Anyone here ever give FreeBSD a try? I haven’t used it on my Purism laptop, but I’ve been playing with it on a new desktop I built, and it’s pretty awesome. Apparently it’s renown for it’s networking stack (Netflix uses it, for example), and even MacOS is based on FreeBSD (obviously with some secret sauce inbuilt).
Their development strategy is a bit different than the Linux GPL ecosystem, in that FreeBSD is developed as a singular item, a complete operating system, out of the box. In other words, they develop the kernel, system utilities, init system, networking stack, and key software components together, as a single package, rather than in “Linux” where all of these items have separate development organizations and get patched together in various “distributions” by different organization (Canonical, Redhat, etc). It typically makes for a more stable OS, particularly when talking about servers, because all of the component pieces are developed together as an integrated whole.
Another interesting aspect is the BSD license, which is super permissive, even more so that GPL. You have to credit the originators, but after that, it’s basically free game. Modify, distribute, even close the code and sell it. In comparison to GPL, you might think this incentivizes companies to “steal” the code and not give back to the community, but apparently upstream support is critical enough for companies like Mac, Netflix, Playstation even, that actually do give back to the community quite a lot.
At any rate, FreeBSD is a Unix-like system, with a similar feel to Linux,and some really cool features and philosophy of design, code, and license. As a final example, they invented and released the first sandbox containerization as security measure, back in 2000, called Jails (nowadays they also do hardware virtualization as well).
If I wasn’t so married to Qubes by now, I’d probably give it a whirl on my 15v4. Anyone else out there play with one of the BSDs?
