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FreeBSD General Other questions regarding FreeBSD which do not fit in any of the categories below. |
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Reasons Not to Use FreeBSD
I am using and learning Linux these days. On an impulse, I looked up FreeBSD and found it to be very interesting. There is a lot of material out there suggesting why people should use FreeBSD. But I couldn't find any honest answers on why, when, and where FreeBSD would not be a good choice. If everyone interested in learning about FreeBSD could see a list of why FreeBSD might not be a good choice (its limitations), much more informed decisions could be made. For those of you using FreeBSD, can you give the *nix community any reason(s) in what situation you would say: "do not use FreeBSD"?
From what I seem to have gleaned from online resources, maybe the latest and greatest hardware is not supported right away; it may take some time for the hardware to be supported. What does your experience say about this and other "problems" with freebsd? |
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Generally FreeBSD would be a bad choice where GNU/Linux would also be a bad choice - as is the case with any Unix derivative, really.
I guess one reason not to use FreeBSD instead of GNU/Linux is that it is supported by even less proprietary software (because *BSD doesn't get the "exposure" that GNU/Linux does). However FreeBSD has binary compatiblity with Linux from what I've read, so that shouldn't really be a problem. There are plenty of reasons to use FreeBSD over GNU/Linux - friendlier licensing, better performance (in many cases but not all), kqueue, etc. Last edited by nfries88; 12th November 2008 at 06:09 AM. |
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I for one can only think of the fallowing reason:
If you like playing 3d games, don't use BSD..... don't use linux..... use windows.... I was Windows user, then i switched to linux.... Then i tried FreeBSD.... and switched back to linux.... However in few days i used FreeBSD (about month) something changed in me... And linux wasn't giving me satisfaction anymore.... So now i use FreeBSD Reasons why not to use any particular system depends on individual itself... I bet there are some creeps out there still using dos |
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FreeBSD Jails are OS-level virtualization feature and as such thing works great, but if you need full/hardware assisted virtualization like Xen/KVM/VirtualBox then FreeBSD is not for you.
I do not know any other reasons for 'no' instead of virtualization.
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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0/ OpenBSD has better wireless support
1/ FreeBSD default SHELL for root is (t)csh 2/ Multimedia plugins for surfing the web all suck, b/p to use Linux versions of all 3/ 3D Gaming needs more stringent hardware shopping guidelines. that's about it, unless one wants to get into stuff like virtualbox/vmware/file systems/bike sheds
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. |
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OpenBSD will never support tools like nidsgen, period. Quote:
1/ In my experience the MPlayer plugin is buggy and just how much depends on the browser used. I've often had to send SIGKILL to flock-bin processes after closing linux-flock or just closing a tab, due to having the MPlayer plugin in use when the window/tab was closed. Viewing multiple video streams at once has also caused my browser to hang on many occasions. I do not call this usable enough, to not say that it sucks. 2/ My note to be prepared to use Linux versions of software, is because of increasing need for Flash 8+ plugins and the road to FreeBSD 9. Not to mention that a number of people can't live with out that infernally annoying website known as youTube! 3/ I do not consider downloading and opening MPlayer independently to be a 'browser plugin', if you mean making the web browser use an mplayer plugin whenever a flash plugin (et. al.) is requested for video playback , then I see your point ;-) N.B. I use MPlayer for almost all my video playback needs, be it in a web browser and beyond.
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. Last edited by TerryP; 12th November 2008 at 08:36 PM. |
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2. Flash 9 works on FreeBSD with the Linux compatibility layer and nspluginwrapper quite well at least on PC-BSD. swfdec is also progressing very well. One thing that's good about swfdec is that it blocks flash content by default and that Youtube and Google Video compat are very well maintained. 3. I care about quality drivers, not raw support. If I cared about the latter, then I'd use Linux.
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"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." MacBook Pro (Darwin 9), iMac (Darwin 9), iPod Touch (Darwin 9), Dell Optiplex GX620 (FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE) |
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I really wish I could say the same about the ~2 years that I've been using it on FreeBSD.
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. |
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OpenBSD will NEVER get support for NDIS. That is the principal philosophical difference from FreeBSD. If you subscribe to such kind of puritan OpenBSD philosophy that might be one of the reason not to use FreeBSD. But on the more serous note, I could probably think of 3-5 reasons not to use FreeBSD on the desktop or server. Common "problems" for FreeBSD desktop are: 1. Lacks drivers for cheap USB cameras so VoIP with video is not possible 2. Lacks drivers for Scanners. Even the one supported by sane-backends often do not work on FreeBSD as developers are lazy to list their vendor IDs explicitly on uscanner driver without which they can not work. On the another hand you can always recompile your kernel with support for your scanner. 3. Lets talk more about printer and scanners. There are lots of proprietary drivers for Printers and Scanners written only for Linux. Usually people who are using computers on the desktop just want those kinds of things to work not to do treasure hunting for supported devices. This is in particularly true for scanners. Things like HPLIP do not work well on FreeBSD. They are coded for Linux. On FreeBSD your YMMV with HPLIP. 4. So what did you say about Gnash and YouTube? You are kidding right? Gnash doesn't support Flash 9. So yes Flash is really problematic on FreeBSD. Saying different is fooling yourself. 5. If you need video tuner card FreeBSD is not a good choice for you unless you want to hunt on ebay for specific video tuner card with bktr chip-set. OK I will stop this cra***. I said only 5 reasons why one want to rethink running FreeBSD on the desktop. Now why wouldn't you want it on the server? Hmmm This one is more difficult. 1. If you want the latest PF FreeBSD is not for you. 2. If you want Xen then FreeBSD is not for you. 3. If your server is not i386 or in the worst case scenario amd64 I would think twice before running FreeBSD on it. 4. You have a mother board with 128 i386 processors and 256GB of RAM you might be better of with RedHat Linux. Enough of this bashing of FreeBSD Last edited by Oko; 12th November 2008 at 09:30 PM. |
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IMHO Solaris / OpenSolaris will be better here, but I would like to see benchmarks
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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For Sparc64 yes. Last edited by Oko; 12th November 2008 at 10:17 PM. |
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>ignoring fact that OpenBSD doesnt support NDIS. Ignoring the fact that NDIS in FreeBSD is in a sorry state. You'll get a better wrapper in Linux - so what? You will get even better support in Windows ;-) >Wrong, Flash can be used via gnash/wine/youtube-dl combination. Gnash ist PITA like swfdec. Something really useful instead of youtube-dl would be clive. Furthermore Flash 9 is possible (not for videos only) with the help of Linuxulator. There is more than Youtube, Youp0rn and videos ... >OpenBSD just got WPA recently Irrelevant, WPA is PITA - consumer grade security. Every respectable company or university has got VPN. So what? Let's fight? Remember it's BSD! Don't start something like a Linux distro war.
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use UNIX or die :-) |
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- Ports: in my experience they are clumsy, ineffective and time-consuming (try to compile OpenOffice and you know what I mean). - poor support for WebVideo and other multimedia applications (i.e. Flash et al.): Gnash & Co. are some kind of a workaround one can live with but almost any Linux-Distribution does it better (and right here right now I don't argue from an ideological point of view about blobs). - no speed advantages on desktops or laptops. I ran FreeBSD and Debian for a while on my PC. Both were used for plain average user tasks (surfing the net, writing letters, working on digital photographs, listening to music and so on). I didn't found anything that FreeBSD did better than Debian exept one thing: It's easier to configure a new kernel for FreeBSD. Well, that sounds quite negative, but I wouldn't say that FreeBSD is a bad OS. No, it's ok, but it didn't serve my needs as good as other OS did (and do). Other people will think totaly different. |
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1) Because all you want do is play Fallout and Oblivion.
2) Because you want to be cool like everyone else. 3) Because your mom said your not allowed to.
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick |
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If you plan on using FreeBSD on any machine which isn't i386 or AMD64-based, you might want to reconsider.
Yes, FreeBSD does run on UltraSPARC, PowerPC, and ARM, but these other architectures are not nearly as well-supported as the generic PC versions. Also, if you're very politically or philosophically minded, you might want to avoid FreeBSD because of its use of blobs (although systems without blobs built-in are rare). OpenBSD, however, is not affected by these problems. EDIT: While I'm here, I must ask: Terryp, this is probably just my ignorance, but what is so bad about the root user's shell being tcsh?
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"Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else." - /usr/games/fortune Last edited by snes-addict; 12th November 2008 at 04:53 PM. Reason: Want to ask another question. |
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