I saw this in my email from ZD.net. I hppen to read the arthicle because I have seen decussion here on the fourm about this Unix type of OS.
I thought maybe some of you might enjoy reading it too. Find it here
Title “I’ve used Linux for decades, but I’d switch to FreeBSD for this one feature”
I read it… he means stability.
I would have guessed having the system update software completely separate from the package software. You can roll Freebsd to a new release, even over several releases, and you can roll it backwards to an earlier release. No Linux can do that.
The UNIX that the MacOS mach / microkernel boots is FreeBSD based - it then loads the Quartz MacOS GUI… MacOS comes with “Terminal” and it plonks you into a FreeBSD like shell (the default is ZSH).
I’ve used FreeBSD, NetBSD and to a lesser extent OpenBSD…
They’re all good, but FreeBSD probably the easiest to use…
My NAS runs FreeBSD (it’s TrueNAS Core, iX Systems have moved over to TrueNAS Scale and it runs on top of Linux instead of BSD)… Reckon I’ll just stick to TrueNAS Core… Been using it 15 years or so… Not sure what I’ll do further on down the road… The hardware I run it on is nearly 15 years old - but it’s fine, HP N40L Microserver, dual core AMD Turion II, 16 GB ECC (DDR3) and 16 TB storage (RAIDZ+1 so I get about 11 TB use-able on 4 x 4 TB HDDs) - I should really by a spare Power Supply for it… Could probably keep it going for-ever - just upgrade the HDD’s (incrementally) to 8 or 12 or 16 GB each…
Or I could always install XigmaNAS - which is still FreeBSD based, and was formerly called NAS4Free and it support ZFS natively too…
Always found the BSDs were better (much better) at doing ZFS than Linux… That may no longer be true - but last time I tried ZFS on Linux, was Ubuntu (20 or 22?), and I could see ZFS read and write PIDs eating CPU cycles - NEVER saw that on TrueNAS / FreeBSD…
Yes.
Netbsd has some deficiencies, but it is really interesting to go back to Unix basics.
I only briefly tried Openbsd … the partitioning scared me off.
I had it running on my Sun Ultra 5 (64 bit SPARC IIi RISC) - maybe 5 years ago? 512 MB of RAM, and booting off a CF card in an IDE (PATA) adaptor… Yeah - partitioning was a bit different…
On Solaris - we didn’t describe partitions, we called them “slices”… so the first disk, on the first controller would be c0d0 - and that would be partitioned as slices e.g. c0d0s1, c0d0s3…
I keep meaning to get it out again (the Ultra5)… it’s interesting playing around on non-AMD / Intel architectures… Not that I do much with those different instruction sets (pretty much nothing).
Last time I tried to compile something on Sparc - was POVRay Raytracer on Solaris 10 (dual Sparc IIIi SunBlade 2500 silver) - and gave up - just a VAST insurmountable array of dependancies… The developer team have a “UNIX” branch - but - it’s almost 100% Linux only… Before Oracle took over Sun - some volunteers ran a great service called SunFreeware - essentially GNU equivalents of UNIX commands (like “tar” - GNU tar is exponentially more powerful and useful than SunOS UNIX “tar”) - and they’d have pre-compiled Solaris PKG files of POVRay for download (a Solaris PKG is like a DEB or RPM).
But when Larry Ellison got his hands on Solaris - Oracle’s lawyers sent nasty “cease and desist” threats to the operators of SunFreeware…
I inherited a Sparc workstation handmedown. It was not Sun , it was Opentech.
It had a 19in CRT monitor that occupied the whole desk.
It died somewhere in the early 2000’s
I really kinda hate how Discourse default when you click on a link, is open the link in the CURRENT tab… Been using Discourse forums for over 10 years - and it’s STILL ANNOYING!
Anway : there’s also this :
One thing I kinda like about the BSD’s - they have no qualms about shipping proprietary BLOBs… That used to drive me crazy when install Debian years ago - and even Ubuntu would ask you first, before installing proprietary stuff (like drivers!). This “feature” is probably the main reason why RMS (Stallman) won’t touch BSD 
I really don’t know what you mean. When I click on the link, I go directly to the web page.
Discourse forums - don’t know what that is either. Still a little wet behind the ears.
Well, the “go back one page” brings me back to what I was looking at. Is there another way to add a link that will take a user to the next tab? Let me try it another way.
Oh yeah, this way brings up a new tab. Is this the preferred method for most people? I kinda of like the second method myself of going to a new tab.
Thanks @daniel.m.tripp for pointing out the difference.
My whinge wasn’t directed at you…
Discourse is the product name of the forum software of ITSFOSS - i.e. this “site”
On most pages/sites, when you click on a posted link / URL - it opens in a new tab… On Discourse forums, the default is to open in the current Browser Tab - i.e. so you leave the page you were reading from… it’s a tad annoying… have to rememer to right-click the link, and select “Open in new tab”… it’s minor - trivial - but still an annoyance
Me too… Way back with Netscape Navigator, or I.E. - you only had a single tab - the alternative was “Open In a New Browser Window” which could get messy… The “second method” is the default nearly everywhere… just not on Discourse based forums…
Anyway - sorry for sidetracking this thread, didn’t mean to derail the discussion…
I reckon I’m going to try and carry on with GhostBSD on my older Dell laptop (E6xxxx series - quad core 16 GB RAM 512 M2 SSD)…
I had trouble booting Ghostbsd in a VM?
Had success once, then could nor repeat it.
I have FreeBSD 15.0 running on my tower. I upgraded it from 14.3. My goal is to learn some new stuff with it but I’m struggling with the idea to re-install it and use ZFS file system. It’s UFS at the moment. I don’t use it for anything so I can just wipe it and start fresh. It’s dual boot machine with two SSDs.
On laptops there’s been issues with WiFi and the 15.0 should fix some of those issues.
Be careful with zfs in a dual boot. It tends to want to takeover the whole disk.
It might help if you had one OS on each ssd.
I don’t dual boot - so it should never be a problem for me… ZFS is way better than any other software RAID I’ve ever used, and nearly all software RAID solutions CRAP on hardware RAID…
One of my favourite things about ZFS - if you’re booting a new O/S that supports ZFS - and it sees a bunch of disks (or one disk) it knows there’s a zpool there and it learns all about it - MAGICALLY!
Try doing that with LVM!
Sheesh - you have to import the LVM DB into your system before it even realises there’s a block device with some volume management on it (ZFS is not that dumb)
My shellscript runs “lvscan” :
╭─x@titanii ~/bin ‹main*›
╰─➤ cat c--tx.bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# mount old LUKS pezzo di merda
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme1n1p3 crypto_LUKS
# sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 crypto_LUKS
# nvme1n1p3
sudo lvscan
sleep 5
sudo mount /dev/data/root /mnt/oldc--t
OK - sure - ZFS might not automagically mount the volume… but it’s way more robust than anything else out there…
I have to do that EVERY time I want to mount my old NVMe LUKS SSD on every boot…
With LVM you have :
a Physical Volume (e.g. pvcreate)
a Volume Group (e.g. vgcreate)
a Logical Volume (e.g. lvcreate)
an XFS or ext filesystem on a Logical Volume!
ZFS is magical 
I’ve done it before - moved 4 x 1.5 TB HDDs out of one system - plonked them in another, booted FreeNAS - and it finds the zpool and knows how it’s configured! It’s like black magic!
Yes, I have two disks so FreeBSD has its own disk
Just installed it this morning 25/12 - no issues whatsoever… Actually - a few initial ones - e.g. I tried it with 2 GB RAM and it wouldn’t boot - then 4 GB - on 20 GB HDD - still wouldn’t boot - so I gave it 50 GB disk, 4 CPU and 8 GB RAM - running quite well and updating…
Bridged networking “works” (I’ve enabled sshd but I can’t ssh to it) sorta - switched graphics to VGA and running it 1920x1080 on my QHD desktop…
I like it… I think I prefer MATE (Gnome 2 based) to Cinnamon (Gnome 3 based)… By default MATE comes with a transparency enabled terminal app too… Sure you can add another terminal app in LMDE - but I like how it comes out of the box like that already on MATE…
I will try again with more ram.
Did you use legacy or uefi in the VM?
I prefer gnome2 style . You can turn on the pull down menu in gnome3
Don’t remember - I just used the default that VirtManager presents for DragonflyBSD (it only mentions DragonFly and NetBSD when it asks about the O/S - FreeBSD isn’t listed) - I think it’s “legacy” - after the install - it asked me did I want BIOS boot or something else (don’t remember) - I checked “BIOS”…
Right… the default is legacy in virt-manager… ie puts an MBR on the virtual disk.
What you choose in the install script has to match.
Just a quick update - I researched my issue with being unable to ssh to a GhostBSD install (I have a VM in QEMU / KVM and I also have an older Dell laptop - both runing GhostBSD) - had to disable the firewall and reboot - so - if a firewall’s important, maybe don’t do this - me? I don’t care - someone would have to break into my WiFi or ethernet to get access to either of them :
Add “firewall_enable=NO” to /etc/rc.conf :
cp /etc/rc.conf /etc/rc.conf.$(date '+%Y%m%d')
echo "firewall_enable=\"NO\"" >> /etc/rc.conf
shutdown -r now
Have you a way of accessing Linux ext4 filesystems from Ghostbsd.
My last attampt with Netbsd was a kludge.