
Can You Use FreeBSD for a Developer Machine in 2020? - kiyanwang
https://hackernoon.com/can-you-use-freebsd-for-a-developer-machine-in-2020-fc653bk5
======
codesections
I'm slightly confused by the claim this article makes about performance. It
says:

> Generally, FreeBSD performs better than Linux - Don’t expect exponential
> differences, but many tests have shown that FreeBSD performs better than
> Linux

In that same line, it links to
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3990x-fr...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3990x-freebsd-
bsd&num=2) which says:

> Lastly is a look at the geometric mean for all of the benchmarks conducted
> for this FreeBSD vs. Linux scaling comparison on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper
> 3990X. In the end, both CentOS Stream and Ubuntu 20.04 (development)
> delivered similar performance and were basically tied for first.… At 16
> cores, RHEL8-based CentOS was about 17% faster than FreeBSD 12.1 while at
> 128 threads the lead expanded to 28% based upon the geometric mean or 21%
> when comparing the GCC9 results on FreeBSD 12.1.

~~~
partomniscient
There was a period of time where FreeBSD performed much better under load
(particularly under a high network load). Unfortunately as a side effect you
get a lot of people quoting "FreeBSD performs better than Linux" without
context or under what scenarios.

~~~
trasz
There were many different periods where FreeBSD performed better than Linux
under some loads. The same is true in the other direction. Generally speaking,
"X performs better than Y" is meaningless without specifying the workload.

------
non-entity
> for C, C++ and Python developers FreeBSD is probably your best possible
> choice because of the number of tools and packages available.

Is there any source for this? I cant think of anything that any BSD would
offer for C / C++ / Python that I couldn't get on another platform?

Also, perhaps I just haven't paid attention, but I feel like in the last year
at least, I've seen a ton of articles or anecdotes about people trying some
BSD for the first time (usually FreeBSD or OpenBSD) and having some epiphany.

~~~
trasz
DTrace, for one.

