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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • It’s not necessarily better, some things are a personal preference. Though some might be able to list some technical pros and cons.

    Some things I appreciate are:

    • base systems and packages are completely separate. Packages and their configuration goes in /usr/local/ No where else. (Thought they might write to /var/ )
    • bsd init, not systemd. Feels more home to me as a late 90s slackware user.
    • first class zfs support. Linux has caught up lately, especially now that there is a shared zfs codebase for both Linux and FreeBSD. When I switched to FreeBSD on my home server ~10 years ago that wasn’t the case.




  • Very possible and even probable that they’re using some chrome specific behaviour. Just like back in late 90s early noughts when so many websites were IE specific making is impossible to use without a windows installation. The effect is though that unfortunately Firefox isn’t usable everywhere. Sometimes you need chrome for some specific websites. This is especially true for some self hosted “enterprise” web apps, I need chrome for one of those too.





  • After a hiatus in Mac and windows land, I came back into Linux a with similar wishlist.

    It’s quite a diversion, but I actually went with FreeBSD. Now it’s not Linux but with the separation of base system and packages, you get a stable base that is released at a pretty fixed consistent schedule.

    For packages you can pick from quarterly or weekly update schedule, so you can have a stable base OS with bleeding edge software. The binary package manager is easy to use, but if you want more control you can opt for building from source as well.

    The init system is BSD based so all main config goes into a single rc.conf file, very easy to understand and work with.

    Most mainstream applications such as Firefox, postgresql, nginx etc are just a pkg install away and it natively supports zfs (even as root fs) which was one of the reasons I got really interested in it 10 years ago.

    Of course, there is software, especially some younger projects that don’t support FreeBSD. So while there are thousands of packages available, some Linux only applications won’t work.

    Personally, I would pick FreeBSD any time that the software I require supports it. I only run Linux (settled on pop is for now) if the software I need requires it.