Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

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.

> 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.

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.

Used ZFS on Debian in production for 8 years, yet to experience rough edges but always interested to learn.

My experience with ZFS (over 10 years ago now) was awful. Still have a bad taste in my mouth though no doubt it's much improved today.

Sounds like maybe you were holding it wrong? This is year 20 for ZFS in production.

Though Linux support a decade ago with ZFS was pretty rough around the edges. That's not true anymore for many distros of Linux.

I didn't run it. But several times a year there were multi-day outages for "rebuilds" and at one point Oracle consultants were involved to get it back on its feet.

If that's Oracle's ZFS then it's not really comparable, it's essentially a very old closed fork. So on top of using a languishing outdated version you have another reliability problem (Oracle). It's a little bit like comparing OracleDB to MariaDB.

Most people use Open ZFS which is from the Illumos project, which was basically the escape hatch that the engineers who wrote ZFS used when Oracle tried to close source Solaris after the Sun acquisition. There are decades of improvements in all of the OSS versions that comprise Illumos (which Oracle has denied themselves by attempting to close source it, since they cannot feed off of downstream OSS code). i.e most of the people who wrote ZFS immediately left Oracle and worked on Open ZFS.

Open ZFS is for both FreeBSD and Linux, and is what most people are referring to when discussing ZFS. I've never used Oracle ZFS and never will.