What won me over is how it treats an NFS share going away. Linux gets so weird you need to reboot but FreeBSD is usable to the point I can fix the issue.

Honestly it’s the same with out of memory issues too.

I just can think about my FreeBSD boxes less.

Yep, you can test this right now, do a "stress -c 320" (that's 10 times the number of cores I have), a linuxbox starts to stutter massively (sometimes even audio), with FreeBSD no stuttering at all, just a bit less responsive.

Ok but when I run it on my notebook, WiFi is slow, the laptop crashes when I connect it to a docking station, audio doesn't work and suspend and resume is broken. And this on a Linux certified machine.

This is fascinating. I always assumed the susceptibility to fork bombs was an inevitable consequence of the Unix process model optimizing for speed of fork.

Do you know why/how BSD handles it better?

Typing “man $something” and getting actual good documentation rather than “use infodoc you uncultured swine” was always a bonus too.

Back when such things were my deal, the FreeBSD docs were a breath of fresh air. It was like the whole platform was designed intentionally rather than the pile of cobbled together components that most Linux distros felt like.

You can install drm-6.1:

https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-61-kmod/

It even in the quarterly repo.

I find the BSDs, in general, take a more holistic approach to the operating design and everything feels very cohesive. In contrast, Linux feels more like an assembly of parts to form a unit and everything feels far more disjointed. That said, I run Linux on my production workstation because it supports more modern stuff. However, OpenBSD is one of my favorite operating systems to put on the back end because of its very simple and consistent design, and, well, strong focus on security.

The main benefit for me is that it provides a very stable user experience since it is not under the influence of the war between linux distros; you learn the system once and you might spend 5 minutes after a major update learning what is new and configuring. But much of that software in ports is developed for linux with no consideration for BSD so it can cause headaches since the maintainers of those ports can not possibly test every possible use case and generally port it for their own case. A big rub for me is the sound situation, I love OSS but not all programs support it so I still get stuck using Jack.

I almost made the switch to FreeBSD a few times but Slackware still offers fewer compromises for me with the same ridiculously stable user experience and I don't have to worry as much about drivers when computer shopping. I assume I will end up switching to FreeBSD when Patrick dies since Slackware will probably die with him so I keep an eye on it and play with it once every year or two.

Some reasons here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

For my use cases (a stable environment for writing and running systems code locally, browsing the internet, reading pdfs, etc), desktop Linux peaked about ten years ago.

That was back before systemd/wayland, and back when deleting pulseaudio just made everything work better.

Also, minimal window managers like evilwm were more tenable, since the only useful thing that really used the notification area/dbus was wifi.

Anyway, being behind on the spiral of instability I’ve seen with recent Linux desktop environments seems like a feature, not a bug.

No real reason to as an end user. Maybe better ZFS integration out of the box is appealing for a NAS or something like that. But the desktop user experience on FreeBSD is not great. Lots of regressions in things you might care about (wifi, kde/gnome, chrome web browser) relative to Linux.

> behind [..] tool versions

I run both Arch Linux and FreeBSD. It is not uncommon that FreeBSD's packages update faster than Arch Linux. Make sure you update your pkg config to use the latest packages instead of the quarterly packages it uses by default.

Also, I'd like to point out that FreeBSD has thousands of more packages than Fedora: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest

> why would I consider FreeBSD

ZFS: Since FreeBSD isn't encumbered by the GPL, it has fully integrated ZFS which is a far better experience than on Linux. On FreeBSD ZFS always works, whereas on Linux ZFS is an out-of-tree module and your dkms builds breaks frequently when the kernel updates. Also, a lot of software on FreeBSD takes advantage of the features of ZFS, whereas on Linux most software doesn't use the features of either btrfs or ZFS.

PF: This firewall has a great config format. After using PF, Linux's iptables makes me want to walk into the ocean.

poudriere: A great and easy-to-use package builder. I use this to build both my OS and all my software with CPU optimizations for my specific processor (but FreeBSD has official package repositories, so you don't need to build your own if you don't want to.)

kqueue: FreeBSD uses the kqeueue syscall. Later Linux created their own syscall: epoll. But epoll is fundamentally broken: https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-...

jails: more secure than Linux containers despite being invented 7 years earlier.

sysctl instead of /proc: On FreeBSD, when you're listing the running processes (for example, top, htop, or ps), it uses sysctl which gets an atomic snapshot of the running processes. On Linux, you have to crawl through the /proc filesystem which is MANY more syscalls and the contents of /proc are changing out from under you while you're crawling through it.

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That being said, Linux has some wins over FreeBSD:

systemd: As controversial as it is, I think systemd is nicer than FreeBSD's init system. systemd supports user services whereas the built-in FreeBSD service manager does not (3rd party ones do though). Systemd automatically captures stdout/stderr to a log whereas FreeBSD relies on each service invoking the daemon tool to redirect their stdout/stderr. FreeBSD still uses pidfiles for everything which is flawed.

documentation: FreeBSD has much better man pages than Linux, but the Arch Linux wiki is the champion, no contest.

wifi: FreeBSD's wifi support is definitely not great. There are efforts under way to make a shim that will allow FreeBSD to use the Linux wifi drivers (similar to what they did for graphics drivers) but where it stands today, the wifi support is not great. That being said, there is a package called "wifibox" that spins up a tiny Linux VM and has Linux drive your wifi card, bridging the connection back to FreeBSD.

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Finally, this is a popular blog post on why someone would choose FreeBSD over Linux: <go see Vermaden's post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 >

Edit: Vermaden himself has posted the link to his blog post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 so I am removing the link.

> As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD?

The vid talks about how big Linux vendor, like Red Hat, betrayed the Linux community (their words, not mine).

If you're fine with the "microsoftization" of Linux, then you're all good and set with Fedora or Ubuntu.

For many users Linux is just "Windows but sucking a bit less than Windows".

But others do feel the betrayal they talk about in the vid. For me for example systemd and systemd's author now officially being on Microsoft' payroll is a very hard pill to swallow. Same for many non-portable things now targeting only the bastardized Linux ecosystem, instead of targeting all the Unixes still out there (including FreeBSD and OpenBSD).

Thankfully due to the unfathomably big number of Linux containers / virtual machines being spun on and off and the need for utmost speed of these, systemd ain't much of a thing in the Linux container world. And Linux is still the kernel and it's still possible to have both systemd-less containers and systemd-less distros. I'm not sure how long that'll last though seen how systemd is spreading its tentacles everywhere.

For people who love Microsoft INI files and who love the rube-goldberg monstrosity that Windows is, systemd Linux distros with snap and whatnots are just fine. To them Linux is just basically a Windows a tiny bit more secure and crashing a tiny bit less. And don't worry: Microsoft employees are hard at work making sure Linux gets shittier by the day, emulating the mistakes of the biggest turd of an OS ever made (that'd be Windows).

For others, thankfully the BSDs do still exists.

As a fedora user you probably shouldn't consider FreeBSD, it's more for servers than desktop systems. E.g. I run it on my laptop even though I can't adjust the brightness of the monitor.

For me being "behind on features and tool versions" actually means that there's much less going on so I'm more confident that everything works and works well together. From my POV Linux has developed a case of Winchester Mystery House syndrome.

>All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and tool versions

Well, I don't want to be that guy, but you're wrong about that too ;)