BSD can be a better choice for a variety of reasons. Firstly business reasons BSD has more permissive licences than Linux's GNU licence which compels you to share any modifications you make to the software. BSD uses the MIT licenses which state that you are allowed to modify the source code and not release it, which is why most embedded devices like routers/firewalls use BSD over Linux. That and BSD is faster at networking.

It also has better storage (ZFS), although this is now implemented in Linux, it is not as stable as BSD which developed it specifically for their OS.

The typical touted benefit is the native first-party ZFS support.

While the "better" security than Linux argument is weak, the FreeBSD/OpenBSD OS network packet handling is extremely good (common OS for routers etc.) =3

Mine: It's not Linux. Linux feels like a heavy weight. Compiling a kernel is tideous. If a service fails, systemd breaks which a PITA in to fix. "Waiting for X/Y to quit", NetworkManager is archaic.

You have to enable four different repo's just to get the packages required. Debian you're already out of date but that's for security. It's under corporate control. Ubuntu is corporate, anything RedHat is IBM and corporate.

Something else breaks, you try to look online for a Red Hat based distro and the actual answers are hidden behind a paywall on redhat.com.

We have HP machines with 4000RTX which get used for rendering. They get thrashed, to reach TPN requirements I am moving from Windows to Linux. The struggles on a good day to operate with them is insanity. I'm now drinking 2x double shot lattes a day from just a single double shot. Next it will be whisky, some days I have snuck in a shot of Tequila before work. FreeBSD handles them like a champ. However the TPN doesn't recognize FreeBSD so it has to be Rocky Linux.

I needed a PXE server, we only had a old 2009 mac mini left over in the cupboard. It does the job, 100Mbit is fine for provisioning, and if I want more I'll just use a USB Ethernet dongle. Linux, failed, FreeBSD, booted off memory stick and has been working flawlessly. So I now have a working PXE server coded in TCL and running on FreeBSD. It's glorious, and because so, I've now been told going forward all projects must be Python.

ZFS <3. Why the hell TrueNAS went Linux is beyond my grasp.

I run FBSD 16 on my main rig, 4x screens. 2x27' 4K, 2x27' all work flawlessly with Xorg.

Four of my colocated servers are running FreeBSD.

    mookie@cookie:~ $ uname -a && uptime
    FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC  amd64
    10:39PM  up 1699 days,  1:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.64, 1.30, 1.31

You've not given any reason to why you don't like FreeBSD. What you can do on Linux, you can do on FreeBSD. Life of a FreeBSD admin hasn't been easier.

Also illumos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 - Jan 2026 (15 comments)

People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Back in college I spent some time translating portions of it to Russian. It was super easy to work with the project on that. I honestly have no idea if any of my contributions are still a part of it but I am really glad I did that.

You're seeing the benefit of the cathedral model right there: a centralized, architected approach yields unified documentation, whereas the bazaar is inherently fragmented.

In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability. =3

You are mistaken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

It is more that Windows abdicated its 87% market share due to incompetence in brand management. =3

We need to say goodbye to the unix philosophy. From the security point of view there are much better options. Also text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives. We should aim higher than just the cathedral approach of unix alternatives.

Why a whole new mobile OS? Linux is the least important part of Android. It could be replaced. Probably will be, by Fuschia.

FreeBSD is notoriously bad with modern hardware especially Bluetooth/wifi/etc so I can’t think of a worse base OS for mobile tbh

Kinda feels like the submission title should be changed to FreeBSD Handbook, and possibly even the relevant version info.

I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is.

As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.

ZFSBootMenu doesn't work with FreeBSD, it only knows how to boot a Linux kernel.

It could be worse. Could be written by an LLM.

Karma farming.

Like how people look up what links got lots of engagement two years ago and then re-post them for a new audience.

Honestly lmao

I use FreeBSD on a raspberry pi 3b using the arm64 image. It’s under aarch64:

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAG...

Yes, arm64 support has been Tier 1 since FreeBSD 13.0.

When you finally understand the full stack you inevitably end up down operating system rabbit holes.

You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.

(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)

my money is on fake-internet-points farming, and is directly related to "all the links to OS project homepages today"

Surely most of us have heard of FreeBSD here. To the point that it should not be the top hit on the front page of hacker NEWS

At a certain point in some use-cases the Linux problems outweigh the "improvements", and more traditional partially conformant posix systems reduce complexity.

For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design.

Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't)

In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability.

I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3