<story><title>Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux</title><url>https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>&amp;gt; And even to avoid running headlong into this troll pit: Linux distros without systemd exist. It&amp;#x27;s dishonest to compare FreeBSD to Linux and then only focus on a subset of Linux distros.&lt;p&gt;Are any of them mature enough to depend on for serious work? I looked at moving back to Linux a few months ago, but all the non-systemd distributions seemed to be small projects and many of them looked to have schismed, collapsed, or both.</text></item><item><author>msla</author><text>&amp;gt; They haven&amp;#x27;t listed what&amp;#x27;s actually technically better about it than in systemd. (not subjectively)&lt;p&gt;And even to avoid running headlong into this troll pit: Linux distros without systemd exist. It&amp;#x27;s dishonest to compare FreeBSD to Linux and then only focus on a subset of Linux distros.</text></item><item><author>viraptor</author><text>I find some points... debatable. For example software:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Normally when you install software on a Unix operating system you find and download the software.&lt;p&gt;According to the title, this is about choosing FreeBSD over Linux, not over Unix. That means the normal way to install is &amp;quot;&amp;lt;package_manager&amp;gt; install &amp;lt;package_name&amp;gt;&amp;quot;. For the end user this is just like ports without having to compile anything. Once you don&amp;#x27;t have the package or the port available, you end up in the same situation: download the source and compile (which is more likely to work on Linux OOTB simply due to popularity).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Poudriere is a utility for creating and testing FreeBSD packages. It utilize the FreeBSD jail system to set up isolated compilation environments.&lt;p&gt;In Debian-like systems you can use pbuilder in the same way. Each package is built in the same clean choot. I suspect RH has something similar?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; bhyve&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t list anything technically better about bhyve. Why would I use this over xen or kvm?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; FreeBSD has three different firewalls built into the base system: PF, IPFW, and IPFILTER, also known as IPF.&lt;p&gt;Ok. Linux has iptables and now nftables&amp;#x2F;bpfilter. It&amp;#x27;s also got queuing, stateless and stateful features, protocol tracking, etc. CARP can be done in userland, or via other solutions like linux-ha&amp;#x2F;stonith. What are the reasons to choose FreeBSD here? (also, mentioning 3 firewalls after being excited about well-designed system that just comes together rather than being glued together from third-party software just sounds weird)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; BSD init&lt;p&gt;They haven&amp;#x27;t listed what&amp;#x27;s actually technically better about it than in systemd. (not subjectively)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Jails&lt;p&gt;Jails &lt;i&gt;as described in the article&lt;/i&gt;, have the same features as lxc. Lxd provides zfs-as-a-backing-store option as well.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; FreeBSD has over five hundred system variables that can be read and set using the sysctl utility.&lt;p&gt;Ok. On my Fedora system &amp;quot;sysctl -a | wc -l&amp;quot; gives 2093.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For example, on top of the geom_mirror module an encryption module can be added, such as geom_eli to provide a mirrored and encrypted volume.&lt;p&gt;So how is it better than lvm with its layers dm-raid and dm-crypt?&lt;p&gt;I get that people are excited about FreeBSD and I&amp;#x27;d love to learn what are the technically better sides of it. But this article really doesn&amp;#x27;t list that many.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robertlagrant</author><text>Ah, &amp;quot;serious work&amp;quot;. That well-known absolute thing that is the same for everyone.</text></comment>
<story><title>Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux</title><url>https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>&amp;gt; And even to avoid running headlong into this troll pit: Linux distros without systemd exist. It&amp;#x27;s dishonest to compare FreeBSD to Linux and then only focus on a subset of Linux distros.&lt;p&gt;Are any of them mature enough to depend on for serious work? I looked at moving back to Linux a few months ago, but all the non-systemd distributions seemed to be small projects and many of them looked to have schismed, collapsed, or both.</text></item><item><author>msla</author><text>&amp;gt; They haven&amp;#x27;t listed what&amp;#x27;s actually technically better about it than in systemd. (not subjectively)&lt;p&gt;And even to avoid running headlong into this troll pit: Linux distros without systemd exist. It&amp;#x27;s dishonest to compare FreeBSD to Linux and then only focus on a subset of Linux distros.</text></item><item><author>viraptor</author><text>I find some points... debatable. For example software:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Normally when you install software on a Unix operating system you find and download the software.&lt;p&gt;According to the title, this is about choosing FreeBSD over Linux, not over Unix. That means the normal way to install is &amp;quot;&amp;lt;package_manager&amp;gt; install &amp;lt;package_name&amp;gt;&amp;quot;. For the end user this is just like ports without having to compile anything. Once you don&amp;#x27;t have the package or the port available, you end up in the same situation: download the source and compile (which is more likely to work on Linux OOTB simply due to popularity).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Poudriere is a utility for creating and testing FreeBSD packages. It utilize the FreeBSD jail system to set up isolated compilation environments.&lt;p&gt;In Debian-like systems you can use pbuilder in the same way. Each package is built in the same clean choot. I suspect RH has something similar?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; bhyve&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t list anything technically better about bhyve. Why would I use this over xen or kvm?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; FreeBSD has three different firewalls built into the base system: PF, IPFW, and IPFILTER, also known as IPF.&lt;p&gt;Ok. Linux has iptables and now nftables&amp;#x2F;bpfilter. It&amp;#x27;s also got queuing, stateless and stateful features, protocol tracking, etc. CARP can be done in userland, or via other solutions like linux-ha&amp;#x2F;stonith. What are the reasons to choose FreeBSD here? (also, mentioning 3 firewalls after being excited about well-designed system that just comes together rather than being glued together from third-party software just sounds weird)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; BSD init&lt;p&gt;They haven&amp;#x27;t listed what&amp;#x27;s actually technically better about it than in systemd. (not subjectively)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Jails&lt;p&gt;Jails &lt;i&gt;as described in the article&lt;/i&gt;, have the same features as lxc. Lxd provides zfs-as-a-backing-store option as well.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; FreeBSD has over five hundred system variables that can be read and set using the sysctl utility.&lt;p&gt;Ok. On my Fedora system &amp;quot;sysctl -a | wc -l&amp;quot; gives 2093.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For example, on top of the geom_mirror module an encryption module can be added, such as geom_eli to provide a mirrored and encrypted volume.&lt;p&gt;So how is it better than lvm with its layers dm-raid and dm-crypt?&lt;p&gt;I get that people are excited about FreeBSD and I&amp;#x27;d love to learn what are the technically better sides of it. But this article really doesn&amp;#x27;t list that many.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ZeD_</author><text>Slackware is still here looking at you guys</text></comment>