alt Hacker NewsMy home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though).
I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly.
Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need help).
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> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it in `/etc/` over every other system.
This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.
ZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5 array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I was sold after that. These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart.
The ZFS implementation is less buggy.
>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
ZFS boot environments.
One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself.
The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your immutable boot images the same way you can treat your mutable data like how you can with ZFS datasets on FreeBSD.
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything).
Stability of user interface and documentation.
My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000.
The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.
> I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly.
I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option or continued to use the sets?
FreeBsd is Systemd free.
There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD.
For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has.
I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server.
Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better.
So while there are more hardware devices that have better support in Linux than in FreeBSD, there are also devices with better support in FreeBSD than in Linux.
However the main reason why I use FreeBSD on many of my servers is that I need much less time for their administration than for Linux servers. In my experience, Linux servers need much less time for administration than Windows servers, and FreeBSD compares to Linux like Linux to Windows.
I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.