
Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux? - pentago
As die-hard FreeBSD user and admin I&#x27;m interested to know why FreeBSD hasn&#x27;t been used more often (yeah I know about Netflix and Yahoo but still)?
======
nirvdrum
I'm not sure you're going to find one unifying answer, so I'll just contribute
my own experience.

\- FreeBSD lost the desktop battle to Linux. All joking aside about Linux on
the desktop, if you want a *nix environment (and not Mac), Linux distributions
are just a lot easier to set up and have traditionally enjoyed better
packaging of proprietary software (graphics card drivers, RAID card drivers,
applications, etc.). While FreeBSD has some very compelling advantages on the
server, for those in my circle, it's not not so much better as to justify the
cognitive overhead in switching between two similar, but different, OSes.

\- FreeBSD wasn't a first class OS on EC2 for years. This allowed an entire
ecosystem of devops tools to evolve with essentially Linux-only support.

~~~
jmspring
I actually ran FreeBSD as a "desktop OS" on more than a few IBM Stinkpads for
years. It worked well, driver support -- well, wifi was always fun, but if you
knew enough, you could get them going (orinoco cards for the win).

That said, I never saw FreeBSD as anything other than a Server OS. So I
wouldn't say the "desktop" comparison really ever fit in.

~~~
TylerE
My experience with FBSD on the Desktop was always polarizing... when it worked
well it was FANTASTIC, way ahead of any linux distro. Great drivers support,
no bullshit with audio, 3d graphics worked great, etc. Really good.

If it worked.

If your hardware didn't fit inside a fairly narrow box (e.g. Nvidia for
graphics), things failed horribly.

~~~
nirvdrum
It's been a long time since I gave up on FreeBSD on the desktop, but I think
back in 2000 I had some bad problems with whatever SoundBlaster card I had
(some Audigy thing) and ATi acceleration just wasn't going to happen. But
otherwise, it was rock solid. I think from there I went to Gentoo since
portage was similar to the ports system.

I did try some of the FreeBSD desktop variants over the years (DragonFly and
PC-BSD). But then you're still not quite running FreeBSD. I haven't kept up,
but it looks like DragonFly is its own distinct BSD flavor now.

~~~
TylerE
Yeah, the Audigy cards were always flakey (under Linux, too, as I remember).
Support for the Soundblaster-series cards was much better.

The sound was really good for the time if you had a supported card, real
hardware mixing, /dev/dsp (or was it /dev/audio) that multiple processes could
write to and it was seamlessly mixed. Using the commercial version of OSS, as
I recall. In Linux at that time you either had the open source fork of OSS
(which wasn't nearly as good), or raw ALSA, which was promising but buggy.

------
blister
I used to run everything on FreeBSD. It's a great operating system and
incredibly stable and I loved every minute of sysadminning a FreeBSD box.
Honestly, what changed was Ubuntu. Being able to have a fairly robust server
on the cheap and maintain it fairly well with just a few apt-get commands was
a huge game changer.

Admittedly I haven't tried running FBSD since 4/5 timeframe and I'm sure quite
a bit has changed since then, but I used to spend hours trying to patch and
compile upgrades to software. The ports system that they used at the time (and
might still use for all I know) was great for installing stuff, but if
something didn't exist in ports or was a few version behind, you were
compiling and installing from source.

aptitude has 99.99% of everything I've ever needed to install and manage and
some of the newer package management systems like npm and the like cover
everything else. What used to be hours each week of administration work has
become minutes a month. It might be less secure, it might be slightly less
robust, but overall I don't even think about systems administration anymore
and (to me) that's such a huge savings in time that it's just not worth trying
to go back.

And as emersonrsantos mentioned, I can almost guarantee that every hosting
provider has Ubuntu in some form or another. If I need to move to a new host,
I can have the system set up and be in business in probably less than an hour.
What used to take a few full-time sysadmins has now been replaced by a handful
of devops guys that not only manage the systems, but also help my engineers
automate and improve our development workflow and pipelines. And, as he also
mentioned, I can throw a rock and hit a Linux guy. Finding a FreeBSD expert is
nearly impossible and they always cost a lot more.

But, it was my first unix and I've got a lot of love in my heart for the BSD
way of doing things. (NetBSD and OpenBSD are other fond loves of mine). I ran
a hosting company in the early 00s that was powered entirely by OpenBSD off
cheap commodity hardware. And NetBSD runs on everything, which is also a
pretty cool plus.

These days, I'm content knowing that my kickass Mac desktops owe their
existence to the OS I grew up loving.

~~~
wtbob
> Honestly, what changed was Ubuntu. Being able to have a fairly robust server
> on the cheap and maintain it fairly well with just a few apt-get commands
> was a huge game changer.

That hurts to read. Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based) has been around for
decades (literally: it's 22 years old), and has been providing an extremely
stable server, for free, with just a few apt-get commands.

> What used to be hours each week of administration work has become minutes a
> month. It might be less secure, it might be slightly less robust, but
> overall I don't even think about systems administration anymore and (to me)
> that's such a huge savings in time that it's just not worth trying to go
> back.

Or you could switch to Debian and get the same ease-of-use with better
security.

If you _really_ wanted security, of course, you'd choose OpenBSD.

~~~
josephg
> Or you could switch to Debian and get the same ease-of-use with better
> security.

Honest question: In what ways is the security story on debian better than the
security on ubuntu?

~~~
e12e
It's not. I've been using Debian GNU/Linux as my main OS for well over a
decade, and I love it both on technical merits, and on the great effort put
into it to maintain a user-driven, non-profit, democratic (both in the sense
of voting, but even more in the sense of participating) organization.

All that said, I've used Ubuntu on and off since it launched, and they've been
a great benefit to both Debian and Linux in general. There were some issues in
the start, with not handling cooperating and resource sharing very well, there
were a few sore people as a result of that -- but as far as I can tell most of
those growing pains are well behind us now.

I personally sneer a bit reflexively when people mention Ubuntu on the server,
but frankly that's an issue with me, and not with Ubuntu. I got burned by
Ubuntu doing stuff like changing gid/uid numbers for system groups/users and
little incompatibilities that made it hard to maintain services across Debian
old-stable, stable and a couple of Ubuntu LTS releases _at the same time_ for
a while (the typical incompatibilities which generally have plagued Linux for
as long as there have been more than one distro).

My impression is that since Ubuntu 12.04 pretty much all the major kinks got
worked out, including avoiding issues with LTS -> LTS release upgrades - and
Ubuntu is now as solid an OS as pretty much anything else.

As for the security bit, I _think_ Ubuntu still comes with more out of the
box, both on the server and on the desktop than Debian does. Like eg. the ssh
daemon, maybe some bonjour networking stuff. Ever since OpenBSD forced
everyone to re-examine what "runs by default" I prefer a cleanly installed OS
to not listen to neither UDP or TCP _at all_ out of the box. In that sense,
Debian might possibly be considered "more secure" \-- but I don't have the
impression that there's a big difference in patch rates etc between the two.

Ubuntu/Canonical has gone to great lengths to make Ubuntu for Desktop and
Server work out-of-the-box for the great majority of users -- and I honestly
think they've done a great job with it. I still prefer Debian, but I also
accept that it's a matter of _preference_ not some strict criteria of
superiority or the like.

Oh, and I have a special place in my heart for Debian/kFreeBSD even if I've
yet to actually get to play with it:
[https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD](https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD)

Phew. Apologies for the long post - hopefully it has a few interesting
nuggets.

------
ihoz
Community support. More like community derision from the FreeBSD world.

In the early 2000's, I had to set up a dedicated CVS server for my 10-person
startup. I was the dual hat "dev & admin" guy. We were small, but had good
desktop machines with good SCSI disks in them (top of the line Seagate, if I
remember right).

I set up both a Linux and a FreeBSD dedicated CVS server. We were all happy to
try one server for a day, copy the repo to the other one for a day, and try
things out.

Well, FreeBSD was a bitch to set up compared to Linux and was easily 10X
slower in every way measurable. Like, "cvs up" would take 5 seconds from the
Linux server compared to a minute on FreeBSD (yes, same repo...). Hopping on
to the FreeBSD box locally showed that every kind of disk activity was way
slower than Linux.

I went to the FreeBSD newsgroups and got laughed at. Not a single piece of
helpful info. I did get several large words thrown at me about how I didn't
understand the benchmarks and the performance shouldn't be noticeable to the
end users. At least one guy took to emailing me directly about how I shouldn't
be comparing Linux to FreeBSD.

After 2 or 3 days of wrestling, I powered off the FreeBSD box, installed Linux
on it, and never considered FreeBSD again.

------
jlg23
After 18 years of running FreeBSD on my servers, my $0.02:

Politics/marketing:

* Most "unix" admins only know linux and will advocate for it vigorously because it is so much better than.. "what do you use again? Fedora? Ah, FreeBSD, something with F, I knew it!"

* Management not always listens to reason but just wants a discussion go away, so they listen to the loudest advocates.

Knowledge/Community:

* It is easier to copy a solution to a linux problem from stack overflow than to read the FreeBSD handbook, understand the problem and fix it.

* FreeBSD only is fun when one has a higher level of expertise: Knowledge of _sh_ and at least a basic understanding of _make_ are required, being able to at least read _c_ code makes life much easier.

* Reading docs is hard. FreeBSD forces one to understand the standard unix tools that come with it. That means one has to spend some time reading the docs (or at least skimming over them so one knows where to look when the need arises). If one does not understand the tools, even simple init scripts are black magic.

* No exposure to FreeBSD at all: most hosting companies won't even list FreeBSD as an option (though in most you'll find some unix geek who'll happily connect KVM or IPMI and insert the install-CD for you).

* The FreeBSD community is much less forgiving than the linux community: Ask a question that can be answered easily by reading the handbook or some man-page and the response will probably be silence (rarely flaming, just silence).

And finally also some points where one could argue that it makes sense not to
use FreeBSD from an economic point of view:

* When using FreeBSD one is regularly forced to clean up linux-BS when venturing outside what /usr/ports provides: #!/bin/bash - or even worse #!/bin/sh that actually wants a bash - is one of the most common problems.

* When compiling software from source that does not come from /usr/ports one regularly has to do research what $leenox-distro-package XY provides because documentation just gives command lines for the most common linux distributions. "Soo.... what exactly does that software need to compile when the docs tell me to _simply apt-get foo-23.5 and bar-42.666_?"

~~~
jldugger
> most hosting companies won't even list FreeBSD as an option (though in most
> you'll find some unix geek who'll happily connect KVM or IPMI and insert the
> install-CD for you).

Some of my datacenter clients use freeBSD for various bits, and I have been
that guy. In the end they're migrating away because it's incredibly hard to
find experienced engineers. What you describe as "reading docs is hard" can be
equated to "my team will be slower for negleglible gain." Dicking around with
ports and make is fun, but at the end of the day, we seek lower latency
services and faster outage response times.

EDIT: there's also a network effect in puppet / chef / ansible -- More work
for your operations team when every community module for managing services
doesn't support your platform of choice.

~~~
jlg23
TL;DR: You are absolutely right - but that is very, very sad.

> What you describe as "reading docs is hard" can be equated to "my team will
> be slower for negleglible gain."

Yes, but only from a very short-sighted point of view. I cannot count the
"devops"-meetings I had to attend as a consultant during which I hacked a
command line that solved the problem the meeting was supposed to make a plan
for and estimate costs... I dare to argue that letting the ops learn the ropes
on company time would have been much cheaper than my fees plus costs for
working time employees spent on that meeting. But I understand this is very
hard to quantify and that in a startup culture people don't want to think
beyond the point where the financing is used up.

My fav. test for sysop/devop candidates: "Tell me how large the home directory
of all users who use [t]csh as a login shell is on that machine; no, you
cannot install anything, there is no perl, ruby or python. You have 90
seconds.". 99% fail. I've even interviewed people who applied for a
sysop/devop positions who could not set up a host if not through puppet
because they know sh1t about the target OS.

PS: Thanks for being "that guy" who allowed me to use a mature OS. People like
you allowed me to have a 336 day uptime as the _lower_ limit. Most of my
machines have more than a thousand days of uptime :)

~~~
jldugger
This is a attitude classic case of engineers optimizing for the wrong damn
thing. Sure, we've all sat in on 18 month projects that should have been a
five line shell script. One hopes that whatever expert is teaching ops "the
ropes" knows this already. But at least you get a consultant paycheck for
their ignorance.

> My fav. test for sysop/devop candidates

But how do you query your LDAP server without installing additional tools?
Because in 2016, we have more than one machine. Hundreds. Grepping /etc/passwd
is missing the forest for the trees.

You can have all the shell experts, I need people who can write Chef code that
passes peer review. kitchen lets us poke around the OS all we want to inspect
proper functioning.

> People like you allowed me to have a 336 day uptime as the lower limit. Most
> of my machines have more than a thousand days of uptime :)

AFAIK, none of the BSDs have online kernel replacement facilities. So you
willingly admit you haven't upgraded your kernels in years? I know fBSD has a
reputation, but every once in a while this still happens:
[https://threatpost.com/freebsd-patches-kernel-panic-
vulnerab...](https://threatpost.com/freebsd-patches-kernel-panic-
vulnerability/116001/).

~~~
jlg23
> But how do you query your LDAP server without installing additional tools?
> Because in 2016, we have more than one machine. Hundreds. Grepping
> /etc/passwd is missing the forest for the trees.

You are missing my point, it's about being able to filter and transform
textual output. If a sysop can only do what the UI provides s/he is useless
when creative solutions are asked for.

> You can have all the shell experts, I need people who can write Chef code
> that passes peer review. kitchen lets us poke around the OS all we want to
> inspect proper functioning.

Every good sysop I've met can write your Chef code. Understanding system
basics and managing with high level tools is not mutually exclusive. Tools
like Chef are the result of exactly those sysops automating what they could.
You know that saying? "Tomorrow I'll replace you with a shell script." ;)

> So you willingly admit you haven't upgraded your kernels in years?

Yes, I only update when a security problem concerns me and that is pretty rare
with custom kernels that only have what is required. Even my desktop setups
need a new kernel only once a year or so.

------
jmspring
Simple answer - knowledge share. Many more people know and are familiar with
Linux than FreeBSD. Throw in companies like Red Hat, etc. and that makes it
more compelling for those wanting some sort of support backing.

Personally, I've been running FreeBSD (including some commercial installs --
years ago) for about 16-17 years.

~~~
kennell
Pretty much this this.

Linux (especially Debian-based distros), is usually the first UNIX flavour
that people coming from Windows get in touch with. While FreeBSD has excellent
documentation, Ubuntu and others simply have the larger newbie-friendly
community.

~~~
isxek
This sums up my experience. I still have an ISO of FreeBSD 10.1 sitting
somewhere on my system just waiting for me to copy over to a USB drive once I
work out how to set it up on a dual-boot system along with Windows.

So far, all the guides I've seen for dual-booting have been for Linux, and
they've all been straightforward.

------
mwpmaybe
It's kind of a virtuous cycle (or vicious cycle, if you prefer BSD): more
people use Linux; more guides are written to help others, more software is
readily available, and more testing is done by virtue of having a larger user
base; so more people use Linux. I don't think there's much to say about
qualitative comparisons between Linux and BSD that hasn't already been said to
death, but I do think the two are borrowing from each other in healthy ways
and approaching parity, at least in an "on paper" sense.

------
zzzcpan
These days mostly because of the network effect.

People both get more value from Linux and add more value to it by using it and
writing software for it. Take docker or nix for example, huge value for Linux
and not so much for systems, where they don't work or aren't first class
citizens.

------
protomyth
I have vendors that require a certain OS. Often, its not even "Linux", its
"Red Hat Enterprise version 6.x". If you've ever dealt with an Enterprise
Software Vendor, you know the added level of fun of using something other than
the strict requirements given. Red Hat is the new Windows for government
vendors I've had to deal with.

------
ksec
I read / "think" Yahoo is not using FreeBSD any more. The move to Linux
started before Marissa era. And I think by now they should be 99% Linux.

Netflix I "think / read" is only using FreeBSD with their Storage Appliance.
So that is relatively small parts in number of Servers. Most of their
operation, those Chaos Monkey killed machines are all EC2 and Linux.

Whatsapp is Erlang and FreeBSD, a real rare bleed. But i read Facebook is
hiring Engineers to make Linux Network Stack better then FreeBSD. Bold claim
on the Job Description, then there were rumours Whatsapp moving to integrate
with Facebook, i.e moving off FreeBSD to Linux. I doubt thats an coincidence.

Despite the many / some similarities between FreeBSD and OSX, even Apple
aren't using any FreeBSD on their Servers. At least there hasn't been any
evidence in hiring.

So really, which large, Internet Company is actually using FreeBSD?

------
slyall
I think it was a network effect. Around 1992 The free PC-based BSD
distributions like 386BSD were at around the same level (if not slightly
ahead) of Linux.

However in 1992 and 1993 there were some internal political problems in BSD
land (which eventually led to FreeBSD spinning off) and the "USL v. Regents of
the University of California" lawsuit also cast a shadow on the legality of
the BSDs.

During those two years Linux kept developing, jumped ahead and basically
grabbed all the mind-share and marketing share.

The BSDs have been playing catchup since. For instance with fewer developers
they had problems supporting a wide range hardware so were not even an option
for many.

------
emersonrsantos
Some reasons I could think:

\- It's easier and cheaper to find Linux sysadmins than BSD ones

\- There's more commercial software supported on Linux

\- There's more companies offering support for Linux

\- Linux is more portable than BSD

\- Linux is one of the standard server OS offered by providers, BSD isn't

~~~
redbeard0x0a
How is Linux more portable than BSD?! NetBSD has been ported to nearly every
platform known to man, even toasters.

I'm surprised that more embedded devices don't run some sort of BSD because
they wouldn't have to release code. The PS4's OS is FreeBSD, which they did
release a lot of code in return, but they don't have to open source or release
all their code (i.e. DRM and other "Security" based stuff) if they don't want
to.

~~~
vacri
There's platform, and then there's drivers. There's no point on having an OS
on a net-enabled device if that OS can't talk to the network hardware, for
example.

Linux has had a ridiculous amount of work from a variety of sources in it's
drivers. I once used a git animation tool (forget the name of it, sorry) on
the linux kernel source, and the area where the drivers were put was buzzing
like a beehive, as people from all sorts of companies were making sure their
stuff was supported on linux.

~~~
iotku
>I once used a git animation tool (forget the name of it, sorry)

Probably Gource I would imagine [http://gource.io/](http://gource.io/)

~~~
vacri
That's the one, thank you.

------
pentago
Thanks everybody for answers!

From what I gather from all these replies people's main concern is that
FreeBSD is generally harder to use/configure and management is hard to
persuade into supporting it because it would make DevOps less productive.

From the standpoint of a person who run FreeBSD in production on both bare
metal and VM's and manages several commercial applications and websites, I
must say that plenty (if not all) of these phobias are unjustified. Yes, there
are some edge cases but 95% of the time, there's nothing new to learn you
already don't know, except new package manager commands and slightly different
file system layout.

Not using awesome technologies like ZFS, Boot Environments, Jails, Qjail,
Poudriere and awesome PF is just a plain missing out in my opinion.

I personally don't care about desktop, there are already 2 awesome OS's that
majority of people use for a reason and that's pretty much enough I think.

I personally heard nothing but praises from people who are long term Linux
users/admins who tried it.

Once people figured out couple of OS specifics its all breeze :)

------
coroutines
In my experience, the BSDs used to be trusted for their reliability and
performance. Linux has come a long way in terms of reliability and
configuration cost - though performance is harder to tune for. Docker has
enabled a lot of trusted deployments. 6-8 years ago I remember the question
"Why don't companies use Linux as much in production as FreeBSD?"

Maybe I'm sheltered.

~~~
cageface
I was in devops in a Dotcom in the 1999-2000 era. Back then Linux was still a
pretty shaky server OS. In particular the network and NFS stacks were unstable
and slow. We originally tried to deploy on Linux but had to switch to FreeBSD
to get a stable environment.

But Linux has come a long way since then. The major issues have been resolved
and IMO the overwhelmingly larger ecosystem Linux enjoys outweighs most if not
all advantages FreeBSD might still have on a technical level.

~~~
coroutines
However much I hate the politics surrounding Docker and systemd, they have
done a LOT for Linux to provide a standardized way to configure most distros
and reliably deploy apps/stacks. I still feel that tuning Linux for networking
is not an easy thing to learn about.

------
gspetr
Personal anecdotes:

About a year ago I wanted to replace newlines in a file with "sed" on FreeBSD.
I couldn't.

At first I thought there was an error on my side. I was very surprised to find
out that you could not do that at all, it said so right there in "man sed".

Dirty hacks to work around this problem posted on stackoverflow did not work
on that machine either.

Tried to mess with newlines with python. Turned out there was some kind of
other problem if you open files in 'wb' mode under FreeBSD.

This experience with some of the most basic tools not working as they do on
GNU/Linux made me want to avoid FreeBSD if possible.

------
geggam
Lowest common denominator.

Those people who are familiar with a Unix variant are more familiar with
Linux. Linux is different enough from *BSD that what people do learn about
Linux doesn't translate.

Linux entry level is actually easier than Windows these days. In fact when I
look for candidates if they only have Ubuntu / Docker on their resume its
trash.

What used to be considered entry level skill sets are now called "Michael
Jordan" level skillsets ( kernel compile / tuning , C debugging etc etc )

Currently I use Linux because it makes me money. I use the BSD's because I
like them

~~~
mwpmaybe
> if they only have Ubuntu / Docker on their resume its trash

I hope there's some wiggle room in there for folks who may know more but cater
their resumes to what they want to do and/or the buzzwords recruiters are
filtering by.

------
personsunknown
I can tell you my experience as to why Linux won out in production. Many years
ago when I was doing enterprise systems administration, we were using both
Linux and BSD equally in the beginning. But what eventually gave Linux the
edge was hardware support and package management. Linux had solid SMP support
first, which meant we could replace expensive UNIX servers like Suns and
AlphaServers with much cheaper Intel based multi-processor servers. PLus Linux
had more drivers for hardware like RAID and network cards. We didn't have to
hunt down specific, often older, hardware like we did for our BSD servers.
Also IBM ported Linux to it's z series servers so Linux had a (what we used to
term) "big iron" server solution first and could replace proprietary solutions
like the high end HP9000's. Package management was a huge plus. It greatly
reduced administrative time. Major software upgrades, like when we had to
replace libc6 on all our *NIX servers because of a major security bug, would
take hours on the BSD servers but minutes on our Debian servers.

------
metaform
Perhaps they have some security concerns. [https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-
defaults.txt](https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.txt) \- more admin time
spent tweaking poor default security == more money being spent.

~~~
jlgaddis
Many of the "points" mentioned therein are misleading, at best, if not
outright wrong. There was a nice discussion / rebuttal of this article
_somewhere_ , although I can't remember where at this moment. Unfortunately,
I'm just about to leave but I'll see if I can find it later.

~~~
metaform
Which points are misleading or wrong?

~~~
jlgaddis
Apologies, I just glanced at this link and I think I mistook this article for
a "troll" article that has been posted and shared several times. I just looked
at this article, started reading through it and it doesn't seem familiar. I
don't think I've seen it before. I'm trying to find the "troll" article that I
thought this was but I'm not having any luck at the moment.

------
twunde
It comes down to the fact that there are more people familiar with linux than
BSD. Orders of magnitude more in the US. Unless you're working on something
where the GPL is a concern, it's easier to default to linux.

------
sigil
Keeping software up-to-date on FreeBSD sucks. That's my one and only
complaint. If that got comparably easier, I'd be switching from Ubuntu/Debian
on servers back to FreeBSD.

I still run FreeBSD 8.4 on one production system, and recently decommissioned
a FreeBSD 5 box that had been happily humming away in a colo for 10 years. I
learned FreeBSD before Linux and prefer almost everything else about
it...except that part about updating software.

If you take security seriously, you apply security updates in a timely
fashion. For a while I was diligent about it on my FreeBSD boxes, monitored
vuxml, and updated vulnerable packages regularly with this:

    
    
        portaudit -a |
        sed -ne 's/^Affected package: //p' |
        sort -u |
        xargs portupgrade -P -rv
    

When things go well, and binary packages exist for everything, this is almost
as good as `unattended-upgrades` on Debian. But things don't usually go so
well. Building packages from source occasionally doesn't bother me. Random
breakages in ports and their dependencies bothered me a lot, and became the
rule rather than the exception.

Near as I can tell Ubuntu/Debian wins here because it freezes packages
alongside the OS release, except for backported security patches if you're on
LTS. FreeBSD has only one ports tree. It's in constant flux, and (in my
experience) is constantly broken. Why can't ports be branched off alongside
the OS release and receive security backports? Maybe FreeBSD doesn't have the
manpower to do this, maybe it's cultural, I'm not really sure. What I can say
is it's relatively easy to check out, tweak, build and install ports on a
case-by-case basis if for some reason you need the latest and greatest of
something. I don't see the value in constantly having the latest and greatest
of _everything_ though, and it even seems a little antithetical to FreeBSD to
me.

Anyway, so port upgrades suck, but base upgrades also suck. Doing an `apt-get
dist-upgrade` to go from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 "just worked." Rebuilding world
to upgrade from FreeBSD 7.x to 8.x worked, but just barely, and the whole
process scared the shit out of me. Random incompatibilities continued to crop
up for some time after.

I think this one comes down to the integrated base userland + kernel in
FreeBSD versus the "everything's a package" approach in Ubuntu/Debian. Kernel
upgrades are much more common on Linux. Not that this is an objectively good
thing, but rare events don't tend to get tested and optimized like routine
ones do.

Note: if you're a diehard FreeBSD user and you've figured out how to keep your
system up-to-date with minimum fuss, please school me.

~~~
swills
It's a lot easier these days with the new pkg tools.

~~~
sigil
I've used the new pkg tools a little. Can you be more specific? Can they be
used to reliably apply unattended security updates now?

~~~
pentago
There days people use freebsd-update to do this.
[http://serverfault.com/a/738217/41952](http://serverfault.com/a/738217/41952)

Accompanies with ZFS boot environments there's literally minimal fuss about
upgrading and worrying about possible breakages.

~~~
sigil
Thanks, I hadn't seen `freebsd-update install --not-running-from-cron`. I'll
give that a try.

------
Gracana
It's easier to find Linux admins and it's easier to look up Linux stack traces
on SO. "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM," updated for the modern age.

------
dmourati
Early companies like IBM threw a lot of weight and money behind linux around
2000 or so. From there, Google and other big companies chose Linux as well.
This is a large basis of engineering talent and knowledge to build upon.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOtKZA9ri7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOtKZA9ri7M)

------
chrismaeda
Java runs on Linux. There are tons of bespoke and third party Java apps
running in companies. Running Java on any other x86 UNIX is a hassle.

~~~
malensek
I run several Java applications on a FreeBSD server without problems. Is there
a particular subset of Java features that don't work other than on Linux? I
also haven't had any issues with Java on macOS.

~~~
chrismaeda
When I put on my pointy corporate IT hat, and I go to the Oracle web site to
download Java, I see that Java runs on Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and Windows.
Then when I go to download WebSphere, I see that it runs on a similar set plus
AIX. Java support for Linux comes from the vendor while Java support for
FreeBSD comes from the "community." Corporations will generally not depend on
infrastructure that does not have reliable vendors who will sell them support
contracts. Linux has this ecosystem in place. FreeBSD does not.

------
jwatte
If they should use BSD, wouldn't OpenBSD actually be better? (Default to
security)

~~~
protomyth
I use OpenBSD for quite a few services, but end up using FreeBSD for my file
servers (OpenZFS). If the progress on multiple CPU usage and virtualization
continues on OpenBSD, the only real thing holding me back from getting rid of
FreeBSD is the filesystem. I am looking at the progress of HAMMER2 on
DragonFlyBSD to see if it is a good fit.

~~~
jlgaddis
Ditto for me. I run OpenBSD for a few specific services (transparent
SMTP/spamd proxy, SSH jumpboxes, firewall) but mostly stick with FreeBSD for
production primarily because of ZFS.

ZFS really is amazing. Before I ever actually tried it, I couldn't understand
why people were so amazed by a filesystem. It's incredibly hard to "go back"
and I often feel a bit "crippled" when managing machines not using ZFS.

------
ktRolster
I can't speak for anyone else, but video card support is better in Linux.
_shrug_ Otherwise I'd switch to BSD.

