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0 pointsforca11y ago0 comments

I'm talking devs and sysadmins. I agree with you that NetBSD is the friendliest of the bunch.

Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He simply has no tolerance for people with no merit and nothing to add. Anyone would be the same.

I've met a couple of snarky FreeBSD admins, but they were also Linux and Windows admins at the same time. These two guys were full of themselves regardless of platform.

BSD (in general) tends to be more polished than Linux and suffers fewer bugs out of the box. Again, this is what I've noticed. I've yet, in almost 20 years of using FreeBSD off and on, ever had an issue with it that was a deal breaker. I cannot say this of the various Linux distros.

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oDot11y ago

I've never used BSD before, but from reading FreeBSD's BSD vs Linux [0], I can't see a major difference aside of the license, and the number of distributions available. Can you please explain what made you go on off using BSD/Linux?

[0]: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...

forcaOP11y ago

I have noticed over the last ten or so years that FreeBSD in particular is ridiculously stable -- far more so than any Linux distro I have tried, including Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian.

I have stable Linux machines running Debian and I have FreeBSD test machines running the same software. FreeBSD uses less resources (exact same HW), tends to be slightly faster, and is arguably easier to admin on a daily basis. Let's not even mention ZFS, which is remarkable in its own right. I'm impressed. I once ran an OpenBSD pf firewall that supported almost 200 users on some seruously underpowered HW. This thing's load average was always ridiculously low. Ditto FreeBSD now. What will cause the Debain machines to peak out sometimes, FreeBSD doesn't seem to notice. Interesting and a bit impressive.

_delirium11y ago

I also like both FreeBSD and Debian (have no real experience with the others). But on performance it varies a lot by workload. To take two examples: over the years at any given point in time, FreeBSD has had a better networking stack than Linux, but worse scalability to large numbers of cores. Though there is some ongoing sponsored work on the latter [1,2].

[1] http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/freebsd-foundation-and-ix...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8123512

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