
People who run BSD - vetelko
https://runbsd.info/
======
decasteve
I run OpenBSD on a PC Engines apu2 as my main router. I have a 1 Gbit fiber
going into a TP-Link converter and then directly into the OpenBSD router which
completely bypasses the POS router provided by my ISP.

When I first started poking around with BSD I searched for tutorials online
for the things I wanted to do. As I often do when I want to learn something.
Early on in this process I came across a suggestion to just read the man pages
(RTFM!). So I stopped searching and just read the official documentation. I
was surprised how it was all just there! For almost everything I needed to do
the man pages were enough.

~~~
aerique
When coming from Linux one is not used to this but the OpenBSD and FreeBSD man
pages and documentation are actually useful!

------
pfortuny
Just installed openBSD on my 2007 MBPro (OS X does not update etc.). What a
charm.

I bought another MBPro in 2017 because I needed the power and the old one had
become unreliable (shutdowns due to heat etc.) I use now the old one for home
work and as a remote terminal. Could not be happier.

~~~
lelf
In case you ever run it from the battery, how is the power consumption?

~~~
pfortuny
Never run it from battery: it has become just a backup for fast moves from
room to room.

However, I have managed to get the processor get at 1Ghz when not under too
much stress automatically (there is a switch which I do not recall, sorry).

------
setquk
The only reason I don’t run a BSD derivative is laziness. It requires more
maintenance effort than xubuntu. Back in the distant past I ran NetBSD on
SPARC at home.

I’d quite happily be paid to work with it all day but no one wants to hire me
to do that. So centos it is.

------
karmakaze
I tried to use OpenBSD for software development and deployments. It didn't
work well because it seemed that packages didn't get as much use judging by
inconsistent documentation and sometimes faulty defaults. I didn't care enough
to contribute to fix the issues I ran into. Instead I went back to the Ubuntu
LTS as before.

I briefly also looked at kFreeBSD with a Debian userland to address the issue
but it seemed to be even less well traveled.

~~~
sirn
I wonder what kind of development and deployments you do and whether FreeBSD
might work better. For instance, FreeBSD packages (ports/pkgng) has two
branches: latest and quarterly. I've found latest often closely tracking
upstream releases.

My work consist of Elixir/Erlang development and a bit of deployments with
Kubernetes/Helm/Kapitan/Jsonnet. I primarily work on iPad and login to the
FreeBSD workspace via Blink.sh/Mosh and it all worked really well.

That said, if your work involve Haskell and Stack, you might want to stick
with FreeBSD 11.2 since Stack still hasn't release a version that supported
FreeBSD 12 (which broke due to FreeBSD 12.0 change to inode64)

~~~
karmakaze
My motivation for trying *BSD over Linux is for security/stability which is
OpenBSD's goal more than FreeBSD.

------
h1d
I always thought BSD is surviving due to its liberal license allowing many
companies to use it as a base OS for their prodcits without any liability to
open their code leading to financial supports.

From a consumer perspective where a license choice doesn't really matter, I
don't find much reason to use BSD over Linux, though I keep a FreeBSD just to
keep up with the difference.

~~~
sureaboutthis
I saw someone post that "FreeBSD is a professional operating system for
professionals" so consumer perspectives don't really matter. That Netflix,
Whatsapp, Sony and most of the world's major internet traffic routers run
FreeBSD, via Juniper Networks, is more significant to me.

~~~
sirn
Sony also deploys FreeBSD in one of their major consumer product: a
PlayStation 4, which runs Orbis OS, a fork of FreeBSD 9[1]

[1]:
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI)

------
veryworried
I would like to use FreeBSD myself on my laptop, but I really need those intel
WiFi drivers to support 802.11ac

~~~
pfortuny
Have you tried OpenBSD?

------
stingraycharles
I really like BSD myself, I used it as my primary OS for both desktop and
server back in the early 00s.

Nowadays, with a container-centric cloud architecture, it seems like BSD
doesn't really have a good answer to Kubernetes, Nomad, etc. If anything, the
projects are experimental and/or hobby projects.

~~~
ivoras
Which is a bit bizarre because FeeeBSD jails were world's first containers on
a vaguely desktop-ish unix-ish systems.

The crowd just never had the hype power of Linux and no big player took to
developing cool things on top.

It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant if
there's no marketing behind it.

~~~
tannhaeuser
It maybe also shows how brainwashed or resume-oriented the tech crowd is.

~~~
lima
Network effects are real though.

