FreeBSD

“the FreeBSD Foundation has spent a lot of money in the last couple of years on improving Wifi, drivers, power management”

“I've been using FreeBSD since 1996, both commercially and as a hobbyist. These days, I always use RELEASE and apply patches with freebsd-update.”

“FreeBSD has one of the best package bases of all open source operating systems including all the Linux distributions.”

“I continue to use FreeBSD on some servers, where maximum reliability and maximum simplicity in management is more important.”

“Mostly freebsd is simpler and more consistent; having the whole operating system in a single place means that the documentation is better”

“FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux.”

“It has a few more hiccups and rough edges than on Linux (at least from my PoV on running it on an older laptop) but otherwise it works fine.”

“it has not historically been a very pleasant experience, hence this recent push to bring it into parity with Linux from the 2010s”

“I can no longer rely on FreeBSD, literally the 2nd open OS with most hardware support, on supporting basic hardware (!) from this decade”

“I like the simplicity from FreeBSD, this simplicity also comes specifically because there's less contributions.”

“it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way”

“I have to thank Linux Developer Resource CD-ROM sets, FreeBSD CD-ROM sets, etc. to make me a Unix fan, a programmer and technically literate.”

“we too had some issues. I don't remember the exact details, but our sysadmin at the time had to do a bunch of work to get it fixed.”

“there aren't all that many kernel updates, so if you keep your services patched then you really only need to reboot about every 6 months”

“FreeBSD has a dedicated service for USB cameras, webcamd, and it worked very well for capturing video and audio at maximum resolution”

“FreeBSD instilled that mindset in a generation of developers that now pushes back hard against cloud-everything SaaS.”

“Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.”

“Yes, FreeBSD current is quite usable. It's fun to start using the new features as they are added to kernel and userland immediately”

“I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.”

“At least FreeBSD, NetBSD (OpenBSD not by design, but that's understandable because of security) have their compat libraries on”

“FreeBSD doesn't have support for CUDA, many third party network fabrics and accelerators, Lustre, and other high performance storage solutions.”

“I continue to use FreeBSD for many servers that implement various kinds of networking or storage functions, due to exceptional reliability and simplicity of management.”

“FreeBSD and Linux give me more control over my daily experience, but at the cost of way more time debugging and administration.”

“I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux.”

“Best feature of freebsd. I have really messed up the system and successfully restored a boot environment snapshot and everything is fine after.”

“For me it's the complete package though that comes with FreeBSD, and everything being documented in the man pages and the handbook.”

“I use FreeBSD on various servers with networking or storage functions, where I value most to have the highest reliability and the simplest administration.”

“what mainstream users want (everything decided on by a vendor) is completely contrary to what FreeBSD stands for and what I want”

“I was mucking around with FreeBSD on my old laptop and it works well and it isn't too bad to get stuff going if you are following the handbook”

“Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools.”

“what killed it for me was lack of (or too complicated for me) support for multiple monitors via a docking station using DisplayLink”

“This is one of my favorite things about FreeBSD, I love being able to take a snapshot of my system before doing an update.”

“Superb, in-house maintained documentation, light, elegant out-of-the-box options and solutions and the ports/AUR power.”

“It seems pretty nice, but it never gets the attention Linux gets and the hardware support situation is sorta sad.”

“One thing FreeBSD's installer does not do a good job with that's very relevant for laptop usage is any automatic setup of hardware-specific kernel modules.”

“Solaris and FreeBSD had significantly better implementations of the containerisation/isolation piece from a technical standpoint.”

“when a system update requires compiling a large thing, 95% of the time it will break the internal LAN's network interface”

“memory allocator, scheduler, network stack, kqueue, dtrace and other instrumentation are all superior than the Linux counterparts”

“Working with the BSDs is just delightful in how wanting to do something turns into something working with ease.”

“One reason is the stellar ZFS support, but the simple fun of doing stuff differently is definitely a thing, too.”