FreeBSD is so very much worth taking a look at. Hardware support is not on Linux’s level, so it’s not necessarily an endeavor I’d recommend for desktop use, at least as a first 'nix experience, even with the super nice ZFS integration in PC-BSD.

But if you’re at all frustrated by any aspect of Linux in server use, it’s worth having a peek at FreeBSD. And I’m saying this as a person who doesn’t really have much business talking about tools like dtrace or even jails. But I will argue that it’s the increasing wtf:ness of Linux that has held me back from wanting to become a more competent admin and more focused on IT work in my career. Blame the system, right?

As a reluctant IT person and "advanced beginner" sysadmin, I was inspired to look into FreeBSD this spring. The final push had a lot to do with that massive, remotely exploitable glibc vulnerability (CVE-2015-7547), when the potential consequences of Linux monoculture started to really dawn on me.

First thing I did was to migrate a couple of my Tor relay nodes to FreeBSD (instructions here: https://torbsd.github.io/ ). Whether my handful of <10 Mbit/s middle relays are real workloads or not is debatable, but it’s stuff I have a sense of duty about, especially with regards to doing basic security due diligence. Tor has a direct impact on real people doing real things, but it's not like these boxes keep me from working if they're down for a week, so it’s a good place to learn.

After ten years on Debian and Ubuntu for server stuff, FreeBSD is quite refreshing. There's really a lot to love: human readable userland, man pages and scripts, the simplicity of throwing basic ipfw rules in /etc/rc.conf etc.

Whereas stuff tends to "just work" on Debian (including automatic restarts of services after package installs), one needs to read the manual on FreeBSD. But everything feels like less of a pain to learn. And to be clear, the system doesn’t feel like a "tinker or GTFO" kit like Gentoo or Arch, starting with the installation process.

After looking quickly at pf for more advanced networking stuff, I feel like I’ve been duped into believing that I hate networking, when it’s really the syntax of Linux’s iptables that is at fault.

Another thing I definitely need is in-place upgrades, without the need to boot from media (like OpenBSD and NetBSD still seem to require). ‘freebsd-update’ seems to be stable nowadays. For the base system, FreeBSD seems to be moving towards a proper LTS model, where one is encouraged to stay on top of point releases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960

For third party software, packages seem to make a whole lot more sense than my expectations. I had heard that FreeBSD only recompiles all their packages every few weeks, but nowadays, it’s every three days or so. I have used ports on my Tor relays in order to be able to install security patches immediately.

As a virtualization platform, I suppose Linux’s KVM remains a lot more mature and well supported. But the bhyve hypervisor seems to be coming along nicely. Before long FreeBSD might become a good virtualization platform. Personally, I can’t wait to see something like FreeNAS becoming a virtualization appliance, like the one you’d get with Proxmox or those QNAP prosumer file servers.

From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.