A brief look at FreeBSD

> For example, ZFS seems interesting but Btrfs is probably close enough for most people.

They are not directly comparable since ZFS is also the volume manager for your ZFS filesystems, enabling features like `zfs send` of snapshots or entire filesystems for easy backups.

> Let's start with the first and probably most important step: setting up the network. […] I don't fully remember how I actually set up the network as it's been a while, but it involved adding the following to `/etc/rc.conf`

This would be a great time to show off FreeBSD's documentation. A great “Step 1” would be https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?networking(7)

And then later on when people reasonably wonder what the heck else is going on in `rc.conf`: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rc.conf

All of the modern `rc.conf` examples will also be using `sysrc` instead of telling you to edit the file directly, at first as a first line of defense against fatfingering the file formatting, and later when you get more advanced as a way to transparently descend into Jails' `rc.conf`s without having to think about it: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysrc

One thing FreeBSD's installer does not do a good job with that's very relevant for laptop usage is any automatic setup of hardware-specific kernel modules. You will want to enable either `coretemp` or `amdtemp` (depending on your particular Framework model) which will automatically populate all the sensor data, easily queried via `sysctl`:

- https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?coretemp

- https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?amdtemp

  [Lammy@Emi] sysctl dev.cpu.{0..7}.temperature
  dev.cpu.0.temperature: 40.0C
  dev.cpu.1.temperature: 43.0C
  dev.cpu.2.temperature: 41.0C
  dev.cpu.3.temperature: 42.0C
  dev.cpu.4.temperature: 40.0C
  dev.cpu.5.temperature: 40.0C
  dev.cpu.6.temperature: 42.0C
  dev.cpu.7.temperature: 43.0C

e: and see my comment here about the quickstart firewall class options that let you avoid writing any of your own rules until you really want to! A laptop would do well with `firewall_type=client`: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794391

> They are not directly comparable since ZFS is also the volume manager for your ZFS filesystems, enabling features like `zfs send` of snapshots or entire filesystems for easy backups.

Btrfs supports both snapshots and sending/receiving them between different hosts. You can also create additional Btrfs subvolumes.

This is mostly what I meant with the differences between zfs and btrfs not being that significant for most: they largely seem to give you the same end result, instead taking a different path to get there. I do know that zfs is better in terms of reliability (or at least people love to bring that up), but it's something I don't have any experience with myself and thus can't comment on.

> https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?networking(7)

That document is a stunning illustration of beautiful simplicity.

Meanwhile on linux, do I use netplan or NetworkManager or Systemd, maybe /etc/network/interfaces?

On the other hand, the lack of broad HW support means that my FreeBSD server burned 2x more power at low to mid usage levels than the same HW running Proxmox.