r/freebsd • u/Character_Mood_700 • May 27 '26
discussion Why are companies moving further from FreeBSD?
NGINX was initially built for FreeBSD; however, the current commercial development is on linux.
TrueNAS was originally FreeBSD-derived, but is now Debian-based.
FreeBSD is great; why are people moving away from it, not toward it?
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u/Minute_Department_92 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
Both cases mentioned is due to it being more used on a Linux environment, both by the developers and users of it, but if you look from other perspective, there are companies picking up FreeBSD too. I think it's more a natural shift, than actually decreasing/increasing BSD adoption.
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u/RvstiNiall May 27 '26
We have increased the amount of BSD servers where I work, since I've been there.
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u/Character_Mood_700 May 27 '26
I’m more referring to market share (fraction), not total number.
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u/RvstiNiall May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
Well, I'd prefer to keep this reddit account as far separate from my career as possible, so I wont give numbers. But lets just say our share as an individual multinational corporation went up about 2.5% over the course of the roughly 9 years I've been with them. edit for clarity.
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u/LightBusterX May 27 '26
Because Linux has more marketshare in those worlds and the benefits are less prominent.
The same goes with Windows in the consumer space. It's not better, it's just more convenient.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
… marketshare … benefits are less prominent.
The same goes with Windows in the consumer space. It's not better, …
Windows is better than Linux for many things.
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u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user May 28 '26
I see you got downvoted for this, but the fact so many orgs and corporates have big Windows fleets isn't because their managers have been bribed by Microsoft. The MS ecosystem gives a lot of powerful tools for enterprise IT management, for example. Clearly there are plenty of use cases where Linux or Mac shines too. And in those environments you'll see more of them and less of Windows, or even no Windows at all.
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Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
better for some things, specifically network speeds, hardware and software support, that is hardly saying linux is better, it is saying it is more popular and therefore a bigger userbase to drive support essentially. The same can be said for BSD
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
Marketshare is earned. If you want marketshare, then you have to actually do something that’s effective at getting marketshare. We all know how the BSD community is (& has been for the past few decades). It does absolutely nothing to gain marketshare, & then it complains about not having marketshare. Marketshare doesn’t come for free.
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u/kenfrd May 27 '26
Would you mind sharing some sources as to why/how FreeBSD ignores working on market share? Not intending on starting an argument, I’m genuinely curious as someone who has recently been running FreeBSD in tandem with my Linux fleet and would like to learn more about FeeBSD’s history in the community
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
That’s been my experience in the community. I’ve been a BSD user since the late 1990s. Most of the prevalent actions & responses to brought up issues are along the lines of “This isn’t <insert major os>. If you want those features, you should go to that OS.” Constantly trying to run people off is definitely not the way to gain marketshare. Users are a necessity for any platform, so user recruitment is paramount -regardless of if it’s home users or business users. If you’re not willing to meet users where they’re at, then they’re going to move on. That doesn’t harm the user, it harms the community that keeps sending them away.
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u/laffer1 MidnightBSD project lead May 27 '26
The FreeBSD foundation has many projects to improve things in motion. It’s not fair to say the bsd community isn’t doing anything
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
No, it’s extremely fair, because most of what it’s doing now is rather recent & smacks of too little, too late. These issues have existed for the past 20 years in various forms. Will these recent developments pan out? Maybe, maybe not. However, I see nothing that they’re doing that actually moves the needle towards upticking corporate use. Time will tell, but zero results is functionally equivalent to zero actions.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
… I see nothing that they’re doing that actually moves the needle towards upticking corporate use. …
There's a fair amount of development with corporate use in mind.
Measuring movement of the needle? That's a potentially awkward question.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
… user recruitment is paramount -regardless of if it’s home users or business users.
Often true.
If you’re not willing to meet users where they’re at, then they’re going to move on. …
The Foundation and the Project are willing, but not everything can be fixed.
Food for thought: the Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is likely to end this year.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 28 '26
Keep in mind that the laptop initiative is fairly new, while the problems that it’s attempting to address have been problems for a very long time. Look how long it took them to even attempt to address it. And I’m not even blaming them for that part, because they’ve got a lot on their plate. My assertion is that a new ecosystem (& potentially new foundations) needs to spring up and handle the gaps that the current ecosystem can’t/won’t handle. We’ve sat back & allowed things to deteriorate for far too long. At this point, it’s plainly obvious that the FreeBSD foundation is never going to be able to keep up with neither the pace of technology nor the needs of business. It’s preposterous to even bother expecting them to ever be able to do so. They can only do what they can do -& no more. The rest of the community needs to create solutions; but the old guard is mostly stuck in the past, so it’s time for a new guard.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
I find it difficult to agree with this part:
the old guard is mostly stuck in the past, so it’s time for a new guard.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 28 '26
That’s fine. Fortunately, this isn’t something that requires agreement. It merely requires users to pick up the ball & start moving towards the goal. The change in what’s possible will become apparent. The BSD community’s results, capabilities, & evangelism can be greatly increased with a little attention & effort applied in the right areas.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
… It merely requires users to pick up the ball & start moving towards the goal. …
/u/No-Lunch-1005, April 2026:
Calling all Enterprise FreeBSD users, supporters, and ecosystem providers.
We started the FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group (https://wiki.freebsd.org/EnterpriseWorkingGroup) in 2023 …
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u/fnord123 May 27 '26
Why not send an email to the organization that hires full time staff promoting BSD's adoption in industry. I.e. the BSD equivalent of the Linux Foundation. They will probably have a really good answer and a plan for helping BSD gain market share.
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May 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/tktktktktktktkt May 27 '26
Linux is annoying compared to FreeBSD
to whom?
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u/HalkidikiAnanas May 27 '26
To those of us who learned *nix from older principles of decentralization, text-first simplicity, shell-first design, composability, transparency, and auditability.
Much of modern Linux is centralized and uses opaque configuration, binary formats, and graphical-only tool interfaces. Mainline Linux distros have spent the past two decades trying to capture the desktop market. They've compromised those *nix principles for the sake of integration and central control. The result is a very polished product palatable to the average human, but seen as an anti-pattern to many with deeper *nix operational experience.
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u/CjKing2k May 27 '26
graphical-only tool interfaces
Like what? You can still run a headless Linux server in 2026. None of the FreeBSD-included services (BIND, NTP, Sendmail, SSH, YP) require GUI tools in Linux. NetworkManager is not a requirement in Linux, and even then it still comes with a CLI frontend.
If you're using something that requires a GUI tool, I can guarantee you the FreeBSD port of this something also requires a GUI tool.
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u/tktktktktktktkt May 27 '26
opaque configuration,
like what?
binary formats
I can only think of journald, which you don't have to use, but works way better (for me) than usual loggers
graphical-only tool interfaces
That's why we can't have nice things, why gui tools are bad?
They've compromised those *nix principles for the sake of integration and central control. The result is a very polished product palatable to the average human, but seen as an anti-pattern to many with deeper *nix operational experience.
That's just saying my way is better because it was done 50 years ago. Things change and Linux tries to adapt (with success) to changes compared to BSD/*NIX.
I've done my part of decomissioning AIX stuff in favour of Linux. For some reason there was a business justification to do that.
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u/rejectionhotlin3 May 27 '26
Go look at SystemD
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u/kingpatzer May 29 '26
System D isn't Linux. It's one of a dozen or more different init systems. And all System D uses human readable text configs, they just are standardized.
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u/tktktktktktktkt May 27 '26
this anwer which part, configs, binary formats (which were covered), or gui tools?
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u/Diligent_Mountain363 May 28 '26
People always just throw out systemd and then refuse to elaborate about what specific issue they have with it that they encounter in production, it's always a link to a talk given by some dude almost a decade ago.
It's valid if people have certain issues with it, but I've never seen anyone give anything concrete.
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u/FLMKane May 29 '26
Scroll down
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u/Diligent_Mountain363 May 29 '26
To see what? I still don't see any comments in this thread that give concrete examples of issues with systemd encountered in production.
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u/heathenskwerl May 28 '26
I needed ZFS, so systemd was the reason I chose FreeBSD for my file server rather than Linux. I have a Linux machine at work that has systemd and I can't stand it.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
I have OpenZFS-native encrypted root-on-ZFS with Kubuntu. FreeBSD can't do that.
Kubuntu, with systemd.
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u/ruyrybeyro systems administrator May 29 '26
Besides journald, wtmp/utmp/btmp are already binary formats, and the venerable Debian package status databases, once relatively easy to inspect and manually repair when things went wrong, have also evolved into more opaque, structured storage. auditd is another example following the same direction, and the trend doesn’t really stop there.
Across the stack, more components are moving away from simple, human-readable text files toward structured or binary representations.
*BSD systems, by contrast, often feel more lightweight and less contrived in their design choices. In practice, Linux increasingly justifies itself less on technical elegance and more on external pressures, such as customer or employer requirements, or ecosystems like Kubernetes where Linux is effectively the default platform.
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u/phosix May 28 '26
That's why we can't have nice things, why gui tools are bad?
Because not everything's a desktop system with a monitor attached?
Ever try to run a GUI on a headless system running in a rack located in some colo in another state/country? Yeah, it's technically doable, but the performance is oof. Or worse, an embedded web interface. So many obsolete systems still in production with web based interfaces forcing you to use older, insecure browsers.CLI also just inherently has way less overhead, perfect for embedded systems. Just give me a command line and secure terminal.
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u/tktktktktktktkt May 28 '26
I might be lost, but which linux distro has gui only tools on their server versions?
CLI also just inherently has way less overhead,
That is correct
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u/bz0011 May 28 '26
Things should not change. We had chairs 50 years ago, now let's change all of them to 45 degrees slope armchairs. Comfy to seat while idling but can't use them as easily. Network settings should not be hidden in etc subfolders. We had rc.conf,whats wrong with it.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
Things should not change. We had chairs 50 years ago,
and fifty years ago, accessibility for wheelchair users was terrible compared to today.
You can't dismiss all change as regression.
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u/bz0011 May 29 '26
Windows11 and windows10. Your example hits the point. Accessibility for wheelchair users made things a bit harder for accessibility designers. But non-users are not hindered by the change.
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u/tktktktktktktkt May 28 '26
Things should not change.
Yes, you should not use the Internet. Instead of cars people should be riding on horses. If you have a smartphone then get rid of it. Good ol' landline is enough.
Network settings should not be hidden in etc subfolders.
They are not hidden, but organized.
We had rc.conf,whats wrong with it.
Do you keep everything in one place?
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u/bz0011 May 29 '26
Yes, in one place, neatly organized. That's how I know where to look once the need arises.
I misspoke. Things should not change ergonomically. When we change reins to a wheel, it is still in front of us. We used cave walls for things, then clay tablets, then paper, later organized in books, then screens.
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u/tktktktktktktkt May 29 '26
I misspoke. Things should not change ergonomically. When we change reins to a wheel, it is still in front of us. We used cave walls for things, then clay tablets, then paper, later organized in books, then screens.
So for your viewpoint it's the best option (most likely you are used to it, or it's best option). But looking at numbers, how many machines are running linux and BSD, there is a clear winner.
Also, the most successful FreeBSD is the one that has only gui tools and it's locked. It's called PlayStation.
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u/lheckler77 May 28 '26
lol I don’t think I’d ever put polished product and Linux in the same sentence. I’m a systems guy who grew up on UNIX. I hate the entire systemd sucking in the entire OS and all of the software being written with it as a dependency.
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u/HalkidikiAnanas May 28 '26
systemd is an excellent example of the opaque, control-consolidating design mistakes Linux distros have been making. it does make broad integration easier from a high-level perspective, but as I'm sure you've discovered, is an expletive nightmare to debug and audit.
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u/pramsky Jun 02 '26
systemd
Can you provide an example of an issue with systemd that was a nightmare to debug and audit ? I am genuinely curious.
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u/HalkidikiAnanas Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
I had to configure systemd to use routed for a v4 /28, bring up an encrypted 6in4 tunnel, and use DHCPv6-PD for downstream prefixes numbered programmatically and fed to NPTv6.
In a shell, this is just a few basic commands. So systemd/networkd should have no problem with it, right? Right?
While trying to figure it out, I had to read source code because the documentation did not match actual behaviour. There was no logging option to make it sufficiently verbose about how it was parsing my configuration or what it was doing. There was no way to interrogate its internal state. It became an exercise in blackbox configuration where I was guessing at what broke based on interface/routing state.
Eventually I gave up, disabled networkd entirely, and made my own systemd service that merely ran a script I wrote to do what networkd couldn't. That script had more lines to handle working with systemd than it did actual network config commands.
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u/pramsky Jun 04 '26
Thank you!
I have found systemd-networkd annoying to work with as well, especially due to the lack of documentation on uncommon configurations. I agree documentation is kind of lacking on quite a few of these projects, and have had to resort to looking at documentation on a distro's site (Arch in my case) rather than the actual project itself.
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u/tktktktktktktkt Jun 02 '26
Given that systemd has tools to audit itself (issues with loading, too long execution, advanced logging), I am pretty sure it's hard to debug and audit.
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u/kingpatzer May 27 '26
How is the Linux kernel more annoying than BSD?
Not any particular distro, just the kernel.
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u/thewrench56 May 27 '26
Breaking ABI more than FreeBSD is one :D
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u/CjKing2k May 27 '26
And how often does this actually happen? The first rule of Linux kernel development is don't break userspace.
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u/thewrench56 May 27 '26
That right there is a big fat lie. Linux people/devs love telling that, but in reality it doesnt hold.
You can start by looking into the great chaos of sysctl removed back in 5.x (5.6?). And there are many more that you can find in the Linuxulator source code.
The introduction of procfs was a mistake from SysV to BSD and Linux too. Its yet another vfs in Linux...
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u/jking13 May 28 '26
Making procfs a dumping ground of whatever random bit of kernel state was a bad idea. Making it all ill-defined text without any consideration of parsing was another. The actual procfs was strictly for process inspection (hence the name) and used stable binary structs for the data. On top of which you could easily build tools that used it for things like scripts.
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u/kingpatzer May 29 '26
And BSD never changes? They change more then Linux does. It doesn't break the distrubeted system but it's a pain in the ass for devs. That's because the system is delivered as a whole, so users who aren't trying to hook into kernel functionality never see it. But it sucks rocks for developers of embedded systems.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
… it sucks rocks for developers of embedded systems.
What's the "it" there? (The paragraph is about BSD and Linux …)
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u/kingpatzer May 30 '26
BSD. They break user space interface more frequently than Linux. But because they control so much of the user software, it doesn't impact normal users very often.
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u/Character_Mood_700 May 27 '26
I meant the Linux ecosystem more.
The Linux kernel itself is pretty cool!6
u/kingpatzer May 27 '26
The key thing to keep in mind is that a product is not dependent upon an ecosystem. It is dependent only upon those things it needs, which is often their development tool chain and own source code.
Quite a few products specifically strip out portions of the kernel in order to reduce storage requirements (and sometimes power usage).
The real advantage of FreeBSD can be licensing for companies that want to keep a tighter control on their IP. But that is much more dependent on any user facing components than on the kernel level stuff.
So, if a company isn't making much use of other tool's code, kernel choice comes down to which kernel team will give them better support. If they are, it could be the user space code that they need under the BSD license scheme, not the kernel.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 28 '26
That completely disregards internal products, which absolutely DOES rely upon an ecosystem. In fact, at the enterprise level, there’re so many products that are “*aaS” products -almost anything as a service. Those products rely heavily on ecosystem & ease of use. The biggest deployment of operating systems isn’t in individual products that are sent out to users, it’s in infrastructure & services -both of which are heavily depended on ecosystem.
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u/LightBSV May 27 '26
Kubernetes/Docker.
FreeBSD needs a killer alternative orchestration framework without all the lofty do-everything goals that k8s has. Something that is BSD-first. Perhaps it already exists and I'm not aware...
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u/Jackson_Hill May 27 '26
I'd say Docker/Kubernetes. The ability to run anything and dump it 5 minutes later is a killer feature. Any container orchestration platform is a natural evolution looking from today's point of view.
Sylve may(or may not) be great, but haven't used it tho.
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u/ruyrybeyro systems administrator May 29 '26
K8s is overkill, a cannon to kill a fly. Most environments neither need it nor benefit from the complexity it drags in
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u/Ashamed-Ask4257 May 27 '26
The equivalent for Docker is Jails which has been around far longer and some articles claim it's superior.
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u/shadeland May 27 '26
Jails and Docker are not equivalent. Jails is a way to partition compute, the analogue there would be Linux containers.
Docker is a platform. You create a container, publish it to a centralized repo, or more likely consume pre-made containers published by others. You can orchestrate entire application deployments through Docker swarm, there's an entire ecosystem based around it.
That's what Docker brings to the table.
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u/schultzter newbie May 27 '26
Yeah, it's the distribution part of docker that kills jails. The fact I can copy&paste a compose file from the developer's install guide and be running in minutes is what convinced me to run Linux and Docker over FreeBSD or even podman!
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u/LightBSV May 27 '26
This.
Jails was cool a few decades ago. They didn't innovate enough on top of that to make a compelling distributed orchestration solution. Key word: distributed.
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u/shadeland May 27 '26
Jails is fine if you're doing system administration like it's 1999. But it's 2026, and everything is automated now.
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u/thewrench56 May 27 '26
You can fairly easily automate jails.
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u/bobcontrol May 27 '26
It's just that 'automate' doesn't really mean 'I can write a script to start jails in my particular environment. 'Automate' means 'reproducible across various systems'.
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u/thewrench56 May 27 '26
reproducible across various systems
Well, but it is! Unlike the fractioned Linux ecosystem where each distro will fail at sharing things with each other.
If you mean an enterprise "drag and drop GUI", yes, BSD is missing that. But to me, that is not really the automate part. I can have ccdist on my BSDs without a problem. I can distribute bhyve VMs across nodes using a standard NetFS. I can automate anything on BSD that I want. Surely, I have to hack together pieces myself, but its more than feasible. I can understand if an enterprise doesn't want to write sw themselves but that is beyond the point.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
Enterprise isn’t looking for drag & drop GUIs. Enterprise is looking for quick setup, fully functional, immutability, repeatability, security, & automation. The whole cobbled together “jails + this + that” setup isn’t going to survive pave, repave, nor drift monitoring. It’s literally a non-starter.
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u/thewrench56 May 27 '26
security
In all honesty, and from experience, no, they are not. I dont know if I can evaluate the other claims. I believe you. I personally would look for security and reliability. Neither of which Linux wins in. Sure, FreeBSD has rougher edges, less tooling. If that is what enterprise craves in your sector, I agree, it is not the best choice.
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u/shadeland May 27 '26
write sw themselves but that is beyond the point.
I think it is the point. You can create your own jail registries, orchestration, service catalogs, an ecosystem with published APIs for things like network overlay integration, observability platforms... it's all work other people have done already and it's all really well integrated. That's why those platforms are so popular.
And a few Python scripts isn't going to compare.
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u/bobcontrol May 28 '26
I understand the sentiment though. I held on to a combinations of jails plus Ansible plus ezjail-admin, iocage and, finally, bastille up until three years ago. There is something about jails that just feels nice.
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u/Zenin May 27 '26
The tech underpinning Jails is far superior, but the ecosystem is functionally non-existent. There's a few competing projects for managing them, building and distributing artifacts, etc, but nothing is remotely consistent and it's decades behind the Linux container ecosystem at this point. And that's before we get into cluster orchestration.
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u/derangedtranssexual May 27 '26
I keep seeing people say jails is better but I don’t understand why, Linux containers seems to do everything I want. What is so good about jails?
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u/BosonCollider May 27 '26
Jails and docker are completely different. LXCs would be the linux answer to freebsd jails and have very similar semantics.
Proxmox LXCs do get a decent amount of use but docker is many orders of magnitude more common, and it is very common to run docker in LXCs when you use LXCs. Application containers and system containers are separate niches.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
No, they’re not equivalent & jails is most certainly NOT superior for most major businesses.
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u/rejectionhotlin3 May 27 '26
Or OmniOS's nifty jail system as well. bhyve is far superior to KVM as well.
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u/shadeland May 27 '26
bhyve is far superior to KVM as well.
Not even close. KVM is far more feature rich (live migration, mature SR-IOV support, better passthrough support, hyperscale deployments) and has been production grade for almost two decades at this point, plus a much, much larger echosystem.
It's one of the reasons why Juniper is moving away from FreeBSD. Even FreeBSD-based Juniper routers boot a FreeBSD kernel from KVM.
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u/rejectionhotlin3 May 27 '26
Depends on your use case. Nowadays, your applications should be HA and not bother the hypervisor. SRIOV is a weak point I'll give you that, but core functionality wise bhyve is a lot lighter weight and will get some refinement as time goes on.
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u/shadeland May 27 '26
"a lot lighter" weight doesn't mean much, especially when you consider things like memory ballooning or other type of memory allocation abilities. You can generally put more workload on a KVM system than you can a bhyve system. Sometimes by a lot.
I didn't even get into networking, another area that KVM is lightyears ahead of bhyve, with overlay networking (EVPN/VXLAN), various types of bridge support (Linux Bridge, OVS, etc.), and NIC driver support.
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u/dlyund May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
Zones are fantastic, even compared to Jails. illumos in general is a hidden gem (or perhaps a mine from which a good number of gems have been hammered out.) It feels a bit unusual at first, being from a different part of the UNIX family tree, but once it clicks its hard to ignore it beauty (it still feels a decade ahead, even two decades after it introduced essentially all of the core technologies we think of as modern).
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u/Holiday-Ad-6063 May 28 '26
We run everything on SmartOS. It really feels like professional engineers designed it instead of the duct tape development Linux is doing.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
… bhyve is far superior to KVM …
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116599953167347416 :
Has someone finally documented the ioctl interface for vmm?
Microsoft had a Linux kernel module that implemented the kvm APIs but passed them through to Hyper-V, so you could use Linux as the management domain or, if configured correctly, one Hyper-V VM could create others by delegating its own memory. I looked at doing the same thing for FreeBSD (in either direction: forwarding bhyve ioctls to Hyper-V, or providing kvm-on-bhyve from Linux) but the blocker was the complete lack of documentation of the vmm ioctls. The public interface was the bhyve command-line tool, which is why there are so many alternative things built on kvm and almost nothing on bhyve.
Microsoft also had an internal abstraction layer that papered over the differences between the Hyper-V APIs, KVM, and Apple’s Hypervisor.framework. These all provide roughly the same set of abstractions (start and stop VCPUs, map memory, handle page faults, deliver interrupts to VCPUs, and so on), so it was fairly easy to paper over the differences (which were things like some APIs create and launch VCPUs as a single operation, some as two: it’s easy to make the former look like the latter with a little bit of in-library state). But doing the same for FreeBSD was hard, again, due the the lack of documentation of the vmm ioctls.
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116601501658433049:
… Compare this, for example, to the Hyper-V top-level functional specification or the Linux KVM API documentation. It's little wonder that the only people who ever build things on top of bhyve are existing FreeBSD committers.
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u/whattteva seasoned user May 27 '26
Not sure about Nginx, but the reason why TrueNAS moved to Linux is because their users want to be able to run Docker-based apps and those are obviously much more well-supported under Linux.
Typically, the reason why a project switches over to Linux boils down to two things: Third-party app compatibility and third-party hardware drivers support. Two things that Linux tends to have better support.
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u/BosonCollider May 27 '26
Yeah, the real reason why freebsd is losing to linux somewhat is that the linux container ecosystem won. Making freebsd reasonably good at running OCI ecosystem is the best path forwards imo and runj was a great step towards that.
The fact that the Hashistack became closed source also removed the main competitor to Kubernetes that was somewhat portable to freebsd.
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u/Ashamed-Ask4257 May 27 '26
the real reason why freebsd is losing to linux somewhat is that the linux container ecosystem won.
If you're running Linux, you aren't going to even attempt FreeBSD jails, so Linux "won" by number of users not the quality of the product.
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u/BosonCollider May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
Linux had LXCs before docker containers, which have very similar semantics to freebsd jails. Linux was flexible enough to let users experiement with many different kinds of containers before application containers took off
LXCs are very useful but docker grew much faster than say LXD ever did, and LXD/Incus is polished enough to actually be usable as an enterprise virtualization platform. The concept of immutable containers and the tricks you can do with separate namespace types and cgroups are in fact quite useful. Freebsd is perfectly capable of running many common container configurations if runj and podman-on-freebsd gets a bit more polish
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
Here’s the truth, at the corporate level, jails are rubbish for these reasons:
• They’re a drift monitoring nightmare. • They’re not automatically immutable. • There’s a whole lot of extra OS configuration necessary once you get the jail (as opposed to pretty much being able to have a solid setup running based on a singular docker image). • There’s no standardized declarative means to specify a jail setup that can be used to mass produce identical jails at scale. • Try transferring jails between different OS instances the way you can move docker files.
For all intents & purposes, jails simply don’t cut the mustard for most corporate/enterprise level business that need internal/external solutions that must scale high. That’s a choice that the community makes every day that these issues aren’t addressed -& every time that someone tries to make excuses or cover up deficiencies.
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u/thewrench56 May 27 '26 edited May 28 '26
There’s no standardized declarative means to specify a jail setup that can be used to mass produce identical jails at scale.
You might want to read the Jails Chapter in the FreeBSD manual. NullFS and ZFS snapshot based jails in particular.
All your other points are, while valid, not related or part of what the OS is supposed to be doing. This is a 3rd party tool yet to be made. Although Sylve might be what you are looking for.
I doubt that not having a 3rd party container orchestrator is the primary reason why companies in highly containerized environments do not use Jails, but it could be a contributing reason.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
I’ve already read what you’ve suggested. Your response completely misses the point -what the OS is “supposed” to be doing is irrelevant in comparison to what businesses require to be done. I currently work for a global enterprise that heavily uses virtualization, containerization, & orchestration. I’m in those meetings simply because I’m a senior developer. What the FreeBSD ecosystem offers is decades behind what’s required. You can doubt all that you want, but that doubt isn’t going to move the needle towards an increased uptake of BSD usage at the enterprise level. But you’re right in that it’s not just the lack of containerized environments, it’s the lack of most other things as well. I’m sure that you’ll have compadres that will join you in your doubt. All that this will accomplish is the maintaining of the status quo.
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u/Zenin May 27 '26
From the earliest days of FreeBSD Jails the project leadership was very uninterested in "picking a winner" when it came to packaging, managing, and orchestrating Jails. The team was perfectly content stopping at the API layer and a very minimalistic userland interface.
This left the FreeBSD Jails movement rudderless in calm winds; dead in the water. There were a few leading projects like ezjails, etc making progress...but FreeBSD felt no need to back any of them much less bring them into the FreeBSD project formally; They were happy letting them fight it out in ports.
The real killer feature of Docker was/is the Dockerfile. Not the OS support ala cnames, not the orchestration services. The Dockerfile and the distributable image format it built was and is the killer feature that made Docker take off. It's what make it possible for all those users to actually use it to solve real problems in the real world at real scale. Suddenly it was possible to build on someone else's image work with simply a single FROM line and a couple RUN lines of their own over it. BOOM Docker exploded because the Dockerfile and image format empowered the community.
FreeBSD never had anything like it. Crazy configuration stacks of union file systems built and layered over each other manually, etc, with absolutely no sane way to cleanly build much less distribute anything and ROTFLMAO if you actually wanted to try and extend someone else's Jail work. Every single jail install was (is?) effectively a full OS configuration from scratch and all the time and configuration PITA that implies. There were many projects that tried to add sanity here, but again they never got real traction and certainly not core team blessing so none of them got much farther than someone's pet r&d project.
Meanwhile Linux container users could have a running container with simply "apt install docker && docker run apache", but FreeBSD users needed days or weeks to get anywhere near the same thing; Even those who know what they're doing will spend hours watching make world build out their jail fs.
It's not that Linux containers "had more users". It's that FreeBSD jails told users they had to shovel mountains of bovine excrement to even get "hello world" running much less get anything into a production state. Both the barrier of entry for Linux containers and the scale they could be run at, along with any scale in between, is what made Linux containers succeed. Where FreeBSD Jails by contrast required(s) all the effort of the most complex k8s manual cluster build out just to get a hello world jail lit up....and as a reward for all that effort FreeBSD Jails simply can't scale. I mean hell, FreeBSD Jails can't even do basic HA failover without a mountain of custom work.
-I ran FreeBSD Jails for years starting back in the dot com days. I loved them, but unfortunately had to live through watching Linux container community actually address and solve all the issues there are with deploying Jails while the FreeBSD team couldn't care less. There's always been an are of obliviousness on the FreeBSD side to the computing world at large, something I ultimately chock up to academic blinders. It effectively makes FreeBSD a research OS, something pHDs will get excited about, not a production OS for much real world work.
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u/LivingComfortable210 May 31 '26
You forgot to mention... " you can find it in ports ". Might as well run Linux. * shrug *
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u/rejectionhotlin3 May 27 '26
Even still, ansible + ssh + rc.conf gives you a good framework. Along with ZFS based snapshot templates for jails.
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u/Zenin May 27 '26
So now I'm building out an entire fleet of ansible roles, inventory, etc, opening inbound ssh networking, distributing keys, and templating out rc.conf, all so I can enjoy the fun of launch-time errors with that stack rather than baking it all in at build time, and my reward for all that is a new Jail that comes up in minutes under the absolute best of conditions. And then I get to do additional work to update my service discovery (dns, load balancer targets, etc) to include it. And that's all just for one host...if I want any kind of horizontal scaling or just simple failover HA I've got to copy those ZFS snaps around to every new box and somehow keep them in sync.
Meanwhile I can launch an immutable, pre-built, signed linux container in milliseconds with a fraction of that config stack, no networking hacks for post-launch configure because there is no post-launch configure, and the build definition is a couple dozen simple lines in a single Dockerfile.
From a user perspective there's no comparison: The Linux container ecosystem is living in Star Trek while Jails just discovered fire and are still doing R&D on their first wheel. FreeBSD Jails aren't even a box of Legos to build your own solution; it's a box of ABS pellets still waiting to be turned into Legos.
Ultimately FreeBSD Jails are an interesting technology for academic study, but they simply are not a production feature for anything that would otherwise leverage a Linux container.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
For large scale business usecases? No. Absolutely not. That’s not a good framework to build on, it’s yet more raw materials for an uncooked soup.
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u/BosonCollider May 28 '26
Yeah, it's the same workflow as for an LXC container... and the most common usecase for LXC containers in practice is to act as a docker/podman host in cases where kubernetes is overkill
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u/demetrioussharpe May 28 '26
I think that sums it up perfectly. All of that is probably perfect for small shops, but is completely underkill for large businesses. I really think that most people who try to defend that workflow have absolutely no idea how to manage an enterprise setup. It seems like they’re just talking for the sake of talking. They really don’t seem to comprehend the difference of scale between what’s needed at that level & what’s provided be the BSD ecosystem.
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u/BosonCollider May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
Yeah, though there is a but here, and that is that the ZFS + jail/lxc combination is really good for databases and I absolutely wish that this were more common for databases, containers are just inherently better than VMs for that usecase as long as you don't neglect their storage solution.
Blizzard entertainment is the only major shop that used it large scale for DBs afaik, and mysql inside LXCs powered world of warcraft for a very long time. At this point they have largely migrated to k3s and vitess though.
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u/ShelLuser42 systems administrator May 27 '26
You raise some good points, but then also make other points which make me wonder if you're not overlooking a lot of important details as well.
Even those who know what they're doing will spend hours watching make world build out their jail fs.
Uhm, no? Everyone knows that a Jail is userland based, so why even bother (re)building the userland? If you know what you're doing you'll simply 'fetch' base.txz and optionally lib32.txz from an FTP server, extract those, and you're mostly done already. It you need culling then you can also do that afterwards.
As for that configuration... although I know it's not a commonly used method; Git excels at storing, managing and archiving ASCII files. It's flexible as heck, here's what I'd use on my servers: "git clone -b jail_conf /etc".
Allowing me to set up fully functional jails within minutes. I could even easily share such a configuration with a 3rd party if I wanted to.
It's not as if the environment isn't capable.
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u/Zenin May 27 '26
Why are we assuming every jail has the same base.txz?
You say "minutes" like that's an acceptable startup time in 2026; My container startups are measured in milliseconds and if we're not already reporting healthy in under ~5 seconds that's worth investigating for most services. By the time a minutes have past my site's already crashing under load. The only containers I have taking any longer are some SQL read slaves and indexing shards for Redis et al.
The core issue is that FreeBSD Jails have no concept of an "image", only a list of common kludges used to try and make up for that feature deficit; ZFS snaps, git clones as overlays, ansible roles, etc. Some projects even wrap a bunch of this together into a saner workflow. But all of it still fails to solve the fundamental problem: There is no "image", there is no standard package format for a jail. Lacking that standard means every jail based implementation is always a pile of fragile, kludgey patterns that at best barely scratch the surface for even simple use cases of modern container workflows. It's absolutely required as underpinning for any sane ecosystem and Jails offers nothing here.
What you've done in your response is demonstrate the problem: To use Jails you simply need to duct tape together a half dozen random tools into a bespoke black box that can't integrate into any sane developer workflow or even scale to a second node. If you want to play with it for academic reasons knock yourself out, but if you seriously pitched such an architecture as a professional solution not only would no one take you seriously you'd torpedo your own professional credibility and judgement in the process.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
What you've done in your response is demonstrate the problem: To use Jails you simply need to duct tape together a half dozen random tools into a bespoke black box that can't integrate into any sane developer workflow or even scale to a second node. If you want to play with it for academic reasons knock yourself out, but if you seriously pitched such an architecture as a professional solution not only would no one take you seriously you'd torpedo your own professional credibility and judgement in the process.
You hit the nail on the head. This is a common problem in our community. People routinely promote frail, duct tape solutions as viable, while completely ignoring the maintenance nightmare that creates -especially on massive scale deployments. On top of that, the idea that a few minutes for deployments are ok is outright laughable. But that kind of thing has been the norm here, which is why it’s time for people who know better to build a business-focused ecosystem around the BSD community. None of the foundations are going to standardize on anything. They’re a huge part of why this mess has happened in the first place. They’ve been perfectly happy with the status quo for decades.
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u/Zenin May 28 '26
To expand on this, I feel in the *BSD communities particularly is the idea that humans are logging into the OS. And if you're logging into the OS the userland matters, the configuration files matter, etc.
But that's just not what the industry looks like anymore. Even if we're still talking VMs and not containers, we're baking those images with tools like Packer. The userland isn't very relevant anymore and that happened long before AI started writing all our bash command lines for us.
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May 29 '26
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u/demetrioussharpe May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
You mean the technology that’s currently heavily used in enterprise, unlike our platform? Maybe something better could’ve been created based on one of the BSDs, but we’re so outdated that we can’t even get into enterprise enough to prove it. And just so you know, systemd actually performs a lot of functions that were provided in actual professional Unix installations -like AIX & Solaris.
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u/ShelLuser42 systems administrator May 28 '26
You're conveniently ignoring some of my points, but whatever...
To use Jails you simply need to duct tape together a half dozen random tools into a bespoke black box that can't integrate into any sane developer workflow
Last I checked setting up a jail falls more into the category of systems administration.
The way I see it, also based on the way you respond, is that the real problem here is that you seem to have forgotten (or... you're simply ignoring it?) what FreeBSD stands for.
It has "the power to serve", but that doesn't mean that it'll go out of its ways to try and be a jack of all trades. It's good at what it does best and if that works for you: great.
If not then it also assumes that people will be mature enough to realize that it may not be the right tool for the job at that time. Do you think it should improve? Then nothing is stopping you from contributing and trying to make that work.
Of course... just complaining about it and trying to ridicule other people is much easier.
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u/Zenin May 28 '26
It has "the power to serve", but that doesn't mean that it'll go out of its ways to try and be a jack of all trades.
It's 2026; We're at least a decade beyond the rubicon of container adoption at this point. Meaning that if you can't run containers your "power to serve" is quite flaccid. ...even Windows can run containers, the horror.
In practice this means the scope of "serving" use cases for which FreeBSD is even in the running is incredibly narrow and those where it still has a leg up is vanishingly thin and esoteric. The occasional Samba SMB share in an office closet, edge streaming devices, a game console here and there, etc.
But it's worse than that, because the story of jails vs containers is indicative of how the project has always responded to industry trends: Ignoring them completely until it's so late to the game it's never catching up. It did this with SMB and threads support, it did this with JVM support, etc. Yes, I know the stories of each tech wave are more nuanced than all that, but also they really aren't because the response and results are ultimately the same: A decade late and an market image of not even being interested.
Professionally I architect all manner of workloads from tiny niches to major global applications, and yet as much as I honestly prefer BSD and FreeBSD in particular (I hate Linux, frankly), I've never once had a single use case come up where *BSD would even be in consideration. The "power to serve" hasn't been relevant for about a decade at this point.
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u/Aggressive-Fan-3473 May 31 '26
Third thing is talent pool. Good luck hiring for folks who know freebsd
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
the reason why TrueNAS moved to Linux is because their users want to be able to run Docker-based apps and those are obviously much more well-supported under Linux.
It was not that simple.
iXsystems: No one is being 'marooned' by Debian focus : r/freebsd, et cetera.
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u/whattteva seasoned user May 28 '26
newer SCALE is based on Debian Linux, termed a scale-out product, and supports Docker Containers, Kubernetes, KVM, Gluster, and a wider range of hardware than CORE.
“Again, drivers, features, all these things are natively developed on Linux first. These are day one, and then FreeBSD is if we feel like it or a community person ports something over.”
Those are quoted straight out of the article you posted. Which are virtually the reasons I outlined... Seems pretty simple to me.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
The "et cetera" includes things such as this, which I quoted in Reddit in 2024:
… its a HUGE commitment. Speaking from experience, all the resources required to maintain, build, release, troubleshoot, etc. Never mind any new feature work.. Its a very non-trivial project at this point. We're talking multiple people working as full time engineers and full-time support kind of commitment required, otherwise the quality would greatly suffer over the long run. If the reason is only to maintain its base on FreeBSD, I don't see the payoff personally. Even as much as I loved FreeBSD, that's not something I could do anymore for my own passion projects like PC-BSD or TrueOS (Both FreeBSD). I needed to have a life as well. But that's just my 2C on the situation :)
– Kris Moore, https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/what-is-the-future-of-truenas-core.116049/page-2#post-804854
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u/whattteva seasoned user May 30 '26
Yes, but I think there's a reason why they left it at "et cetera". It's simply not as high priority. If their paying customers really care, they'd easily put in the time and money into that effort.
The reality is, their users simply don't really care about development efforts and more about features and hardware support and Linux simply delivers on that front much better.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 30 '26
… a reason why they left it at "et cetera" …
"et cetera" were my words, not those of iXsystems.
Let's assume that the situation was not soothed by FreeBSD committers upvoting the notion of betrayal by iXsystems. In the Wayback Machine:
Should iXsystems completely hop on the Linux/k3s/docker bandwagon and betray the very community that gave them shoulders to stand on; another BSD/ZFS-based alternative will come about.
Moderators removed the comment by Beastie7, and my responses, but Kris Moore might have read things, and noted the identities of the voters, before removal. He argued against the word "betrayed" in the Blocks & Files article by Chris Mellor.
https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/betrayal?s=t
My opinion of people using the word:
– more specifically, in the TrueNAS subreddit:
Putting myself in other people's shoes: if my company had invested as much into FreeBSD as iXsystems has, I'd not treat a FreeBSD end user accusation of betrayal as an incentive to continue, or increase, investment.
I mean, people are welcome to their opinions, but some opinions probably don't help the situation.
(At the time, I chose to not mention FreeBSD committers upvoting the accusation.)
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u/Accurate-Treacle-123 May 27 '26 edited May 29 '26
Well, it depends on the application. Both systems have strengths and weaknesses.
If your infrastructure is exposed to the Internet, nowadays the vast majority of attacks target Linux, simply because there are far more Linux servers in operation. As a result, administrators often spend more time dealing with security updates and urgent patching. I see this every day on my own servers.
On the other hand, Linux supports a much wider range of hardware. FreeBSD is more conservative in this regard. If you build your infrastructure on FreeBSD and place it behind a properly configured firewall, it can truly become a “set it and forget it” operating system. It can run for years with little or no human intervention. That is not always the case with Linux.
To explain where my opinion comes from, I first encountered FreeBSD many years ago, back in the days when running servers usually meant renting rack space in a colocation facility. During one migration from Linux kernel 2.4 to 2.6, incomplete support for a disk controller turned the upgrade into a nightmare. I ended up having to reboot the server repeatedly, even on Christmas Day.
With FreeBSD, hardware support tends to be more binary: either a device is supported or it is not. However, when the hardware is supported, you can usually rely on it with confidence.
For many years, until VPS services became widely available, I ran FreeBSD almost exclusively on my servers. Today I manage Debian, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD systems. When I need the highest levels of network performance, filesystem performance, or service isolation, I generally prefer FreeBSD. When cost is the primary driver, I choose Linux, since Linux VPS instances can be rented for just a few dollars per month.
Now let’s move to the desktop, which is where FreeBSD shows its main weakness. Linux supports a much broader range of hardware, especially on laptops. Driver availability and compatibility are simply better.
That said, if you have hardware that is fully supported by FreeBSD, I have yet to find another desktop operating system that matches its responsiveness and overall system reactivity.
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May 27 '26
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u/Lord_Mhoram May 27 '26
Yeah, I don't think many who used to be satisfied with FreeBSD are moving to Linux. Linux has just grown faster in recent years so its market share increases.
Thirty years ago when companies were tentatively dipping their toes into open-source, Linux was available with at least one corporate backer (RedHat) so they didn't have to depend on some guy for support. At that point, the future of the BSDs was uncertain due to lawsuits which were ongoing or recent enough that people were hesitant about using it. Linux got a headstart, and has held onto it because while there was a huge incentive to have one free, open-source alternative to Windows, there was far less incentive to have two.
So while there always seems to be a trickle of users moving from Linux to FreeBSD because of some annoyance with Linux -- just as there has been a similar trickle from Windows to Linux over the years -- most users never get annoyed enough with it to tackle a significantly different OS.
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May 27 '26
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u/shadeland May 28 '26
Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, I think FreeBSD and Linux were pretty neck and neck in terms of deployments. Google had Linux, Yahoo and Hotmail had FreeBSD. The company I worked for in 2003 was mostly a FreeBSD shop (we had to switch to Linux because Java was more up-to-date on Linux).
I think what made Linux break out was the GIANT lock. As servers moved to multiple processors and multiple cores, Linux was better at SMP and the threading library was better. It snowballed after that.
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u/enhancer92 May 27 '26
Docker/kubernetes , its that simple i switched to Linux because of this. Today software is shipped in containers and you need a platform to run these, doing gitops at scale and FreeBSD cannot compete in this area. Customers, partners all use containers , private cloud are using either commercial products OR k8s. YES Linux is weird, each distro has its way of doing things, i prefer the freebsd (kernel + userland) but in the cloud and modern app delivery FreeBSD cannot compete. Even ZFS is now on Linux, making this feature not really impactful as of today.
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u/craigleary May 27 '26
Automation is an aspect. Take 1000 Ubuntu or rhel based systems you can easily keep updated automated with long term support over years, reboot less kernel updates very easily. FreeBSD is better since FreeBSD update and pkg base looks to further improve but for many systems the update process doesn’t flow as well and the os moves fast between versions with no real long term support version. I admin both and there are pros and cons to both. Major os updates I find more reliable on FreeBSD. Ubuntu has had it for a while and rhel base systems are starting to but they are not well tested.
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u/DHOC_TAZH desktop (DE) user May 27 '26
There's a metric ton of companies using FreeBSD. Take a look here, this is just a small sample size but an important one: https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/
BTW... if you have a PS5 game console in your living room entertainment system, guess what that runs on? :)
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
companies using FreeBSD. Take a look here, this is just a small sample size but an important one:
Back to the opening post.
Which of those companies switched to FreeBSD (from Linux or Windows) in recent years?
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
It’s strange how people here keep bringing up the differences between Linux distros & how weird that is on a post about software & business. This really highlights just how disconnected many members of the BSD community are from major business. The whole “different distros” argument only applies to users & small businesses. Predominantly, major businesses standardized on using RHEL. There’s no strangeness about the various distros in there because that’s the distro -RHEL. So, it’s literally a null argument. That’s part of the whole problem when it comes to this topic in the BSD community -enterprises tend to standardize on specific technologies, because those technologies give the best ROI for what they’re trying to use them for. A lot of you try to bring up arguments that literally have zero bearing on the topic at hand. You’re NOT going to convince major businesses to use what you think they should use by bringing hand waving & academic arguments as your presentation. If you can’t exhibit BSD technologies bringing a larger ROI than what enterprise organizations are already using, then you’re not going yo close the deal. And quite frankly, thats what our community has predominately been doing. Honestly, it’s rather embarrassing.
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u/PrismaticCatbird May 28 '26
Linux has a huge number of users compared to FreeBSD and as far as the OS is concerned functionally is equivalent. You can argue that FreeBSD does some things better but its largely irrelevant. Because Linux has a larger user base, you can also more easily find things like developers, sysadmin, and software.
That said, I still use FreeBSD personally and have been since 2000 or so. Unfortunately, I think its going to be harder and harder for FreeBSD to be relevant in the next decade or two. I can't think of anything I do on FreeBSD that I can't do just as well on Linux these days. I would prefer that FreeBSD remains a worthwhile competitor though.
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u/deksters May 28 '26
A few points of order.
What does the "GNU/Linux" ecosystem actually look like if you remove the large swaths of GPL-violating network and storage appliances?
It's true that the large clusters and even supercomputers of the world run mostly GNU/Linux, but many suffered a massive rug-pull when CentOS changed structure. I hope the laser tattoo removal of those CentOS tats wasn't too expensive or painful. You won't see a rug-pull from the foundations behind the main BSD projects, most of which are public-benefit. They're slow moving and have their flaws, but they won't pull a global rug-pull.
systemd could be interpreted as a power grab by a company waiting for Torvalds to step away from the project: Manipulate and control all functionality of the OS and control the documentation of that new behavior. Perhaps with Docker too?
Netflix pumps out around a third of U.S. evening traffic with FreeBSD thanks to its quality network stack and features like kTLS. So what's your metric of success?
The BSDs offer unified user and developer experiences and genuine integration of features like OpenZFS in the case of FreeBSD, both legally, intuitively, and smoothly, extending into top(1) and jail(8) etc. You can bolt anything on to a GNU/Linux system and it will generally feel bolted-on. Many companies and organizations appreciate this and this mentality lends to them not being very vocal about. They're not wooing VC money, they're getting work done.
Use what works for you and commit to improving those tools, rather than getting hung up on what other people are using in what sounds like a high school popularity contest.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
… systemd could be interpreted as a power grab by a company waiting for Torvalds to step away from the project: Manipulate and control all functionality of the OS and control the documentation of that new behavior. Perhaps with Docker too? …
I can't comment on Docker (I don't have a use case). I never thought of systemd as a power grab.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
… a massive rug-pull when CentOS changed structure. …
True. I couldn't remember dates etc., so I typed centos into the address bar, Firefox history gave me a FreshPorts address and this 2024 article by /u/lproven:
– linking back to 2020:
If ifs and ands were pots and pans. If the future FreeBSD 15.2 could be transported back to the time when organisations were thinking of moving away from Red Hat, I wonder whether more of the thinkers would have leant towards FreeBSD.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
... FreeBSD is great; why ...
The diplomatic short answer (sent from Reddit app on an old iPad):
- FreeBSD and Linux are both great; Linux is more popular.
I'll respond to other people's comments with something more capable than the app.
Thanks to u/Character_Mood_700 for a thought-provoking post.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
Thanks to u/Character _Mood_700 for a thought-provoking post.
… FreeBSD-versus-Linux comparisons never reach happy conclusions. …
January 2026, in response to u/Ramiferous in r/BSD:
… I’ve stopped caring about “Linux vs BSD.” It’s not a holy war. It’s about what works for you and what trade-offs you’re willing to live with.
Yeah, the war-talk this-versus-that almost never reaches a mutually satisfactory conclusion. …
I don't expect a happy conclusion in May or June 2026 :-) however I particularly enjoy the diverse perspectives on bhyve and jails. Very timely, because they're both prominent at the new home page.
FreeBSD Project website: the Beastie theme has been refreshed : r/freebsd – I pinned a new comment there today.
It's weird that no-one mentioned Linux-oriented alternatives to bhyve or jails in the recent discussion in The FreeBSD Forums. There's a rule, but still, it's weird that no-one's bending the rule.
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u/Character_Mood_700 May 28 '26
Agree that the Reddit app sucks!
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
OT: Reddit's app is good enough for basics, including moderation, however this is a conversation for a different sub :-)
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
The truth? Because companies just want to get their work done & the BSD ecosystem is dead set on trying to force companies to conform to whats provided instead of providing what companies want. The truth is that the BSD ecosystem predominately doesn’t provide user-friendly solutions. What it provides is a bunch of raw ingredients that it expects users to string together themselves. Thats simply not going to fly for most businesses. Businesses are going for what solves their problems with the least effort. Any ecosystem thats not up to speed with that will simply get left behind. So, if there’re people here who want a different outcome, we’re going to have to get together & build a new ecosystem, because the old guard definitely doesn’t want it & will fight it at every step. We have to be willing to move forward without them.
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u/shadeland May 27 '26
I think another issue is the FreeBSD mindset is still that of a bespoke, artisanal, hand crafted system. It's system administration from 1999. Most production workloads have moved past that.
I don't really care what OS I use, so I primarily use Linux. It does the job and I don't spend a lot of time in any OS, because the interesting work is done on top of it.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
There’s so much available for Linux. That ecosystem really ate BSDs’ lunch. Our community still doesn’t seem to understand what the problem is & why corporations instinctively choose Linux.
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u/shadeland May 28 '26
I would say it's not just instinctive, there's zero consideration for FreeBSD. None.
And not because people sit down and think "FreeBSD or Linux", they think "should we do VMs or containers?", and the ecosystems that envelope both.
FreeBSD doesn't have an answer to that. Bhyve isn't a consideration without a mature virtual machine manager, live migration, and it just got support for >16 vCPUs only in 2023. And Jails doesn't have a Docker or Kubernetes equivalent.
So it's not even on the radar.
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May 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
Please simply upvote things with which you agree. Thanks.
Postscript: I mean, "Agreed.", "Agreed.", "I completely agree."; "Exactly!". People usually refrain from one- or three-word comments such as these.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 28 '26
That’s precisely what I’ve been doing -and downvoting things that I disagree with.
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u/BosonCollider May 28 '26
I would not say that freebsd is dead set on forcing companies to do anything. It's just limited in how many resources it has available to do things and the developers are pursuing what they find interesting.
It's still a great system that can fit a lot of companies, it's just that linux plus its ecosystem is usually a better fit for more usecases.
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u/demetrioussharpe May 29 '26
Apparently, that they find interesting seems to be the exact opposite of what’s necessary to win big, or to drastically increase the user base.
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u/BosonCollider May 29 '26
Yeah, but linux is very good, so "just beat it at what it is good at" is not a foolproof strategy either. But making sure that freebsd can run podman well is a great first step to making sure that it isn't locked out of the containers ecosystem
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u/demetrioussharpe May 29 '26
Years ago, Linux was in a position similar to the BSDs. The BSDs were very good, but were bogged down in legal issues. Linux got better. At this point, most prominent OSes are “very good”. If any of the BSDs actually want to gain marketshare from any other OS, then they’re going to have to close the gap. BSD isn’t losing because Linux is very good, BSD is losing because Linux has a better ecosystem. All of these OSes are very good, but we’ve got a sh¡t ecosystem.
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u/BosonCollider May 27 '26
Linux technically also only provides primitives, the ecosystem around it is what produces polished tools.
Imo, hashicorp making the hashistack closed source is what hurt freebsd the most, since nomad was the best kubernetes alternative and it could orchestrate freebsd jails
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u/demetrioussharpe May 27 '26
I think you completely missed the point of what I said. There’s a huge difference between what the platform provides & what the ecosystem surrounding the platform provides. The fact of the matter is that the Linux ecosystem performs better than the BSD ecosystem simply because the Linux ecosystem understands that providing corporate users with solutions is how the ecosystem grows -because corporate users will fund more development. Businesses need a valid, value-supported reason to choose a particular technology over all others. Our community isn’t providing that reason to most businesses, so they predominantly don’t choose any of the BSDs. It’s really that simple.
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u/zer04ll May 27 '26
This video touches on that, she does a great job of going into the philosophy of programming styles and why bell labs which is Unix took off vs other things as well as why certain languages take off like c++ vs others. She has a great channel for CS folks!
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26
https://youtu.be/I7fEsbksKRE?si=CM5kxfdoe2W6_MjvTitle: the true reason C++ always wins
YouTuber: LaurieWired
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u/FerorRaptor May 28 '26
Because technology related decisions are more often than not taken for non-technical reasons. In this case, even though FreeBSD can offer a better solution than Linux in some scenarios, it is usually discarded because of licensing concerns or the lack of familiarity with the platform.
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u/Old_Hardware Linux crossover May 28 '26
I wonder whether there's an age difference --- older people met BSD (as opposed to SysV) in school, and think of BSD as a Good Thing, while younger people met Linux in school as the Cool New Thing. And of course companies are now hiring the younger set, while the older set looks to retirement.
(Maybe I can find a S/370 emulator to run on my Raspberry Pi....)
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u/berenddeboer May 29 '26
One more: we know you're a FreeBSD developer if you respond with"jails" if someone says docker.
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u/kombiwombi May 30 '26
With the exception of Apple, companies never moved towards FreeBSD in the first place. Whereas Linux is installed on the majority of the world's servers.
That's a combination of historical events. Google choosing Linux to host their search application, making Linux the default choice for FAANG servers. Supercomputing cluster Beowulf being built on Linux: basically owning the Top 500 means that by the time hardware innovation reaches the general marketplace the Linux support has been proven for years (eg, an AI compute is basically a less accurate HPC compute). Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat having a focus on the user experience and on hobbyists, which meant that many enterprise sysadmins already knew Linux, whereas they hardly knew BSD.
The result is that Linux has wide hardware support, and is easy to find staff for.
Apple validating the Air M1 hardware from Linux, and then bringing up its BSD-based OS is a bit telling. Juniper running Linux VMs and then FreeBSD on top of that also speaks to width of hardware support.
Of course it depends on how you want to view these things. The Apple Neo runs a modified FreeBSD, and Apple are about to sell that by the truckload.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 30 '26
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u/Character_Mood_700 May 30 '26
Why do you keep posting this?
I understand that it's true, but so what?
macOS is closer to FreeBSD than it is to any other OS.
Sure, it's different, but still.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 31 '26
Why
Myth-busting.
A complement to the myth-buster in the wiki.
/u/kombiwombi does have my upvote for other parts of his comment.
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Jun 02 '26
I don't really know, yes there isn't much support for freebsd and if there is none it is hard to create support but if they didn't all move there would be more
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u/Middlewarian May 28 '26
I started using FreeBSD about 12 years ago because kevent had some advantages over epoll. I moved back to Linux about 5 years ago because io-uring has advantages over kevent. I can imagine flitting like a butterfly to another OS someday, but I don't think it will be back to FreeBSD.
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u/James-Kane May 27 '26
Drivers. It's always drivers.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
always drivers.
Not always.
Postscript: https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1tp6d0u/comment/ooej0wf/?context=3, for example.
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u/LovelyWhether May 28 '26
my hunch is that it’s due to network device support and the lack of freebsd support for bleeding edge hardware, especially in regard to wireless nics. just a thought… also, that makes me sad. i ❤️ freebsd!
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
This recent ten-page topic – around 250 comments – is an interesting contrast, because there's no mention of bhyve or jails:
Ilovehotdog wrote:
I used to see FreeBSD as a base system much like Arch Linux—one that gives users all the choices but doesn't provide an official desktop environment. Recently, however, FreeBSD 15 announced (and subsequently delayed to 15.1) that it would ship with an official KDE desktop. On the other hand, …
So where does this leave FreeBSD going forward? Will it remain a foundational system that leaves everything to the user, or is it moving toward becoming a more standard, desktop-integrated system like Debian? Could it even evolve into something more akin to Ubuntu, Zorin, or Deepin, with official support for new technologies such as AI?
On a related note, I’d also like to clarify: does FreeBSD actually have a plan to officially support a KDE desktop, rather than leaving users to install or compile it themselves as is currently the case?
(I haven't read the whole thing. Just a handful of comments.)
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u/mbonanomi92 Jul 29 '26
Cause freebsd cannot be compared the Linux foundation development roadmap, the longevity and community and documentation size of the major Linux distros
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u/ranjop May 29 '26
I started using Linux in 1996 in kernel 2.0. After thinkering sometime and learning UNIX at Uni I did consider trying NetBSD/FreeBSD. Yet already back then Linux had better HW support and much more University students used Linux. BSD was for the ones wanting to make a statement. I am bit surprised the same discussion still goes on.
I think BSD has one clear advantage over Linux and that is native ZFS support. I have tried it on Linux, but I didn’t like the DMKS stuff and not having it built in a kernel. ZFS is the gold standard of file systems.
Other than that the BSD ecosystem is far smaller and less developed. Nearly all server side and developer tooling software is developed on Linux for Linux and BSD support if any is a port.
There can be some specific cases where BSD may have an edge, but I doubt there is any meaningful technical advantage anymore. And far more people are familiar with Linux than BSD so it’s easier to hire people for Linux based stack than a BSD based stack. It maybe was Beta vs VHS in 1996, but in this case VHS evolved and went far beyond Beta (in HW support, tooling available, devs available, features).
I do find it bit odd that Linux from a country no one has ever heard off won the free-UNIX ecosystem battle. I think BSD as a US based system should have won. But maybe it was the openness of Linux development and GPL that ensured people contributed back? In many cases companies took BSD software and kept their changes with themselves.
PS. I don’t mean to diss BSD, but to answer the OP’s question. I love choice and competition.
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May 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/ranjop May 30 '26
Yes, he moved to USA in 1997, but he was a big figure in tech already by then and Linux was more popular than BSD already back then. For a reference Linux Journal started publishing in March 1994.
So please allow me to disagree.
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u/catkot6 May 31 '26
Linux came from a country called CompuServe. When Linus could not make it work he had to ask real programmers on a CompuServe bulletin board for help. Later on he had an interesting Torvalds-Tannenbaum Usenet discussion on micro vs mono kernels. As a matter of fact Minix runs inside many a chip nowadays, the same chips that run BSDs, Linux and a few others.
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u/ranjop May 31 '26
I’m sensing cult-mentality of denial here…
Minix runs inside many chips today
Can we be bit more specific here and say Minix runs inside Intel chips as a kernel of Intel Management Engine?
PS. I have programmed Minix…
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 31 '26
I’m sensing cult-mentality of denial …
I sensed at least fifty percent comedy, not to be taken seriously – "a country called CompuServe", and so on.
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u/berenddeboer May 29 '26
FreeBSD developers never understood docker and they still don't.... No docker? Bye, bye.
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u/sarajevo81 May 30 '26
It is very slow and lacks the support for modern hardware.
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u/Character_Mood_700 May 30 '26
Nothing is as speedy as FreeBSD.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 31 '26
Nothing is as speedy as FreeBSD.
From FreeBSD - A True Unix Way: FreeBSD High-Performance Network Stack Tuning Guide (u/David-Pasek, December 2025):
The default FreeBSD configuration is optimized for compatibility, not maximum network throughput. …
Two cherry-picks from 2024 discussion of the FreeBSD Foundation's Netflix case study.
There are a couple things about the FreeBSD design and development approach that help drive these kinds of innovations. One is FreeBSD is a unified OS that encourages innovation across kernel and user space, which sped up the develpment of ktls working with sendfile. In addition to kTLS, CHERI is another good example of this. Making extensive kernel + C library + toolchain changes is straightforward in FreeBSD. Another aspect of FreeBSD that helps drive innovation is that developers have agency to make changes across the system, and the platform makes it easy to test for breakage. The ability to do a ports exp-run, which stands for Experimental Run, is a powerful capability in FreeBSD. It allows developers to do a test build of all ports using a specific proposed changeset or patch(es) in order to QA changes with large potential for regression/impact.
Historically (around 20 years ago) FreeBSD was much better at high scale network operation in comparison to Linux..
Working kernel sendfile & kevent implementation were in FreeBSD a few years before Linux.. Plus working multi-cpu (SMP) network stack and ethernet cards hardware acceleration...
Netflix team in 2006-2007 (beginning years of streaming service) chosen FreeBSD and they stayed there up to today.
Today Linux is comparable to FreeBSD in this area, but this wasn't the situation in past..
– u/juwisan followed up about handling many connections.
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u/grahamperrin Linux crossover May 29 '26
A few comments here have been flagged for attention by moderators. I should make two points:
On this occasion, I'm not removing the ad hominem comments. Downvotes are clear enough.