DEV Community

Discussion on: 🚀🐧 What's your current OS and why do you use it?

Collapse
 
darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

Let's see...

I have two Windows 10 workstations, a couple Windows 10 laptops, a MacBook Air M1, multiple several FreeBSD servers, some FreeBSD laptops, TONS of SBCs running FreeBSD and ESXi ARM Fling, and one beefy 16-core ARM Workstation...

Too much to share! LOL

Collapse
 
danidiaztech profile image
Daniel Diaz

Wow 😆, that's a really big collection of machines.
It's worth it to use FreeBSD these days?

Collapse
 
darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

Oh, yeah, I think I have close to 30 SBCs now!? :-O SOMEONE has to do all the compatibility testing to ensure when you download an image from the internet, it "just works" ;)

But yeah, FreeBSD is great... in some situations. It is by far and away my favorite server OS. Nothing is even remotely close to its ease of use and flexibility for enterprise deployments. For a desktop, however, it is similar to Linux, as it uses the same desktop environments. It has less drivers though for things like Wi-Fi, which can be a pain, and the graphics drivers are slightly older than what's available on the bleeding edge Linux kernel. I primarily use FreeBSD for the stability and ease of mind behind ZFS and Jails, so I know how reliable my storage is, and have a highly flexible containerization environment for custom deployments.

Thread Thread
 
danidiaztech profile image
Daniel Diaz

That's amazing, what kind of testing do you do? :0

So, what's the level of complexity of using FreeBSD, both as a daily driver and in deployment. Until I've only use Debian and Arch based distros, so I would like you to explain what's the key difference between FreeBSD and a linux based OS.

Thread Thread
 
darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

From a userland perspective, they run mostly the same software. But from a sysadmin perspective, I much prefer FreeBSD. It has easier software installation and configuration for all the major services I need to run, better documentation, and a nice overall ecosystem. There are also some easy-to-use appliances like FreeNAS/TrueNAS and pfSense/OPNsense that are simple to install with decent web interfaces. They serve their purposes very well.

Check out this article for one example of the simplicity: dev.to/darkain/compiling-mariadb-f...