FreeBSD
102 points
1 hour ago
| 13 comments
| docs.freebsd.org
| HN
jordemort
27 minutes ago
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It's apparently "post a link to an OS with no further comment or discussion" day, first we get SmartOS and then Linux From Scratch and now this. Nice way to farm karma, I guess. Flagging them all.
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dang
15 minutes ago
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Also illumos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 - Jan 2026 (15 comments)

People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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joshstrange
21 minutes ago
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Disclaimer: No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD or the maintainers.

I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run).

It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job.

Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc.

I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.

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mfro
38 minutes ago
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I will say the FreeBSD handbook is such a breath of fresh air compared to other OS documentation. Everything is easy to find and well formatted. Same goes for the OS internals themselves. It's just a cohesive project altogether.
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IgorPartola
31 minutes ago
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Back in college I spent some time translating portions of it to Russian. It was super easy to work with the project on that. I honestly have no idea if any of my contributions are still a part of it but I am really glad I did that.
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riffraff
25 minutes ago
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same experience for me, I translated a few chapter to Italian while in university, I learned a lot and the translation project was super well run.
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dev_l1x_be
30 minutes ago
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You're seeing the benefit of the cathedral model right there: a centralized, architected approach yields unified documentation, whereas the bazaar is inherently fragmented.
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mmerlin
20 minutes ago
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Good to RTFM again and learn what's new (from a personal perspective)

e.g. Thin Jails

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailh...

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nish__
38 minutes ago
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Good OS. Idk what to say. I thought this was a news site.
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terminalbraid
27 minutes ago
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You are mistaken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

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nish__
24 minutes ago
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I stand corrected.
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nla
26 minutes ago
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I'd love for someone to show us an OS (not just a kernel) that is more secure.
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nish__
35 minutes ago
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Someone should make a new mobile OS like android but based on FreeBSD.
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dev_l1x_be
28 minutes ago
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We need to say goodbye to the unix philosophy. From the security point of view there are much better options. Also text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives. We should aim higher than just the cathedral approach of unix alternatives.
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hackthemack
12 minutes ago
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Like so many things in life, there are so many variables/criteria and different ways to weigh them that I do not think one can make a claim like "text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives".

What are the alternatives? I had to do a little windows shell programming when working on Chef orchestration to set up windows servers.

There was "flow" programming in WebMethods I had to work on that tried to provide a snap in place component GUI to program data transformation.

I would say that there is something limiting in all the GUI based interfaces I have had to work with. Some option you can not get to, or it is not apparent how two things can communicate with each other.

Text based options have always seem more open to inspection, and, hence, easier to reason about how it works. YMMV.

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nish__
25 minutes ago
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Fair tbh
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zdfgh
32 minutes ago
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Why a whole new mobile OS? Linux is the least important part of Android. It could be replaced. Probably will be, by Fuschia.
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nish__
30 minutes ago
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Simplicity. Also maybe use Go for apps instead of Java.

The idea is it would be nice to have an OS that is a little easier to learn for the next generation of devs.

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zdfgh
29 minutes ago
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Simplicity how? It would require a great deal of complex work.
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nish__
26 minutes ago
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Simplicity in the sense that BSD is a much smaller codebase than linux and therefore less complex and easier to onboard new devs.
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zdfgh
23 minutes ago
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It wouldn't be a smaller codebase if you built an Android-like mobile OS on top of it.
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whalesalad
33 minutes ago
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FreeBSD is notoriously bad with modern hardware especially Bluetooth/wifi/etc so I can’t think of a worse base OS for mobile tbh
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dev_l1x_be
27 minutes ago
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Vibe coding could change that. Porting drivers from Linux got much easier.
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nish__
25 minutes ago
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Good point.
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behnamoh
42 minutes ago
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It took 30 years for linux to finally fulfill "x is the year of Linux Desktop", but I don't know if *BSD will ever get there.
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jmclnx
1 hour ago
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I had the printed handbook from the 3.x days, was a great resource and I am sure it still is.
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browningstreet
55 minutes ago
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Kinda feels like the submission title should be changed to FreeBSD Handbook, and possibly even the relevant version info.
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bionsystem
36 minutes ago
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I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is.

As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.

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alex1138
40 minutes ago
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Posts FreeBSD

Refuses to elaborate

Leaves

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IgorPartola
30 minutes ago
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It could be worse. Could be written by an LLM.
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reaperducer
39 minutes ago
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Karma farming.

Like how people look up what links got lots of engagement two years ago and then re-post them for a new audience.

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publicdebates
36 minutes ago
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"If I haven't seen it, it's new to me."

- Charles Manson quoting NBC in Family Guy

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cube00
35 minutes ago
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After first wrapping it in low quality blog spam.
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nish__
39 minutes ago
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Honestly lmao
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gigatexal
50 minutes ago
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I ran it for a while it’s nice. Easy as breathing ZFS on root and zfsbootmenu is really nice. Also the userland is maintained in connection with the kernel (or something to that extent) and it’s just a nice solid whole.
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E39M5S62
40 minutes ago
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ZFSBootMenu doesn't work with FreeBSD, it only knows how to boot a Linux kernel.
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bionsystem
35 minutes ago
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Maybe he meant boot environments ?
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brcmthrowaway
44 minutes ago
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Does it support arm64?
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kemotep
38 minutes ago
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I use FreeBSD on a raspberry pi 3b using the arm64 image. It’s under aarch64:

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAG...

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dev_l1x_be
26 minutes ago
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How is the support? I would like to use CARP/pf if possible on RPI4/5.
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kemotep
17 minutes ago
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I only have a 3B but everything I need works for me. I don’t do anything advanced with the GPIO pins, just as a headless little arm server running stuff in jails. Everything is quick. Ethernet only but network performance seems solid. Honestly feels as responsive as my amd64 desktop with 32 gb of ddr4 ram and 8 cores. My desktop has worst support for FreeBSD. No networking or graphics out of the box and significantly more work to get that “working” compared to the pi.
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cperciva
39 minutes ago
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Yes, arm64 support has been Tier 1 since FreeBSD 13.0.
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GuinansEyebrows
54 minutes ago
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not to pick on OP but what is up with all the links to OS project homepages today? i've seen illumos, LFS, FreeBSD and a handful of others. did i miss something (other than W11 shitting the bed with app launching) that's got people suddenly interested in alternative OSes today?
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reactordev
47 minutes ago
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When you finally understand the full stack you inevitably end up down operating system rabbit holes.

You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.

(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)

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tacticalturtle
26 minutes ago
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The site guidelines is supposed to be anything that a hacker finds interesting.

This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting?

Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works.

These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.

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GuinansEyebrows
39 minutes ago
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no, i get it - i've been to wonderland and back :) i just noticed more of these types of links today than i usually see.
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stronglikedan
46 minutes ago
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my money is on fake-internet-points farming, and is directly related to "all the links to OS project homepages today"
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goalieca
38 minutes ago
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Surely most of us have heard of FreeBSD here. To the point that it should not be the top hit on the front page of hacker NEWS
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