Comment by sebazzz
Comment by sebazzz 3 days ago
Is FreeBSD used a lot?
Comment by sebazzz 3 days ago
Is FreeBSD used a lot?
JunOS from Juniper is also based off of FreeBSD (I think they're moving to Linux, though) as (were?) NetApp filers (they made heavy use of the Berkley FFS snapshots back in the day).
FreeBSD was popular for many appliances, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as it was generally rock-solid, had very mature networking, and the legal departments at the time liked the more permissive licence.
It's getting less and less common to see it, though. Sheer market share numbers mean performance, driver support, user familiarity, and companies no longer being afraid of the GPL mean that has Linux pretty much taken over.
It makes me a bit sad, but the OS on most Juniper gear is just a control plane for ASICs nowadays and NetApp has moved on to more advanced filesystems. Finding developers to write drivers/software for Linux is probably an order of magnitude easier.
That’s related to anti-tivolization in GPLv3 and basically Apple is forced to stop shipping things that’s updated to GPLv3. That’s not just about scared, assuming being scared means they are irrational and they could have adopted it if they want. Legally they cannot ship it unless they are changing their business model.
If it hadn't been for the Facebook acquisition, there's a good chance WhatsApp would have continued running on FreeBSD until today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38434103
Most Lenovo Thinkpads WiFis should work out of the box with FreeBSD.
A USB distributions like NomadBSD ( https://www.nomadbsd.org/ ) can be used to test compatibility without installing the OS.
Also, for HW compatibility: https://bsd-hardware.info/
Also framework laptops work (mostly): https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework
Even if true, not having great support for laptops doesn't mean "no one uses FreeBSD". Obviously it's supported by essentially all server hardware and is used there, as well as many routers and the Playstation.
I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop in about a decade (~2016-2017), and I had similar issues. I couldn't get WiFi working even though I thought it should be supported, I couldn't get the laptop brightness controls working, the sound would just randomly cut out, and after a certain point I have to ask myself how much time I am realistically willing to spend on getting this working. I was trying to run it because of Jails and ZFS, but by 2016 Linux containers were generally "ok enough" nowadays, and ZFS On Linux seemed to work ok on Arch after a bit of finagling, and Linux stuff seemed work more consistently.
FreeBSD is pretty neat, don't get me wrong, I have played with it on servers and I ran an OPNsense router for years, so this isn't a dig on the OS as a whole, just that I don't think it's a good fit for laptops, at least the ones I've tried.
My MSI Modern 5, a 2024 laptop works is my perfect daily driver, to the point or closing the lid and reopening it resumes HDMI.
The only issues I have with is Bluetooth which to be fair was trying to connect a Xbox controller and HDMI-Sound, otherwise it all works.
WiFi too. A bit archaic to change SSID but that's more software then hardware.
Couldn't be happier and with ZFS I have on-boot encryption.
Same here, Thinkpad T490 works great and much snappier than Linux.
I am a FreeBSD user. I have replaced Windows with Manjaro for gaming. I also use OpenBSD and wish I could run MacOS in bhyve.
Typically I purchase hardware supported by the software I intend on using. I don’t blame the software or hardware vendors, if I intend to use them in a non-supported way.
I use Fedora on my desktop. Whether Bluetooth works or not depends on the position of Venus. 2026 will be the year of desktop Linux
Not as much as it used to be. Before cloud computing became a thing, if you wanted to squeeze the last bit of performance out of hardware, FreeBSD was the way to go. Yahoo! used it when Yahoo! was the biggest site on the internet. Over time Linux became more performant and ever since it has become the OS of choice for AWS and other cloud provides, FreeBSD's popularity has dropped.
A lot, no. On the desktop it's 0.01% according to one of those stats websites. However it's hard to detect because Firefox identifies itself as running on Linux.
I run it myself on my desktop and it's great. What I like is that it's not constantly changing stuff for the sake of it like with Linux. New init systems, changing ifconfig for other commands etc. And it's much better documented.
I use FreeBSD on my machines because it has netgraph: https://klarasystems.com/articles/inside-freebsd-netgraph-ad...
NetGraph and bHyve are a match made in heaven. I need to master them some more.
I have isolated jails with their own vNics running a nested bHyve VM instance inside which inside you then host a jail with its own vnic.
If something jumps out of the they are dead locked to the VM, if they jump out of that, they're trapped in a jail.
I need a blog post about this. I’m just a desktop user of FreeBSD.
The OS of PS4 and PS5 is apparently based on FreeBSD. Netflix uses FreeBSD for its CDN servers. pfSense and OPNsense are popular firewalls that are based on FreeBSD.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...