I was introduced to FreeBSD (v3.3) in the late 90s by /user?id=gjvc. I bought the CD set and the FreeBSD Handbook in paperback format from The FreeBSD Mall.
I was too young to appreciate it back then, but now in my mid-40s I find myself hankering back to those early days for me. It's a shame that some cloud providers like DigitalOcean and Hetzner have dropped native support for FreeBSD as base operating systems for their VPSes. I think this release will be the turning point for me getting back into FreeBSD after too many years away.
Yup.. FreeBSD was awesome becausethe FreeBSD handbook has always been top notch. It covers everything you need to install and administer FreeBSD + many of its packages
Talking about hetzner, they write you an image on a USB-Stick and put it in your Server (at no cost). Since it's a real server i don't need any "native" support from them. Otherwise Oracle-Cloud or Vultr.
But you are right, it's sad that hetzner dropped the "webinstall no hands-on" support.
Once I opened a ticket to complain that it is listed under "Linux custom images", however the documentation team decided my complaint was withouth reasoning(!).
My early FreeBSD moment was when I had a cable modem, and you were able to download one or two boot floppies. After you booted them up, you could install the entire OS from the network. No CD needed.
I assume it just downloaded everything straight from FTP servers.
Oh, look who has a fancy cable modem! Back in my day, we had to do it with 14.4 kbaud modems (really) after walking to school, uphill both ways in the snow (not really).
I run freebsd on a hetzner cloud vps, don’t remember how exactly I did it but I think I uploaded the install medium to the server console. Wasn’t too much hassle iirc.
The problem with FreeBSD is that it couldn't keep up. No containers or VMs (jails and their homegrown HV don't cut it), fewer drivers, etc. It's great for some server use cases but I just couldn't do my work in FreeBSD. I did like it though, the docs and community are great.
They have had jails for 20+ years at this point. I would consider FreeBSD jails and containers on Linux equivalent at this point with overall the FreeBSD jails being better to manage if you do some scripting. The bhyve hypervisor, I haven't played with enough to form an opinion on.
Unless of course you're trying to sell to an enterprise who's core competency isn't computational, and has limited capacity to manage new operating systems in the fleet. Lots of big orgs can only support so many things. It seems odd until you realize they're not running your service. they're running thousands of services across multiple geographic regions with hundreds of thousands of corporate users. And all the upgrade paths that go with this whole thing, and the external facing integrations, etc, etc.
So, sure, if you've got a stand-alone B2C service that's making money today, enjoy your FreeBSD, SUSE, whatever. But if you're clients include big banks, chunks of governments, etc, think really hard about going off the reservation.
No one said anything about entrenched systems that already use Linux or other systems. FreeBSD is an excellent OS to use for those same jobs that a lot of people and companies are missing out on by not giving it a look. Netflix and Whatsapp can't be too wrong in their choice.
Netflix and Whatsapp can't be too wrong in their choice.
Most companies aren't Netflix, Whatsapp, Google, etc. Netflix can afford to run FreeBSD because they have staff that are intimately familiar with tuning it and hacking on the kernel. That's not most companies.
No one said anything about entrenched systems that already use Linux or other systems.
GNU/Linux is entrenched pretty much everywhere at this point. Think about your stack. Does anything you use depend on GNU userland tools? Yeah, you'll get real good at rooting out hardcoded paths and dependencies on GNU extensions. Are your coworkers used to GNU tools? Well, there's a learning curve. Do you use nodejs at your company? The node maintainers actively refused to merge trivial patches to get current versions to build on FreeBSD (and the port itself stagnated).
Evaluating something that's not-Linux is neat and cool, I get it. But the reality is switching will incur a heavy up front (and potentially long-term depending on the candidate pool) cost and lots of long-term paper cuts.
I was just thinking about this again and here's an example (well, two) of why I would not recommend FreeBSD for a prod environment: third party software.
The ports tree has been an archaic mess for as long as I've been dicking around with FreeBSD (~2.2.2). Processors and disks have gotten fast enough that relying on make(1) isn't quite as painful as it was, but ok. To ease the pain, FreeBSD started offering binary packages a while ago via pkg(8).
Earlier this year I was evaluating upgrading 12 -> 13, so I fired up VirtualBox and installed 13.whatever. Out of the box pkg did not work. It started its bootstrap song and dance and fell flat on its face. Digging around on the forums came up with a work around to get everything bootstrapped and a working version of pkg installed, but still this was a known problem that made it out the door.
Meanwhile even with a working version of pkg, the FreeBSD mirrors are glacially slow. I've consistently gotten about 2Mbps max from them. Typically I'll get a few hundred kilobytes per second even on an un-throttled 10 Gbps connection with an Intel 825xx NIC.
So on the 12.x machine I set up varnish and pointed the jails at that. And all was well with the world. Until a few weeks ago when pkg again fell flat on its face. Turns out that somewhere along the way pkg went from "use SRV(!) records but fall back on CNAME/A" to "fail if there are no SRV records". Shame on me for not configuring pkg to ignore SRV records in the first place, but what the hell kind of breaking change is that in the middle of a product's lifecycle? That's 100% the kind of thing that should be synced up with the release of new major version of FreeBSD (e.g. 14), but doesn't because pkg straddles and blurs the boundaries between base system and 3rd party tools.
So. Yeah. FreeBSD's great for academic purposes. It's great if you want to push the limits of what's capable and you have staff who are competent kernel hackers. It's great if you can't use GPL licensed products. But for most things? It's a distraction.
If it's a FreeBSD VPS you're after, I'd suggest you give UpCloud a chance. I'm currently running a few FreeBSD VPSs on UpCloud and I have not run into any issues. It's kinda great!
I was too young to appreciate it back then, but now in my mid-40s I find myself hankering back to those early days for me. It's a shame that some cloud providers like DigitalOcean and Hetzner have dropped native support for FreeBSD as base operating systems for their VPSes. I think this release will be the turning point for me getting back into FreeBSD after too many years away.
Thanks to the FreeBSD release team!