm oversimplifying a bit but the details are under 'man man' under the search path heading.

>>57165647
>How is it?

It's like using a computer from 1999.

>>57167922
Alright, thank you very much.

>>57165647
is slackware a bsd? i use that

>>57168354
no, but it's one of the most BSD-like linux distros

>>57168354
No it's not.
FreeBSD is BSD.;P

>>57165647
I use it on my NAS/plex box/torrent machine.

Works beautifully. Settings up ZFS, jails, etc was buttery smooth, and the craziest part is that the guides I followed worked without any modifications whatsoever. It's a radical departure from following guides to set up shit on various flavors of Linux where half of the tutorial has to be tweaked to your particular snowflake installation, even if said install is fresh out of the box.

>>57169429
Also, I'll add that my positive experience has me strongly considering the use of FreeBSD for future web projects. It's just so much cleaner to set up and maintain.

>>57166080
How about "if it's not broken, don't fix it?"

Poettering is a hotshot little shit who is reinventing the wheel and inconveniencing everyone just because xD and it's time xD, which are the worst reasons to do anything.