
Moving to FreeBSD - vezzy-fnord
https://www.textplain.net/blog/2015/moving-to-freebsd/
======
kayman
I run FreeBSD 10 on my servers. Coming from a linux background it felt a bit
odd at first.

\- Like why am I not defaulted to a bash shell.

\- Never did a cornshell activation before :) [virtuanenv/bin/activate.csh]

Within a few weeks of using bsd, I felt comfortable enough to guess where
configuration files are kept based on BSD logic. From an engineering point of
view, it feels well thought out.

With "pkg" similar to "apt-get" it is easy for beginners to transition into
maintaining a bsd server.

Managing Jails with ez-admin simplifies jails quite a bit.

I keep some notes for myself here bsd for those who might be looking to try
out freebsd > 10.

[http://notes.busilogic.com/freebsd.html](http://notes.busilogic.com/freebsd.html)

To get immediate value for a linux user, I recommend trying jails and compare
that to using Docker. It'd be interesting to hear other people's experiences.

~~~
Sanddancer
Minor note: csh isn't cornshell, it's C Shell, because its syntax is somewhat
c-like. Korn Shell is ksh, named after its creator, David Korn. A variant of
ksh is what openbsd uses as their default user shell.

~~~
ams6110
Does anyone actually use csh as a login shell anymore? Does Mac OS still use
tcsh as the default?

~~~
selectodude
Mac OS X has used an old version of bash for awhile now.

~~~
gsnedders
They forked the last GPLv2 release.

------
ZoFreX
Welcome to FreeBSD! I'm glad you like it!

By the way, you might regret mixing packages and ports unless you know what
you're doing. If you're new to FreeBSD I'd recommend picking one or the other
and not mixing.

~~~
dijit
I was told ports and pkg used the same database since FreeBSD 10?

I could be wrong, it was just an off-hand comment on the freenode irc channel.

~~~
zackelan
Correct. More specifically, pkg-ng uses the same database as ports, and pkg-ng
was made the default starting in 10. It was available in prior versions, but
only opt-in and with a conversion process from the legacy package database to
the newer one.

[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-
intro.html](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html)

For anyone who's tried FreeBSD in the past (before pkg-ng) but ended up going
back to Linux or OS X, I would highly recommend giving FreeBSD 10.x another
shot. pkg(7) is a very well-designed and modern package management system, on
par with Arch's pacman and superior to apt-get, in my opinion.

------
uxcn
FreeBSD (4.7) was actually the first *nix I used. As a user operating system,
I honestly might have been better served with a Linux distribution, but in
retrospect FreeBSD still managed a lot of the end user aspects surprisingly
well (Linux binary compatibility, NDIS driver wrappers, etc...).

I installed a FreeBSD (10) virtual machine this weekend to test a personal
project, and a lot actually seems to have improved. I'm surprised they've
already switched to Clang as a default compiler. Although, I think there are
still some areas where FreeBSD might be a bit behind Linux.

I think what I still like about FreeBSD is that there seems to be a focus on
simplicity and nothing seems to be added on a whim. Progress does seem to be a
bit slower for certain things (kernel features, filesystem features, etc...),
but as a whole a lot of the design decisions seem to be extremely well thought
out.

------
tshtf
The security section should mention that as of 2015, FreeBSD still does not
have ASLR.

~~~
betaby
To be honest, FreeBSD lack so many other modern features that barely makes it
usable. (Properly working)NUMA? Virtualization? Yes, I'm fully aware about
work in progress.

~~~
gopowerranger
And yet Netflix chose FreeBSD over Linux to serve about 40% of all internet
traffic, as does WhatsApp.

~~~
betaby
Since when Netflix accounts for 40% of internet traffic?

~~~
emaste
See for example [http://time.com/3901378/netflix-internet-
traffic/](http://time.com/3901378/netflix-internet-traffic/) Note that the
metric is actually downstream peak time consumer ISP traffic which is a little
different than "40% of the Internet," but the fact remains that Netflix is
using FreeBSD to serve a phenomenal amount of traffic.

------
pgib
Really nice summary! If you really want to make your life with ports easier, I
highly recommend Poudriere
([https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere](https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere)).
Poudriere can build your ports collection for one or more machines running any
version of FreeBSD that's <= of the Poudriere hosts. After you configure your
ports, you can easily archive all of the options you've set (e.g. should
want/need to move your Poudriere setup elsewhere).

I run Poudriere on my home server, and then I point pkg to a local Nginx
server. Every night, it builds the latest versions of all of the ports I use,
and I can simply type "pkg upgrade" any time I want. For work, I run a
Poudriere server on an EC2 instance to build packages for a variety of
configurations. Depending on your needs, you could pretty easily have an EC2
instance that remains shutdown most of the time, and then on some sort of
schedule you spin it up, build the latest, publish your packages, and shut
down again.

------
suprjami
I'd want to switch if I used Gentoo as well. Sounds like this guy is sick of
rolling his own Linux, not sick of Linux.

------
dynomight
The next cheap ssd I get, I'm going to install pcbsd and give it a go.

~~~
grubles
Why isn't FreeBSD suitable for a personal computer / desktop? I'm curious why
you choose PC-BSD.

~~~
thelibrarian
Just to expand a little on Sanddancer's reply, PC-BSD is FreeBSD, but with a
friendlier installer, and comes with X11 and a window manager installed and
set up for you. It is designed to get FreeBSD installed as a desktop system
quicker and more easily than installing straight FreeBSD and then installing
everything else on top of that. So, it is similar to how Ubuntu was to Debian
back when Ubuntu first came out.

------
teddyh
“ _Then came the systemd controversy. I 'm sick of talking about it, so let's
skip that part. I decided to look into other operating systems. Linux isn't
the only UNIX-like OS out there, after all._”

I would like to read what he actually has against systemd, but could only find
a complaint from two months ago that he was forced to learn /bin/ip when
ifconfig was unavailable. This, to me, seems like someone simply unilling to
move with the times.

------
armitron
FreeBSD is fine for a single-user system with no expectations of security.
Given the number of trivially exploitable kernel issues it has, it's
absolutely terrible for a server, shared hosting or any kind of multi-user
environment.

Moreover, unlike Linux, there is no grsecurity patch to harden it.

~~~
haroldp
What?

~~~
agumonkey
> FreeBSD is fine for a single-user system with no expectations of security.
> Given the number of trivially exploitable kernel issues it has, it's
> absolutely terrible for a server, shared hosting or any kind of multi-user
> environment. Moreover, unlike Linux, there is no grsecurity patch to harden
> it.

Quoted for troollth.

