# What I like about FreeBSD.



## bsd_newbie (Mar 17, 2009)

I have been doing user and kernel level development in freebsd for sometime now. One thing I like about FreeBSD is that there is no "Hero Worship" in freebsd unlike Linux. Even though Linus torvalds is quite a terrific individual and I got motivated to do operating systems from Linux but I did notice hero worship attitude and kind of geek mentality of linux people where people try to show off how much better they are in intelligence and technical knowledge from other people. FreeBSD people seem more level headed and tend not to wear their knowledge on their sleeve.

Your thoughts welcome.


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## tobe (Mar 17, 2009)

When you're attending a coding party and a guy come and see you're running Xfce4, and say "cool you're running linux windoz sucks",  you just have to say "Well no, it's FreeBSD, sorry" and the guy run away and you can focus on your work 

just kidding


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## roddierod (Mar 17, 2009)

tobe said:
			
		

> When you're attending a coding party



What the heck is a coding party? Either I'm too old or not geeky enough to know about this.


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## tobe (Mar 17, 2009)

Aka demo party, you're probably not too old, but maybe not geeky enough  It was european centric until recently, see http://www.demoparty.us for US events.


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## roddierod (Mar 17, 2009)

Oh...being that I read the demo comp and old school demo comp a few times and still have no idea what exactly the demo is...I guess I'm not geeky enough. But I'm guessing it has something to do with graphic programming...


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## tobe (Mar 17, 2009)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene


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## fronclynne (Mar 18, 2009)

I used to worship Ricardo Montalban, but I guess he never wrote a driver except to say, "Thanks for the smooth ride.  Also, that part of East St. Louis is very . . . interesting."


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## osx-addict (Mar 26, 2009)

One of the reasons I like it is the fit-n-finish of the product.. Linux (every version I've tried) has the feel of a cobbled up pile of 'stuff' somehow glued together to work in some fashion.. While it does work and can be stable (I ran FedoraCore 6 for ~3-4 years with very high up-times), FreeBSD shines specifically in the following areas :


Package system - FC6 used 'yum' which stinks IMHO -- slow clunky, etc.  The FreeBSD stuff allows you to build locally or get a prebuilt package with the latest security fixes applied.  This is doubly true for dependencies.. I installed Gnome2 the other night without already having X11 installed -- sure it took a while to load all of the dependencies but it WORKED!
coherency in the installation of packages -- if something is not part of the base it usually lives in /usr/local.  In FC6 (and most other Linux variants) each RPM would install wherever the package maintainer wanted it to which led to stuff being all over the place
Jails -- Jails are very slick!  They do have limitations such as not really supporting some things like multiple PostgreSQL installations (IPC issues abound)
What appears to be a better thought out security model than what I was using in FC6 (SELinux) which was difficult to understand let alone make function properly
File system snapshots -- EXTREMELY SLICK!!! We use big $$$$ NetApp appliances at work to hold multi terrabyte disk farms and the NetApps have ".snapshot" hidden directories everywhere and inside are hourly/nightly snapshots of that directory's contents.. This feature is indispensable if you ever accidentally nuke something.  Having something like this in FreeBSD is super slick!  I've not yet set this up but it sounds about as close as you can get to what the big $$ Netapps do..
Oh yeah -- packages that just work.. The amount of wasted time spent trying to get Linux packages installed and functioning was all over the map -- some were easy some not so much.  The FreeBSD stuff seems to behave fine from the get-go as you'd expect from a more polished product.

I think that's about it for now..


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## SirDice (Mar 26, 2009)

osx-addict said:
			
		

> Linux (every version I've tried) has the feel of a cobbled up pile of 'stuff' somehow glued together to work in some fashion..


That's the exact reason why I never liked anything linux. Linux is a kernel and a collection of tools and libraries, nothing more. There's no such thing as a Linux OS.


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## Brandybuck (Mar 27, 2009)

SirDice said:
			
		

> There's no such thing as a Linux OS.



Or as RMS would say, "There's no such thing as a GNU/Linux OS". :e


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