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Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

(aumont.fr)
185 points psxuaw | 1 comments | 31 Mar 25 12:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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asveikau ◴[31 Mar 25 16:22 UTC] No.43536779[source]▶
ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. I have a machine with a zfs pool running samba and nfsd.

Philosophically I tend to prefer *BSDs over Linux. I have a few FreeBSD machines, one OpenBSD, and one Linux.

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0x457 ◴[31 Mar 25 17:15 UTC] No.43537356[source]▶
> ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me.

Maybe in the past there was an argument for that, but ever since FreeBSD started using OpenZFS implementation...what's the difference?

My ideal OS would be something like NixOS, but on FreeBSD and with better language than Nix.

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bluGill ◴[31 Mar 25 20:39 UTC] No.43539695[source]▶
ZFS is a first class part of FreeBSD. you can use it on linux, but it will always have some rough edges. How rough it open to question though, for some it works well.
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tomxor ◴[31 Mar 25 22:16 UTC] No.43540561[source]▶
Used ZFS on Debian in production for 8 years, yet to experience rough edges but always interested to learn.
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asveikau ◴[01 Apr 25 00:55 UTC] No.43541720[source]▶
I have never had a good experience with out of tree kernel modules on linux, so I am skeptical of this report. Usually for Linux Debian is my distro of choice.
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1. tomxor ◴[01 Apr 25 16:50 UTC] No.43548951[source]▶
I have little experience with kernel modules. ZFS is the only one I have long term experience with on Debian.

The only issue I've had with the kernel module aspect is VPS configuration, I use Linode and they used to automatically set everything to use the hypervisor kernel, but the kernel module is obviously built against the versions installed on your OS and these will probably be different.

All you have to do is make sure the boot configuration is set to use GRUB if using a VPS. Linode seem to have switched to this by default for Debian now.