In the mid 1990's the hardware driver support on Linux was much broader.
Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640
The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
The sound card was another issue.
I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
I broadly agree, even as a FreeBSD fan myself; things have converged a lot over the decades. But still, I generally feel that while you can get the same work done in both, FreeBSD does things better (and/or cleaner, more elegant, etc) in many cases.
The overall feeling of system cohesion makes me happier to use it, from small things like Ctrl-T producing meaningful output for all the base OS tools, to larger and more amorphous things like having greater confidence core systems won't change too quickly over time (eg: FreeBSD's relatively stable sound support, versus Linux's alsa/pulse/pipewire/..., similar for event APIs, and more).
Though I totally feel your pain about latest-and-greatest hardware driver support. Has gotten better since the '90s, but that gap will probably always be there due to the different development philosophies.
I hope FreeBSD never gets too "Linux-y"; it occupies it's own nice spot in the spectrum of available options.
That's pretty much it. A lot of the people I see using a BSD these days do so because they always have and they prefer what they know, which is fine, or they just want to be contrarian.
Realistically, aside from edge cases in hardware support, you can do anything you want on any modern *nix. There's not even as much of a difference between distros as people claim. All the "I want an OS that gets out of my way" and similar reasons apply to most modern well-maintained distros these days. It's more personality and familiarity than anything objective.
Big chuckle there, so good. Hey, at least they had a sense of humour.
But I agree the hardware support could be much better even to this day.
The Linux community felt like college students with no job and not much money. That included Linus Torvalds himself who developed the kernel while in college and wasn't rich. DEC basically gave Linus an Alpha to get him to port the kernel to it.
Linux got early commercial interest. That led to far better hardware support. The snowball continues to get bigger to this day.
When FreeBSD would have been getting corporate interest, when it was both free and clearly superior technically, BSD was being sued by AT&T and BSD looked risky. The lawsuit resolved and FreeBSD was born but not until after Linux was in the wild. It was too late.
We will always get these articles from those that prefer FreeBSD. It will never get enough attention to break the cycle started in the 90’s.
> To solve the distribution and isolation problem, Linux engineers built a set of kernel primitives (namespaces, cgroups, seccomp) and then, in a very Linux fashion, built an entire ecosystem of abstractions on top to “simplify” things: [...] Somehow we ended up with an overengineered mess of leaky abstractions
Not sure I like the value judgement here. I think it's more of a consequence of Linux' success. I am convinced that if it was reversed (Linux was niche and *BSD the norm), then a ton of abstractions would come, and the average user would "use an overengineered mess" because they don't know better (or don't care or don't have a need to care).
Not that I like it when people ship their binary in a 6G docker image. But I don't think it's fair to put that on "those Linux engineers".
On the other hand, I don't think the comparison between jails and docker is fair. What made Docker popular is the reusability of the containers, certainty not the sandboxing which in the early days was very leaky.
Inability to find a service I want to run on Github and 95+% of the time to be able to configure it and have it running and fully managed with usually just a one-liner shell script like 10 minutes later just by finding an existing docker image is the thing I’d lose with jails. That’s all of the value of docker to me personally. Jails could be a building block toward that, but last I checked there’s no deep and up-to-date library of “packages” I can reach for, using jails, which makes it pretty much useless to me.
1: I have like eight or nine services running on my home Debian system, they all auto-restart and come back up on reboot, and I’ve not had to touch Systemd once on that machine.
Well, what style difference exactly? GNU utils tend to be more verbose. Other than that, what is the difference in style?
And containers really are a VM-light, so you might as well use the real thing, in fact, VMWare for a long time thought that their images would be a container like thing and many larger installations used them as such.
First it's important to clarify "containers" are not an abstraction in the linux kernel. Containers are really an illusion achieved by use of a combination of user/pid/networking namespaces, bind mounts, and process isolation primitives through a userspace application(s) (podman/docker + a container runtime).
OCI container tooling is much easier to use, and follows the "cattle not pets" philosophy, and when you're deploying on multiple systems, and want easy updates, reproducibility, and mature tooling, you use OCI containers, not LXC or freebsd jails. FreeBSD jails can't hold a candle to the ease of use and developer experience OCI tooling offers.
> To solve the distribution and isolation problem, Linux engineers built a set of kernel primitives (namespaces, cgroups, seccomp) and then, in a very Linux fashion, built an entire ecosystem of abstractions on top to “simplify” things.
This was an intentional design decision, and not a bad one! cgroups, namespaces, and seccomp are used extensively outside of the container abstraction. (See flatpak, systemd resource slices, firejail). By not tieing process isolation to the container abstraction, we can let non-container applications benefit from them. We also get a wide breadth of container runtime choices.
I still see FreeBSD as being great for things like networking devices and storage controllers. You can apply a lot of the "cattle vs pets" design one level above that using VMs and orchestration tools.
Spawning a linux container is much simpler and faster than spawning a freebsd jail.
I don’t know why i keep hearing about jails being better, they clearly aren’t.
> I don’t know why i keep hearing about jails being better
Jails have a significantly better track record in terms of security.
I can delegate a ZFS dataset to a jail to let the jail manage it.
Do Linux containers have an equivalent to VNET jails yet? With VNET jails I can give the jail its own whole networking stack, so they can run their own firewall and dhcp their own address and everything.
FreeBSD jails were technically solid years before Docker existed, but the onboarding story was rough. You needed to understand the FreeBSD base system first. Docker let you skip all of that.
That said, I've been seeing more people question the container stack complexity recently. Especially for smaller deployments where a jail or even a plain VM with good config management would be simpler and more debuggable. The pendulum might be swinging back a bit for certain use cases.
But it's not a competition. FreeBSD does its thing and Linux does another. That's why I use FreeBSD.
I'm using either Docker Compose or Docker Swarm without Kubernetes, and there's not that much of it, to be honest. My "ingress" is just an Apache2 container that's bound to 80/443 and my storage is either volumes or bind mounts, with no need for more complexity there.
> The jails vs containers framing is interesting but I think it misses why Docker actually won. It wasn't the isolation tech. It was the ecosystem: Dockerfiles as executable documentation, a public registry, and compose for local dev. You could pull an image and have something running in 30 seconds without understanding anything about cgroups or namespaces.
So where's Jailsfiles? Where's Jail Hub (maybe naming needs a bit of work)? Where's Jail Desktop or Jail Compose or Jail Swarm or Jailbernetes?
It feels like either the people behind the various BSDs don't care much for what allowed Docker to win, or they're unable to compete with it, which is a shame, because it'd probably be somewhere between a single and double digit percent userbase growth if they decided to do it and got it right. They already have some of the foundational tech, so why not the UX and the rest of it?
On the outside. But that's a lot of complexity hidden from view there, easily a couple of million lines of code on top of the code that you wrote.
Even if "jailsfiles" were created the ecosystem would need to start from scratch and sometimes it feels like people in the FreeBSD ecosystem have a hard enough time keeping ports somewhat up to date, let alone create something new.
Luckily Podman seems to support FreeBSD these days for docker images, but the Linux emualation might be a bit of a blocker so not a 100% solution.
Many Linux syscalls are unemulated and things like /proc/<pid>/fd/NN etc are not "magic symlinks" like on Linux so execve on them fails (i.e there is rudimentary /proc support, it's not full fleshed out).
TL;DR Linux containers on FreeBSD via the podman + linuxulator feel half baked.
For example, try using the alpine container... `apk upgrade` will fail due to the /proc issue discussed above. Try using the Fedora container `dnf upgrade` will fail due to some seccomp issue.
The future of containers on FreeBSD is FreeBSD OCI containers, not (emulated) Linux containers. As an aside, podman on FreeBSD requires sudo which kinda defeats the concept but hopefully this will be fixed in the future.
The link literally uses the term ecosystem. Several times actually.
Fixed that for you ;)
But somehow Linux still took over my personal and professional life.
Going back seems nice but there need to be a compelling reason -docker is fine, the costs don’t add up any more. I do t have a real logical argument beyond that.
However, in 2003 Intel introduced CPUs with SMT and in 2005 AMD introduced multi-core CPUs.
These multi-threaded and/or multi-core CPUs quickly replaced the single-threaded CPUs, especially in servers, where the FreeBSD stronghold was.
FreeBSD 4 could not handle multiple threads. In the following years Linux and Windows have been developed immediately to take advantage of multiple threads and cores, while FreeBSD has required many years for this, a time during it has become much less used than before, because new users were choosing Linux and some of the old users were also switching to Linux for their new computers that were not supported by FreeBSD.
Eventually FreeBSD has become decent again from the PoV of performance, but it has never been again in a top position and it lacks native device drivers for many of the hardware devices that are supported by Linux, due to much fewer developers able to do the necessary reverse engineering work or the porting work for the case when some company provides Linux device drivers for their hardware.
For the last 3 decades, I have been using continuously both FreeBSD and Linux. I use Linux on my desktop PCs and laptops, and in some computational servers where I need software support not available for FreeBSD, e.g. NVIDIA CUDA (NVIDIA provides FreeBSD device drivers for graphic applications, but not CUDA). I continue to use FreeBSD for many servers that implement various kinds of networking or storage functions, due to exceptional reliability and simplicity of management.
The real difference during that early 00s was that momentum bought 2 things that made FreeBSD a worse choice (and made even more people end up using Linux):
1: "commercial" support for Linux, firstly hardware like you mentioned, but in the way that you could buy a server with some Linux variant installed and you knew that it'd run, unless you're an CTO you're probably not risking even trying out FreeBSD on a fresh machine if time isn't abundant.
Also software like Java servers comes to mind, came with binaries or was otherwise easy to get running on Linux, and even with FreeBSD's Linux layer VM's things like JVM and CLR often relied on subtle details that makes it incompatible with the Linux layer (tried running .NET a year or two ago, ran into random crashes).
2: a lot of "fresh" Linux developers had a heavy "works on my machine" mentality, being reliant on Linux semantics, paths or libraries in makefiles (or dependencies on things like systemd)
Sure there is often upstream patches (eventually) or patches in FreeBSD ports, those last are good for stable systems, but a PITA in the long run since stuff doesn't get upstreamed properly and you're often stuck when there is a major release and need to figure out how to patch a new version yourself.
I'm sure some people have a sunk-cost feeling with Linux and will get defensive of this, but ironically this was exactly the argument I had heard 20 years ago - and I was defensive about it myself then.. This has only become more true though.
It's really hard to argue against Linux when even architecturally poor decisions are papered over by sheer force of will and investment; so in a day-to-day context Linux is often the happy path even though the UX of FreeBSD is more consistent over time.
Which surely says something about all these ideological purity tests
OpenVZ and Linux vserver are older than LXC and were commonly used, though they required a patched kernel.
But Virtuozzo was hampered by being non-free - OpenVZ wasn't open sourced until 2-3 years later, by which time the damage had been done (but, of course, Xen headed in the opposite direction at roughly the same time!)
And Linux-VServer was held back by being focussed so directly at virtual hosting providers - it positioned itself against fcgi-suexec, fcgid, and php-fpm (and was much more unwieldy than any of them) rather than jails or VZ.
Both were more or less ignored until the late 2000s, by which time LXC had taken a lot of mindshare - allowing the "FreeBSD was years ahead with jails" meme to take root.
I am not quite sure what this means. I had a jail a few years ago and I remember there was a utility to "back" the jail up so you could put it on another system. Are there constraints with that utility. It seemed to work, maybe I am forgetting something ?
In any case I still think Jails are much better than the things Linux has. To me, it is creating a jail that is more difficult. There were ports that made it easier, I used one of them, but that port was abandoned at some point. I think it was "ezjail".
After IBM destroyed CentOS, all the Xorg politics nonsense, the list goes on with Linux, not interested. I just want something quiet and boring and stable and correctly designed. NetBSD would be my first choice but they don’t get the $ they need for drivers.
For a while even used it on the desktop, but was too much trouble due to specific tools we need that weren't supported properly. so we're using Linux on the desktop.
FreeBSD is stable, lightweight, gets out of the way, and without drama.
Uh... Xorg is packaged by FreeBSD too...
Really the whole theme that (from the article) "FreeBSD ships as a complete, coherent OS" is belied by this kind of nonsense. No, it's not. Or, sure, it is, but in exactly the same way that Debian or whatever is. It's a big soup of some local software and a huge ton of upstream dependencies curated for shipment together. Just like a Linux distro.
And, obviously, almost all those upstream dependences are exactly the same. Yet somehow the BSD folks think there's some magic to the ports stuff that the Linux folks don't understand. Well, there isn't. And honestly to the extent there's a delta in packaging sophistication, the Linux folks tend to be ahead (c.f. Nix, for example).
Ehhh... not exactly. With nothing but the smallest FreeBSD installer image, you can, if you include just one optional package, have a system that is capable of entirely recompiling itself.
You might say "who cares?" and that's fine. But it is "complete" in a sense that no linux system I know of is. I admit that I don't know what it would take to install from, say, almalinux-10.0-x86_64-minimal.iso, and end up with a system capable of recompiling itself, but I expect it would be a whole lot more work than that. Could be wrong.
I think you missed the point in my original comment. I explained I moved my platform with all dependencies and had 1 bug which was actually a silent bug in Linux.
In other words, it works. Your particular stack might have a different snag profile but if I can move my giant complex app there, yours is worth a shot.
FreeBSD is more complete than you make out. They also have hard working ports maintainers.
For all my computing career, I'd use Unix-alike because they let me develop software by having an idea, write some code, let it run in the terminal, chain things together, and see where it failed, and iterate. Terminals let this happen much faster than clicky GUI software, and contain a log of what was happening in a terminal pane (or gnus screen or tmux pane, because usually this is happening on big servers and compute clusters rather than my terminal/laptop)
I could launch a bunch of panes, have several lines of investigation going, and come back to it a day or week later when I had time because the terminal kept a log of everything that happened.
And a couple years ago I started noticing that things I thought I had launched would start disappearing. At first I thought I had started accidentally mispressing a key and killing a tmux pane rather than disconnecting.
But no! When I finally went back to a in-person Linux workstation and saw it happen to the entire terminal window, I knew something major had changed. It turns out that something called systemd-oomd was added to a bunch of distributions that now kills only entire cgroups of processes at a time, rather than a single process offender.
So now if you want to run processes and isolate the kill zone of a process, you have to wrap every freaking subprocess in an entire systemd-run wrapper or docker wrapper. And systemd-run won't work from many contexts, such as inside a Jupyter kernel.
Major breaking changes on fundamental system behavior are a huge problem these days. It's one thing to let the OS kill processes more when there's a memory issue, fine, great, go ahead. But why kill all the lightweight processes that could give feedback to a user?! And why force non-portable process launching semantics, that aren't even consistent across the entire system?!? So infuriating.
this was the key part for Linux success, but also it was a network effect thing, if you want users for a unix they likely would use Linux, so give them a driver on Linux and redirect people. Then having the kernel binding be malleable led to more people just opensourcing the drivers if they had an actual product or just vendor the linux kernel otherwise.
zVault is a fork that is effortless to migrate in-place, but pointless because it has had no updates since the fork, it's no different from just continuing to run the derelict final version of truenas core.
That just leaves xigmanas which I have not tried yet, but looks like a simpler more pure nas without the jails or vm manager, which people have told me can be filled by bastille.
Or really, I'm thinking rather than even xigmanas it probably makes more sense to just use plain freebsd and never get stuck like this again.
The host is stuck at 13.3. 13.3 went fully EOL December 2024. The pkg repos don't even supply packages for that any more. I have a bunch of services that run in jails, and currently I can just barely squeak by by "illegally" updating the jails to 13.5. It's not officially supported by upstream freebsd but I seem to be getting away with it for now. But even 13.5 is not going to last much longer. Then what?
So really the FreeNAS ui was nice an all, but not so nice as to be worth being stuck like this now. I probably should have just skipped it and just used plain freebsd which would never have had any such problem.
So maybe assuming zvault continues to not update when I finally need to move some jail past 13.5, maybe the next move is not even to xigmanas but just plain freebsd.
Linux is to *BSD as
VHS was to Betamax.
Don't get me wrong, FreeBSD is simple, elegant, consistent and well manicured. It seems to have picked up some pace again. I'm rooting for it.
Likely is has a good place at the low end.
In enterprise mode, you want something like an AWS to hide the pain of those large-scale details that Linux is bringing.
It is not incorrect but ... do people really care about that distinction?
Because in most situations I know of, when people refer to Linux, they almost never refer to the linux kernel. They refer to the whole operating system stack, which is typically put down via a distribution. So, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, and so forth, are all "kind of" Linux. Barely anyone refers to the linux kernel if you look at all the discussions on the world wide web.
> FreeBSD ships as a complete, coherent OS
The BSDs often promote that aka "Linux is chaos, we are coherent and consistent operating system following intelligent design". Well ... this is the rise of worse is better, repeated: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
It is a great analogy that works on so many levels. Broken down to Linux versus the BSDs, I think 500 out of 500 top supercomputers running Linux kind of show which philosophy is better. The one that works better. That does not mean the BSDs are useless, but I am getting tired of the promo used by the BSD as "we are order, Linux is chaos". I compare this more to Lego building blocks. With Linux there is a stronger focus on having building blocks available. You can build up things. You have projects such as LFS/BLFS (Linux from scratch). The BSDs do not have something comparable. Which operating system is the better tinker OS? Which community created git? (Ok ok that was Linus so not really a community per se, but it originated from Linux and perhaps that was not an accident either.)
> FreeBSD pioneered the practical implementation of what we now call containers.
Ok great. Many modern programming languages learned from older languages; many of these older languages are dead now. You need to keep on innovating. Why is BSD so dead set on the past?
> FreeBSD reached that third stage in 2000. Linux wouldn't get there until 2008 with LXC.
Dumdedum ... it kind of sounds as if the FreeBSD guys are sad that Linux went on to dominate. It reminds me of NetBSD aka "we work on every toaster in the world". Then suddenly on a mailing list many years ago "wait a moment ... Linux now works on more toasters than we do". The BSDs don't seem to understand how momentum can be dominating.
> Technical superiority doesn't win ecosystem wars. Linux won through a combination of fast decisions, the viral GPL licence, and strong enterprise backing from Red Hat and IBM. Then Google, Facebook, and Amazon happened — hungry for datacenters, developing tools to manage growing infrastructure at scale. They set the direction for the entire industry.
Ok that flat out is incorrect. First - GPL worked well for the linux kernel, that is true. But the ecosystem includes many BSD-licences programs too, on Linux. So that explanation fails already here. LLVM has Apache License 2.0 which I kind of feel is a mix between GPL and BSD (not quite true but this is how I remember it).
Then the claim is Linux won because of Red Hat. I actually find Red Hat annoying and I am glad to not depend on it. Linux is way bigger than Red Hat. IBM? I don't see what IBM did for Linux really. So that explanation also does not work.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon - well, they profited from Linux. They didn't really ENABLE Linux. They would not have used Linux if Linux would have been useless. So that part came afterwards.
So none of those explanations really work well here.
> Linux rapidly went from "the free OS for people who can't afford commercial licences" to "the only acceptable OS for servers".
That is true but not for the claims made, e. g. "because of Google". The more important question is: why did the BSDs fail?
> To solve the distribution and isolation problem, Linux engineers built a set of kernel primitives (namespaces, cgroups, seccomp) and then, in a very Linux fashion, built an entire ecosystem of abstractions on top to “simplify” things
No, that is also incorrect. cgroups are also very different to seccomp and the latter is even maintained independently: https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp/releases
> Somehow we ended up with an overengineered mess of leaky abstractions for cloud-based, vendor-locked infrastructure.
Wait a moment - he cites Docker. That's owned by a private company. What does this have to do with Linux? If company xyz does something based on FreeBSD, we would then say company xyz is responsible for FreeBSD failing or not failing? How does that work?
> And this complexity has quietly reshaped how the industry thinks about deploying software. Today, if you want to run an application in a larger system, the implicit assumption is that you containerise it with Docker and orchestrate it with Kubernetes.
Personally I find all this abstraction crap. With all their failures, though, things such as docker kind of present a "download this one file, then it will work fine". And that is kind of true. I saw that in in-campus use for life science faculty clusters and what not. It simplifies things for the admin there. People give a similar rationale for systemd. Personally I don't think systemd should exist, but there are people who benefit from it - that simply is a factual statement.
All in all this is a very strange point of view from FreeBSD folks. At the least the NetBSD folks back then on the mailing list acknowledged the situation and then tried to find alternative strategies and in some ways succeeded (although I am not sure whether NetBSD right now runs on more toasters than Linux does - anyone has updated statistics for that?).
Or is it because it's what they're used to. I saw this argument elsewhere where the respondent went on to show that the users were Linux specialists and that's why Linux was used.
Maybe opting for a better-written WAF could boost the reach?
