FreeBSD is an amazing operating system. I've started to use it with the 13.0 release and it never fails to impress me.

Everything is very well-documented, you get a fairly clean centralization of configuration, non-base OS software is installed by default in /usr/local while giving you the option to move it elsewhere if you so desire. 3rd party software config doesn't get intermixed with the OS.

It's similar on the surface to Linux but you can really feel the totally different DNA it's composed of. Well worth looking over.

Yes, it's great. I can't wait to update my 11.4 systems to 12.3.

Just make sure you use ZFS as a file system if you have enough memory because the tooling is great and you can resize or reconfigure your storage more easily, or mount it in Linux with ZoL. I recently had to relocate and grow a UFS partition on a VM and it was a bit of a pain compared to ext4 and gparted. Had to grow the qcow2 disk image, make another slice (partition) at the end, dump /usr onto that, remove the original /usr slice to make room to grow /var, create a new /usr, restore onto it, delete the partition that held the dump, grow the new /usr to fill up the empty space. With ZFS, the BSD slices holding UFS filesystems becone ZFS datasets, you have the full zpool free space available on all of them, just like when using a single partition, but it can also span multiple disks.

Not exactly their fault but given up using FreeBSD when they cannot support docker properly for quite a while.

I have plenty of containers that I'd like to use but there's no way to do it in FreeBSD.

Besides, I don't see benefit of using it over Linux except to learn and keep up with the difference between the two.

There are jails. I use both Linux (since 1.2.13) and FreeBSD (since 4.0), there are not much differences to keep up in FreeBSD, rather than between Linux distributions and new vs. old versions of these distributions. FreeBSD has always been consistent and there's no hype driven change occuring, breaking things up and always creating annoyances for the grumpy sysadmin.

I'm not talking about the inability to use virtualization.

Not being able to use the docker container ecosystem is just making me give up.

Any differences between system versions is up to you to learn but having no access to third party resources isn't anything you can get around with.

Docker is a Linux thing (cgroups, overlay fs etc). On Mac and Windows it's emulated using Linux VMs and of course it thus runs like crap on older hardware. Just keep using Linux if you need Docker or Podman. There's also a proof of concept implementation of OCI on FreeBSD called runj, but it's incomplete due to the fact that OCI relies on Linuxisms.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Und...

Started with 9.x here (I don't remember which 'x'), and I agree wholeheartedly.

I use it both as a desktop and on my personal servers (most of them). Also used it in professional capacity in the past.

I upgraded from 12.2 today. Flawless. Once 13.1 is out, I'll jump a full version.

FreeBSD, and the BSDs generally, are such gems. I use Linux for work every day (mostly Debian based), and that's all good. And almost 100% of that is working on Linux from a Windows device (WSL and/or SSH remote).

When I SSH into my FreeBSD ZFS server, or my OpenBSD router, it feels so clean and pure. A joy.

Congratulations to the team. 5.0'er here.

FBSD is like Arch for grownups, or Alpine if it was more complete.

Modern tech, minimal packaging. If we could get a NixOS style declarative model in here (beyond rc.conf) I'd be in heaven.

Hey can you please explain more on "FBSD is like Arch for grownups". I'd love to move to FBSD from Arch if it is actually a better system.

It's a much simpler system, (and I like arch). Instead of aur you have ports, which is the same system that powers the pkg system (pacman equivalent).

SystemD is no where to be seen. Much configuration can be specified in a few simple startup files. Jails offer in built container functionality. Bhyve does virt. Zfs is native. A fresh install uses about 100mb of ram.

New releases have detailed engineering release timeliness and processes, and release notes.

There's a great handbook (though arch wiki is probably better. Brittanica vs Wikipedia sort of thing)

I really like FreeBSD. I would very much like to run it on one of my laptops, but wireless NIC driver support has been an issue, so I'm currently running OpenBSD on one instead. Next time I buy a laptop, I'll probably buy one that can run FreeBSD.