FreeBSD has the pkg package manager. There is also a ports system if you want to build from source.

There's no shortage of info or places to seek help about BSDs on the net, FreeBSD has an active forum at https://forums.freebsd.org

Note that those two are not really disjoint - packages are built from ports; ports are a bit like source packages in the Linux world.

deb/rpm source packages are a bit weird.

AUR and Gentoo Portage are very closely inspired by Ports though.

The only resource you need is here:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/

This is the first and only resource you have to hit when the question is: "how do I do that in FreeBSD?"

Section 4. answers your second question.

There is no less information about BSD than "Linux", it is simply that BSD has no advertisement or companies behind pushing it...

The handbook is also part of the 'refreshing' part of using this system. Lots of documentation even for the more obscure parts (not saying that package management is obscure though)

"There is no less information about BSD than "Linux", it is simply that BSD has no advertisement or companies behind pushing it.."

Which is ironic since huge companies like netflix, sony, citrix, netapp and others make appliances based on FreeBSD and contribute a ton of code (Note, i am not at all disagreeing with your statement, i just find it ironic).

IX Systems does push behind it a lot and does advertise it: https://www.ixsystems.com

I have heard people complain because the handbook needs updating in some areas, but to be fair it is an open source handbook and people can make submissions to help make it better.

Maybe I am wrong, but as far as I remember IXsystems is pushing TrueOS and some other appliances like FreeNas.

My point was simply aiming to underline that there is no analogue of RHEL or Centos in the BSD world. If you decide to endorse BSD you know you are on your own and you have to contribute to the project. The BSD license seems a bit more appealing to this huge giants than the GNU one. Fixing bugs and contributing to the code base is the reason why I love the project.

For purely educational reasons you can learn more in 5 minutes using BSD, than in 10 years with Ubuntu (what is it that one learns with Ubuntu actually?).

The handbook is just awesome. If people complain about it, it is just because they never looked at how documentation is written in the average in computer science (is software documented at all?).

bsd is a family of operating systems, not one. I'm going to answer based on FreeBSD, the system I have more experience with.

1) yes it does, both as source and as binaries (and the same for the base system itself) 2) not sure what you mean, but... (see next answer) 3) https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ and the man pages. Back in 2000s, the FreeBSD handbook was the best documentation for unix based systems. I could bet a fiver this is still the case.

As others mention there is PKG (and ports).

The important thing is however that even though there might be less info it is much more consistent! It is even so old fashioned that you can work without Internet how-to's - it is all there in the "man" pages.

1) https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gfctgb1mfM

It has something, but nowhere near apt/yum. Troubleshooting is fine, it's a good OS with a great range of tools at your disposal.

To be fair, there is very little difference between Linux and BSDs these days, and the choice between them is mostly the matter of personal preference. Yes, Linux is more popular and enjoys somewhat better support by third-party vendors (which could in some cases be limited to a small set of distributions), which is why it is usually a safe choice; otherwise there not much reason to choose one over another.

FreeBSD is an entire operating system. Linux is just a kernel used in hundreds of different distros. It is correct that they are both UNIX like derivatives. FreeBSD is based on the BSD license, Linux on the GPL (this is important if you want to make something proprietary, like the PS4).

Most major Linux distros have different package managers and you download binary updates. They supply their own kernel with backports and custom compiled to stay in sync with the rest of their userland. In FreeBSD the kernel and userland are in sync so you dont have this issue.

Linux has better driver support due to more exposure to hardware.

You can go one for quite a while about how different they are, so they are very different. But you are right it is user preference.

(I excluded systemd and init to avoid a holy war)

> In FreeBSD the kernel and userland are in sync so you dont have this issue.

This is true for the base system, but not necessarily true for ports / pkg. You can end up with an inconsistent pkg collection, unfortunately.

Of course, but this is true for any OS. Some random freeware you download isn't magically going to be in sync with your release of Windows, either.

In FreeBSD at least there is a real, fully-featured, usable OS out of the box, all consistent, in one source tree at /usr/src which is quite easy to read, change, and build. Unlike most GNU/Linux distros where each random thing like "grep" is its own package developed by its own separate group of people.

Allow me to clarify: the way FreeBSD ports are built, updated, and pushed to mirrors means that ABI compatibility may sneak in accidentally and that updating subsets of your installed package base is unreliable and may introduce, e.g., applications that depend on missing SONAMEs.

Linux distros avoid this problem by separating the process of committing to an individual port/source package; building that individual package, and possibly rebuilding dependencies; and pushing out updates, which are atomic and can contain an updated library and all of its dependencies. My experience is that Linux package managers (dnf/rpm anyway) are better at catching operations that would introduce broken ABIs, as well.

In contrast, the FreeBSD ports model is to invoke poudriere periodically and rebuild all ports at once, then push the entire set out to mirrors. There is no automation that checks for ABI changes in libraries, and pkg(1) does not do a great job of confirming that a library upgrade does not break installed programs (or other libraries) via SONAME bump; much less symbol changes not reflected in SONAME.

Sure, but you would never run into having the wrong version of ifconfig, because it's not distributed through ports, it's in in the same repo as the kernel, so they are distributed together.

Yep, I believe that is consistent with my earlier comment :-).

What is awesome with FreeBSD is when you can do a

rm -Rf /var/db/pkg/* /usr/local/* /usr/ports/distfiles/*

reboot the system and all the non OS packages (installed via ports and packages) are gone and you can start over (reboot is probably optional).

> Linux is just a kernel

Well, this mantra is really getting old - because when people say "Linux" they almost never talk about Linux-the-kernel. Which is also why, for instance, nobody calls Android "Linux", but when referring to Ubuntu, Slackware, etc., they do.

You are misunderstanding. It actually makes a huge difference.

Let's compare apples to apples: Ubuntu vs. FreeBSD.

In Ubuntu there is a kernel made by one group (the Linux project), a bunch of userland tools and C compiler made by another group (the GNU project), desktop environment made by the GNOME project, etc. etc.

Whereas FreeBSD is just FreeBSD. It is one project, in one source tree, maintained by one group of people. (The biggest exception to this is the C compiler -- it is a third-party project which gets imported into the main tree. But that's a minor thing compared to Ubuntu which does this for everything.)

That's not really the best of examples because the C compiler and desktop environments are not part of FreeBSD's base system, let alone developed by FreeBSD devs. In that regard Ubuntu and FreeBSD are similar.

I'd have probably gone with init daemons, ABIs and other core systems. Maybe mention how some of the base CLI tools differ (eg GNU has slightly different flags and rules for ordering them for `cp`, `find`, `ps`, etc).

FreeBSD is a bit of a gateway drug in that it's the most like GNU of all the BSDs. Had you use OpenBSD as your point of comparison then the differences would have been easier to describe. But ultimately you're always going to get some cross-pollination across all the POSIX platforms (eg GNU/Linux uses OpenBSD's OpenSSH; FreeBSD has a bunch of GNU tools; and all of the above platforms will run most DEs, Apache projects, etc). That's a good thing though - it was the point of POSIX.

I just wish there wasn't so many differences with syscalls - but that's moan about a very specific problem I'm having on a current hobby project.

The C compiler is in fact part of the FreeBSD base system (if it weren't, you would need to install a port just to update from source. You don't.) You are right that it's one of the few pieces that is developed outside the project (and periodically imported into the tree).

It is, on the other hand, fully supported. Bugs in the C compiler are considered bugs in the OS and will be fixed.

I don't need a desktop environment or care about having one, so it not being part of the core OS doesn't bother me.

I'll copy-and-paste my thoughts on why I like FreeBSD from an earlier comment I made:

"Every one I have used installs the source code to the entire OS in /usr/src and make it very easy to change and recompile the system. On the BSDs I mentioned, if you don't understand how something works or you want to fix some bug, it's usually pretty easy to go find the source code, read it and learn how it works, and fix it. On most Linux-based OSs you would have to go figure out which random organization makes the component that has a bug (Linux project for the kernel, GNU for a lot of utilities, zillions of others for everything else), figure out how to download and build the source and install it into your distro (which is probably totally unsupported since your distro will expect to be using RPMs or DEBs rather than random stuff installed from tarballs...)

This is the most salient feature of the modern pc BSDs to me. It's impossible to describe how different it feels to be truly in control of your system and understand/change it however you want."

Preaching to the choir there; im a fully paid up FreeBSD contributor and use it on several personal systems. It’s a great platform to use :)

The reason I brought the DE into the equation was simply because it was being compared against Ubuntu. I don’t really think Ubuntu is the best case study there either to be honest but I’m just following on from the post that preceded me.

> the C compiler

Or any desktop environment, for that matter, or much of everything else of any importance for the end user.

This is literally what I just said. Including the desktop environment example.

How much have you used {Free,Open,Net}BSD? I find the experience to be completely different from that of using any of the Linux distros I've tried, and I'm wondering what you find similar about them...

Slakware historically has been closest to a BSD feel of the Linux distros

Maybe the init system in the 90's was similar when Slack was compared to contemporary Linux distros. There is very little modern resemblance. I wish this perception would go away. Spend a day with both and I'd put money on an honest person never making this claim again.

Late in reply - I switched off from Slack to FreeBSD around 2006. Perhaps things have changed, but Slackware generally followed the BSD conventions of what goes where as opposed to say RedHat.

> completely different

No way.