Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one. Leverage containers. Statelessness.

I don't want to spend time meticulously configuring things beyond the core infrastructure my services run on. I should probably explore FreeBSD more, but honestly, with containers being everywhere now, I'm not seeing a compelling reason to bother. I realize jails are a valid analogue, but broadly speaking the UX is not the same.

All this being said, I have this romantic draw to FreeBSD and want to play around with it more. But every time I set up a basic box I feel teleported back to 2007.

Are there any fun lab projects, posts, educational series targeted at FreeBSD?

The only thing I currently run on FreeBSD is my storage box. ZFS is absolutely amazing, and FreeBSD supports it fully and without any of the "jank" you'd get running ZFS on Linux. It Just Works (tm), bottom to top. Anything else, I want what I'm familiar with on Linux, like containers and systemd services. I know some people really love pf, but I've been using iptables for so long it would be annoying to switch at this point. So really, it comes down to what you're familiar and comfortable with, and using the right tool for the job.

> ZFS is absolutely amazing, and FreeBSD supports it fully and without any of the "jank" you'd get running ZFS on Linux.

This is why I use FreeBSD as well for my home server, first class ZFS support out of the box. Void Linux musl on my desktop.

I had an old 2TB ZFS array that was part of a trunas setup kicking around for years. I needed to recover some files from it so I hooked all the disks to a motherboard and booted FreeBSD live. I didn't have to do anything, the array was already up and running when I logged in. ezpz.

ZFS is a first-class citizen on Void Linux, too. There's a lot of care and consideration put into the kernel packages to ensure compatibility with ZFS. ZFSBootMenu is 'native' to Void as well, and the features it provides are quite far ahead of what FreeBSD's bootloader has.