Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

I don't know anymore why it is a question why you use FreeBSD.

Systemd and Ubuntu are really more than the sum of their parts. In a bad way.

Out-of-memory kill. OK.

Don't think that `dmesg` has any information about the OOM situation, or even that one happened in the first place. Mind you, `dmesg` is clogged up with all kinds of garbage from systemd that doesn't belong there, starting with lots of error messages from the snap mechanism. I have no snaps installed. And the installation is less than 24 hours old, why is snap already spewing error messages?

/var/log/syslog has the OOM info. It also tells you that systemd has Taken Over(tm) the duties of picking the processes to kill. Note plural, it killed a whole group, although only one of them was big. And worst of all, it killed the (small) tmux process around the failed build. So I can't see how far it made it and which part blew up memory. I don't recall the old in-kernel OOM killer being this stupid.
 
I get tons of OOM process killed errors when I try to compile Firefox or Chromium on a system with 8 GB of RAM. But recently, that did improve, and now even LLVM compiles with 8 GB of RAM...
 
astyle said:
I get tons of OOM process killed errors when I try to compile Firefox or Chromium on a system with 8 GB of RAM. But recently, that did improve, and now even LLVM compiles with 8 GB of RAM...
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Try turning on LLVM's debug build :)

How many cores/hardwarethreads do you have?
 
Update on my current status with FreeBSD...

As I mentioned previously, I tried to get a desktop working on each new release of FreeBSD for about 10 years. I always ran into some weird error that I didn't have enough FreeBSD knowledge to fix. But two things happened: the installation got easier, and I discovered the FreeBSD Forums. That helped immensely, especially with the weird quirks that some of the small computers have. The other day I installed FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE with lightdm and xfce on a Kamrui fanless computer. It took about an hour or two this time. When I was done, I reinstalled FreeBSD without xorg, lightdm, and xfce, because I really don't need a desktop on this machine. (The Kamrui computer does not like it if you switch the monitor to another input, and will not talk to you when you switch back, so unless I want another monitor on my desk, I can't use it that way. So now I just ssh into it, and everything is good.)
 
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I've started with FreeBSD 3.x long ago.

As a freelancer switched completely FreeBSD on my Server, WiFI-Access-Point, Firewall, and Workstation about 12 Years ago. I had no trouble working as Freelancer in the Content-Creating-Business with FreeBSD.

My latest Project are running Windows10 and 11 on bhyve and Jailing Services and Programs in Bastille jails.

I run a podcast for more than 10 years now, and since 3 years I run a small Streaming Radio-Show once a month for my family and friends.

So, I can say FreeBSD is the most versatile OS I have ever used. I'm happy using it for years, now.
 
Hello everyone,

New to the forums and thought I'd make an intro post in addition to asking my question about my RISCV board.

I first was introduced to FreeBSD in 2000 (or thereabouts, I think it was 4.3 or 4.4 was the release). I had tried to use (slackware) linux about 4 years prior and it was kind of a disaster. I mentioned in a programming group that I was toying with trying another linux install and someone said "why not try FreeBSD?". Looked into it and decided to give it a go. The fact that it installed first try including X got me hooked. I also had a dec alpha machine that I put freebsd on without any issues whatsoever. It was such a positive experience I stuck with it for a few years. I've played with it on and off ever since even though my job migrated me out of IS/IT and into quality but its always something I enjoyed.

Now with the current landscape and how well the handbook has matured, I am making an earnest effort to make FreeBSD my daily driver again outside of gaming. Have a bunch of older hardware I'm going to use to get re-acquainted. The goal is to have a comprehensive FreeBSD skill set again by October 2025 as my knowledge has atrophied.
 
Long time Linux user, since 2001 and experienced sysadmin, although nowadays I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t like the direction Linux is going. It has become too mainstream, too enterprise oriented, too complex.

Everything is now systemd and containers.

The focus is in doing rather than understanding. Nobody cares about that anymore.

That’s why now I prefer FreeBSD and OpenBSD. A powerful and flexible system yet simple enough that you can understand everything if you choose to. It is also predictable, sane, coherent. The more I learn and use it the more I like it.
 
I have been lurking around these forums for a while now, and I have a collection of computers that I use for running various OSes on bare metal, and of course one of them had to have FreeBSD. Over some time, I came to love FreeBSD for pretty much the same reasons everyone else does.
 
Why I love open source

For reasons having to do with travel, I need to change my daily driver from my FreeBSD machine to a Windows laptop for at least a few months. Since all my applications are open source, I just install the Windows versions on the laptop and I am good. For command-line utilities, I can run them under Linux using Windows Subsystem for Linux. Although I would rather be using FreeBSD, I can put up with this situation for as long as necessary.

This is how computing should be: the OS helps you do your job, without trying to take center stage.

And in case you are wondering, I did think of putting FreeBSD on the laptop, but laptop support can be iffy sometimes, and I will not have time to debug it while I am traveling.
 
As an IT professional I have been using Unix since the late 90s mostly as a programmer deploying code not as an admin. For a decade now I am less technical and more on the management side. I love open source and used Linux as my daily driver since 2005. I was a distro hopper as none would really work for me and usually switched after a botched upgrade required a reinstall. The last straw was a bug in the mainline Linux kernel which kept causing random crashes without any means of logging so I was looking for alternatives. Really happy that I tried FreeBSD - I wish I had done it sooner.

I was looking for a stable OS not the latest and greatest software with lots of changes. Looks like I have found it here. No systemd is a big plus too :) I'm learning about ZFS and it has lots of functionality that ext2/3/4 doesn't have.

Freebsd has a package manager that actually works ! I use IceWM as a daily driver but like to try out KDE or other DEs from time to time. In many Linux package managers you can install a 'meta' package but have to manually uninstall the many packages individually. So I am reluctant to try them. With pkg I can actually uninstall them cleanly so I will play around with DEs more often to see who they progress.
 
cracauer@ said:
I don't know anymore why it is a question why you use FreeBSD.

Systemd and Ubuntu are really more than the sum of their parts. In a bad way.

Out-of-memory kill. OK.

Don't think that `dmesg` has any information about the OOM situation, or even that one happened in the first place. Mind you, `dmesg` is clogged up with all kinds of garbage from systemd that doesn't belong there, starting with lots of error messages from the snap mechanism. I have no snaps installed. And the installation is less than 24 hours old, why is snap already spewing error messages?

/var/log/syslog has the OOM info. It also tells you that systemd has Taken Over(tm) the duties of picking the processes to kill. Note plural, it killed a whole group, although only one of them was big. And worst of all, it killed the (small) tmux process around the failed build. So I can't see how far it made it and which part blew up memory. I don't recall the old in-kernel OOM killer being this stupid.
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Well said.
 
aji_pineapple said:
With pkg I can actually uninstall them cleanly
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Sorry to be a wet towel in that regard, but FreeBSD has the exact same dependency hell issues as Linux does. An upgrade of just about anything in FreeBSD still means a complete system reinstall. I like FreeBSD because it doesn't change things at the drop of a hat like some distros do. An example that I like to point to - FreeBSD still has ifconfig, while most Linux distros have switched toip... and FreeBSD was first on the scene with ZFS, which solved a LOT of reinstallation headaches for me. In the meantime, Linux distros twist themselves into incomprehensible pretzels over incompatible licensing of useful components and ridiculous license politics. Some of that is unavoidable human nonsense that reminds you that there's no such thing as free lunch.
 
astyle said:
Sorry to be a wet towel in that regard, but FreeBSD has the exact same dependency hell issues as Linux does. An upgrade of just about anything in FreeBSD still means a complete system reinstall.
Click to expand...

What can I say ? I managed to uninstall KDE packages which I couldn't do with Arch or OpenSUSE.

ZFS snapshots and ability to send and receive them are a lifesaver. After all these years of distro hopping I always save the history of commands used for installation and config just in case I have to reinstall.
 
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aji_pineapple said:
What can I say ? I managed to uninstall KDE packages which I couldn't do with Arch or OpenSUSE.
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Well, www/firefox is one of those baked-in dependencies that do get removed if you try to remove nearly anything. There are complaints on these Forums about that. It's like this: Yeah, you can remove it - if you don't mind Firefox being gone as a result. This is especially bad with pre-compiled packages. The corresponding ports (which you do have to compile yourself) seem better-behaved in this regard on FreeBSD.
 
cracauer@ said:
No matter how much dependency hell you get in packages, the base system stays intact. In FreeBSD. Not in Linux.
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Indeed. That feature is coming with PkgBase ;)

If you consider just packages, astyle still has a point though that so much software intermingles its dependencies terribly. But that is the nature of lazy and open-source software rather than any specific OS. On OpenBSD for example I hacked together pkg_bundle for this reason. I prefer self-contained directories in /opt, similar to the *old* Mac OS X days. An update to one software doesn't screw with another.
 
kpedersen said:
Indeed. That feature is coming with PkgBase ;)
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No. Base system packages aren't going to suddenly get dependencies on ports packages. Whether the base system is distributed as .txz sets or as .pkg packages doesn't change the fact that base and ports are separate entities.

aji_pineapple said:
What can I say ? I managed to uninstall KDE packages which I couldn't do with Arch or OpenSUSE.
Click to expand...
So you enjoy pkg autoremove. Me too. But many Linux package managers offer a similar mechanism, actually: apt autoremove, dnf autoremove, xbps-remove -o... and while openSUSE's zypper indeed doesn't have an equivalent command, it's still easy to remove orphans from YaST (DM me if you want more information).

That being said, welcome!
 
bsduck said:
No. Base system packages aren't going to suddenly get dependencies on ports packages. Whether the base system is distributed as .txz sets or as .pkg packages doesn't change the fact that base and ports are separate entities.
Click to expand...
Not immediately, but I strongly suspect it will happen eventually. It will probably creep in first as optional dependencies. I.e a build of su with additional pam plugins support or bsdinstall with libdrm linked against for graphics.

Plus the constant PkgBase micro-updates will certainly affect the packages needing updating since the base will now be considerably more volatile and less "fixed".
 
Trouble with packages is that they still depend on OS-level ABI. This has been ameliorated to an extent by requiring that packages be compatible with at least the major version (like 13-RELEASE vs 14.0-RELEASE vs 15-CURRENT). Thing is: just making sure that packages on your end are up-to-date - that is a pretty big time-draining chore that is difficult to automate.

Case in point: I installed up-to-date Firefox when I installed a freshly released 13.2-RELEASE. I was highly reluctant to upgrade FF with packages because I knew it would pull in a ton of other dependencies that would break other system components. I wanted those other components left alone! Eventually, Firefox itself started to complain that it's out of date. I tried to update via pkg. No go, it still insisted on pulling in dependencies that would break the rest of the system and make me spend a lot of time sifting through the train wreck. Compiling from ports was also a no-go - it insisted on a more recent version of Rust.

And I don't trust the pkg commands that try to do the whole thing in one go - there's gonna be something broken, and it will bite me at a bad time. I can tell, cracauer@ is gonna protest and say that chances of that are minimal - such arguments only apply to bare systems, these Forums provide plenty of evidence that blindly running those big-blanket pkg commands do you no good.

Sifting through a train wreck only makes matters worse overall, and destroys the system further. Sure, you can learn how the stuff is put together. But - I don't buy a car so that I can mess with the engine and learn about it, I buy a car so that I can go places... FreeBSD is like that to me.
 
bsduck said:
That's not any different from keeping the base system up to date with freebsd-update.
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Currently when doing a freebsd-update it is expected that packages won't need to change. However if it is all part of this amorphous package system, the mindset will likely change and updating i.e base zlib could suddenly start to affect almost everything.

The thinking will be "why do we need two zlibs packages? One that we use in base that is older, one that is latest. Lets just have one and depend all packages on that". Yes, technically this will be a "good idea". But in practice, it ends up making everything too darn changeable and Linux-like (read: horrible).
 
bsduck said:
No. Base system packages aren't going to suddenly get dependencies on ports packages.
Click to expand...
Did you know that dependency hell arises due to the direction in which dependencies go? This is where it's helpful to be familiar with DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) theory. If you have a base.pkg package that pulls in and installs base.txz, that's fine. Trouble would happen if a package in userland suddenly starts requiring base.pkg as a dependency. Going the other way, I just don't see base.pkg requiring some userland package as a dependency. Analysis of that logic is left as an exercise for bsduck and other readers.
 
Hello!

Using BSD is much more fun. It's stable and you need to tinker your box, compile stuff and fine tune it to make it work. What do you get ? You know what is going on with your operating system. With Linux too much crap is installed by default, I don't like deb packaging system (much prefer rpm in the linux world) but I dont feel I know what I'm doing.. BSD is simple and clean.
 
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