For nearly 15 years, FreeBSD has been at the core of my personal infrastructure, and my passion for it has only grown over time. As a die-hard fan, I’ve stuck with BSD-based systems because they continue to deliver exactly what I need—storage, networking, and security—without missing a beat. The features I initially fell in love with, like ZFS, jails, and pf, are still rock-solid and irreplaceable. There’s no need to overhaul them, and in many ways, that reliability is what keeps me hooked. My scripts from 20 years ago still work, and that’s a rare kind of stability that few platforms can boast.
It’s not just me, either—big names like Netflix, Microsoft, and NetApp, alongside companies like Tailscale and AMD, continue to support FreeBSD, further reinforcing my belief in its strength and longevity (you can find the donators and sponsors right here). Yet, while this familiarity is comforting, it’s becoming clear that FreeBSD must evolve to keep pace with the modern landscape of computing.
↫ gyptazy
It’s good to read so many articles and comments from long-time FreeBSD users and contributors who seem to recognise that there’s a real opportunity for FreeBSD to become more than ‘just’ a solid server operating system. This aligns neatly with FreeBSD itself recognising this, too, and investing in improving the operating system’s support for what are not considered basic laptop features like touchpad gestures and advanced sleep states, among other things.
I’ve long held the belief that the BSDs are far closer to attracting a wider, more general computing-focused audience than even they themselves sometimes seem to think. There’s a real, tangible benefit to the way BSDs are developed and structured – a base system developed by one team – compared to the Linux world, and there’s enough disgruntlement among especially longtime Linux users about things like Wayland and systemd that there’s a pool of potential users to attract that didn’t exist only a few years ago.
If you’re a little unsure about the future of Linux – give one of the BSDs a try. There’s a real chance you’ll love it.
I wish those disgruntled anti-modern Linux people would move to BSD. Like they threaten every three minutes. Except they won’t. No siree. They’ll just keep yapping for decades to come. After a decade of lamenting, they are all still using it and reaping the benefits, but the whine never stops.
On another note, maybe it’s time to take a gander at FreeBSD again. Virtual machines are willing and able. See what the other side is cooking.
It’s been a tradition in the internet, ever since the days of usenet, for technically/scientifically illiterate people to go out of their way to moan about whatever random technology/science being discussed/introduced/etc. The world must know about how displeasing they find systemd! LOL
It’s basically people, who need to make everything about themselves, but can’t contribute anything to the conversation. So negging it is.
Support and help projects like hellosystem. If this project takes off and keeps using FreeBSD as its base, it could be a good alternative to Linux on laptops.
After decades of muscle-memory building in Debian Linux, I started looking into FreeBSD after upgrading Debian, trying to run ifconfig, and getting an error that the command was not found.
Now my whole infrastructure, besides email, is on FreeBSD and the fact that the tooling is way more stable in terms of syntax and APIs allowed me to learn more complex things instead of relearning the basics all the time.
Email is going now. I lost real user emails after keepalived mysteriously crashed and started sending emails to the standby email server. I noticed the problem after seeing that deleted emails were returning to my inbox…
On FreeBSD, I have scripts that keep my servers always updated. I run 5 servers and they are all updated every day within 3 hours of each other. If a service fails after updating, it halts the process on the other servers and I get an email to investigate. Configuration is fully centralized and up to three servers can go down without any outage. Together with lets encrypt, I only need to look at my servers when I want to do freebsd-update or a nextcloud major upgrade. All the network stack is also redundant. Routers with CARP, two switches and LAGG, each server with its own UPS. My dream home lab.
I tried such arrangement with Linux for 10 years and it was never perfect. On FreeBSD, it took a weekend of work and all information was in their handbook.
Ill start spinning up the email service on FreeBSD today, and I am not looking back.
> I tried such arrangement with Linux for 10 years and it was never perfect. On FreeBSD, it took a weekend of work and all information was in their handbook.
You were able to take your 10 years of learnings and layer that on FreeBSD quickly. It was not magic but you’ve found FreeBSD works well for you.
Your comments about your email server, that proble was two fold. Your keepalived problem revealed your standby email server was mis-configured. Simply a rough ride.
You might find this useful in your update script(s):
https://github.com/tux2bsd/freebsd-update-probe
With the mail server, I went the lazy way. I just used mailcow and used their standby server script to keep the standby server updated.
To avoid an outage in my absence, I set keepalived and a supporting script. So what was happening is that the standby server was getting overwritten by the active server, because keepalived removed the IP but all underlying services went running.
I am very upset because after 25 years running servers, it is the first time I lose some actual data. The emails were being overwritten before backup had a chance to kick in.
The first server I had was a NT 4 box when I was 14 years old. It was a Pentium 75 with dial up, then it got DSL. My first IT job, 2 years later, was a full Windows house, so I stayed with Windows for a long time. My friends would VPN-in, get what they needed, disconnect. I subscribed to no-ip at the time. I must be one of their oldest customers!
Went through a single Pentium 500, then a dual Pentium 500 went to Windows 2000, then an IBM xseries 220 with the lovely Tualatin Pentium III with Server 2003.
Then a friend of mine could hook me up with Windows Server licenses, so I had a pair of MicroServers and Windows Server 2012. First 2x N54Ls (so slooow), then 2x Gen 8s. At that time, nextcloud/owncloud stopped officially supporting Windows Server, so I migrated to Debian.
I started running out of space, so I ordered a 8-bay chassis from rack-pc, a SAS card and built my first FreeBSD ZFS Box (with Ivy Bridge Xeon), replacing one of the MicroServers. Then I built a 2nd box, retired the MicroServers, moving the workloads to bhyve and jails. A new provider showed up in my region and, thanks to the magic of competition, both residential carriers offer fixed IPv4 and reverse DNS for very cheap, so I started hosting my own email. This was maybe 3 years ago? At that time, I also went from once-a-week-rsync-and-give-harddrive-to-a-friend to dumping everything in AWS Glacier. The first load was soooooooooo expensive.
From that point, I slowly started moving the services away from Linux to jails and turned the 2 boxes into storage-only units, and installed 3 Ivy Bridge 1U Dells (with fans replaced) running the workloads.
Up to this summer, I still had haproxy and email running under Linux. I moved haproxy to jails in July and I was planning to move away from Mailcow for email in December.
I still have my high school papers in nextcloud, and some very old photos my friends took with Nokia 7650s, as a proud memento for never having lost any data… Until now. =))))))))))))
So, yes, I am a bit upset, and already spinning up my FreeBSD mail env, and having to write people to write me again, because I lost messages =)))
> How can we make FreeBSD more attractive to new users?
Maybe it’s unexpected, but make it more like mobile OSs and macos. We need more granular permissions to periferal functions and some folders and we need separate permissions to some APIs.
Of course, we need good WiFi drivers and native Chrome.
Please don’t. MacOS dock sucks. I prefer Windows taskbar (with tasks not joined).
I prefer dock on the right, as it was in fvwm on my Solaris setup in the last century. But who cares?
You can tune the UI, but you can’t change OS security.
In MacOS you can only change what Tim allows you to change and to what he wants you to change to. MacOS is getting as dumb as iOS by each release, so I don’t know if that is a good idea. Current Windows is as secure as MacOS is.
You are still talking about UI. The UI in Windows sucks.
In macOS, you can create dozens of virtual desktops with bound apps with just a few clicks in Settings, and have a good shell with normal Unix tools. You can even use tmux, just like in any other normal Unix system.
In essence, it’s like Ubuntu, but better. There are also excellent system apps like Little Snitch and iStat that cover everything you don’t have on the system if you want them.
> Current Windows is as secure as MacOS is.
I believe it’s not.
No, MacOS UI sucks. I can do whatever you mention in Windows, either nativelly or with the thouthands of free and not free apps. Of course is as secure as MacOS.
No, you cant’.
WinUI is sucks af, and you know it lol.
But UI is still not the point of our “conversation”.
Played around with a FreeBSD VM a few weeks ago. Took me less than an hour to follow the manual and get a full plasma desktop running on it. It just worked (TM). Not quite ready to go bare metal yet, perhaps when I update my laptop the current one will get it.
That ship has long sailed.
FreeBSD is great for some traditional infrastructure.
It has zero value proposition to the type of users “making it more attractive” would attract. So it is the same cycle they have been in since the 90s.
It’s a great project for people who want a specific type of unix experience. And I am glad for that, I have been deploying it for my local infrastructure for ages.
But it is just too small of a project, in terms of developer team size, to really do much more. Which is why in a lot of aspects it will forever be stuck in a 90s way of doing Unix. And that’s OK.
A robust free desktop OS for business and development use cases maintained in collaboration with hardware providers is dearly needed. I recently experienced frustration trying to log into the Slack snap app on KDE neon, and I eventually gave up trying.
The most common use cases, including essential business features like screen sharing during video calls should just work. I don’t know why Linux can’t offer that experience, but maybe FreeBSD can do it.
The FreeBSD logo is distracting people from using it.
Jokes aside, I was always confronted with Linux’s cron schedules not working. Maybe in FreeBSD fixes this issue.
I would love to run a mail server, apache on *BSD.