FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Yeah, that was the reason holding me back. It was the boot up time.

You kid and aren't wrong, but this was a huge metric when I was first getting into Linux. I remember seeing it prodominantly posted on Ubuntu's site ... I wonder which version... I think 4 or 6?
- Funny how the biggest metrics back then were boot time and uptime.
  
  " I haven't rebooted in 5 years, but I'll be damned if it takes longer than 5 seconds!"
The more interesting story here is that in 2023, FreeBSD was still using bubblesort. They made it go 100 times faster than a really slow thing, and we've known it's slow for a long time.

I like the idea of FreeBSD, but I can't see the point of giving up on my Linux conveniences to switch over to it. What advantages does it provide, and are they worth the switch, considering I'm losing a lot of software, as well as any semblance of gaming?

The advantage is that you can rebrand it, close the source and sell it as your invention.

Btw, did you know that Apple invented Unix?
- Apple invented Unix?? What the hell are you talking about?
  
  Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna at Bell Labs developed and invented Unix.
What advantages does it provide

ZFS, mostly. There are some smaller peripheral things (like much better manpages), but these days the big one is probably ZFS. Zero licensing conflicts allows it to be an integral part of the kernel.
- FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE switched to the OpenZFS implementation[1]:
  
  The ZFS implementation is now provided by OpenZFS. 9e5787d2284e (Sponsored by iXsystems)
  
  So no big differences now, except for the licensing.
  
  [1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/
- like better manpages
  
  I want them now! I want the better manpages! Has someone decided to create inproved manpages for Linux? I think this could be a great idea for a project or an organisation. Manprove, the organisation to improve Unix manual pages.
The source code used to be cleaner and easier to customise if you needed something specific. And if you leaned that way (of closing up everything), the license is much more lenient of course.

Other than that, nothing much. It's interesting for the sake of it, but bsd has lost the Unix race (which isn't necessarily a good thing).
If you're losing software and are no longer gaming, much of complicated driver compatibility issues from peripherals like GPUs won't matter to you.

FreeBSD is the *nix OS which is stable like Debian but doesn't use Systemd ~~like~~, similar to distributions like Gentoo/Antix/Slackware
- Permanently Deleted
- Systemd is not inherit to Linux. There are loads of distros out there that dont use it. I reluctantly use it but would still remain on Linux if I wanted to drop it
At some point, the same could have been said with win -> linux.
- Yes but the advantage of Linux over windows is obvious. It's open source. Where's the advantage of FreeBSD? Companies can make their own proprietary fork and give nothing back?
- The advantages on the server side were always clear. Same with development environments for things that run on those servers.
- Open Source
  
  More privacy
  
  More customisability
  
  Better performance
  
  More choice
  
  Better software security
  
  Features that Windows doesn't have or is only now implementing (floating bars, file manager tabs etc.)
  
  Better command line experience
  
  Better scriptability (if that's a word)
  
  Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Dont think BSD is ever going to be a Linux competitor, it's not meant to be honestly. But there's always space for a lightweight and fast general purpose OS that can (among other things) boot up really quickly.

On AWS Firecracker

How about on baremetal?

Best I can do is 8 seconds.

"You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like."

I wanted to comment on this being a cool read, but there's too much happening in this thread that is beyond my knowledge. But anyway, cool that this guy is optimizing things like a mofo.

I also thought it was a fascinating read and wanted to comment, but your comment made me scroll down and now I don't even know what Linux is anymore.

So 2ms increase? It was 27ms WITH bubblesort???

I think some gentoo with "bare minimum to boot" bootloader, kernel and init would beat that

Still dont get the point of freebsd.

Unbreakably stable, cohesive (no need to fit and manage tens of different pieces to get a get a functionning OS), performant, bhyve, BSD licensed (can be a pro or con tho). It has quite a lot of stuff that makes it worthy of Linux or other BSDs.

EDIT: Almost forgot ZFS.
- Not to mention that generations of Playstation and Nintendo consoles run on top of their work, and Apple's macOS also has deep roots into the BSD history
There's an old saying: "Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows. BSD users use BSD because they love Unix." Obviously this is not true for every individual user, but I think it describes a trend or pattern.
- I've heard "Linux is a PC operating system that's like Unix; BSD is a Unix operating system that runs on PCs."
Much smaller footprint than Linux. If you’re running a server, it’s much less vulnerable to malicious exploits.
- Yeah, BSD is now in the situation that Linux was in the early 00s. Smaller, faster, and more reliable than the "other guy".
  
  Faster and more reliable are far closer for BSD and Linux than Linux and Windows, but now it seems that BSD is possibly there.
FreeBSD is the tool you don't know you need, and then suddenly there's the perfect use case, because those BSD alchemists never get tired of tinkering on it and suddenly BSD overtake Linux or Windows in some areas. You think Linux is everywhere, same with BSD its just better at hiding.
- and then suddenly there’s the perfect use case
  
  Yeah but like WHAT?
- BSD overtake Linux or Windows in some areas
  
  Any examples? besides the well known security, lower footprint and simplicity. genuinely curious.
I've ran a freebsd based version of TrueNas on consumer hardware for well over 400 days straight. It's the most stable system I've ever run.
How do you mean? Like, how is this different than someone saying "I don't get the point of Linux"?
- Haha yeah actually I wonder whether people actually did ask this when Linux started making the rounds. If I read the history right BSD was already almost 15 years old at the time!
BSD that's easier to run in places than OpenBSD or NetBSD

Still , as with Linux, you spend hours in configuring something that in windows just installs and runs … not saying windows is the best OS , but as all companies … it is less time consuming and everything just runs on it.

When was the last time you ran a distro and how awful was the hardware to have this experience? In the past 10 years all of them have been fairly "hit the ground running" for me unless it had something weird like Nvidia Optimus
- Anything involving Nvidia, really.
  
  I installed Xubuntu on an old laptop with a Geforce 635M. During installation I checked "Install proprietary drivers". So it installs the current Nvidia driver instead of the correct legacy one for my GPU, even though it obviously would be able to tell which GPU I have installed.
  
  So then I uninstalled the current one and installed the correct legacy one, but the driver still doesn't work. Took me quite a while that apt remove/install only removes/installs the packages but doesn't actually load/unload the drivers from the kernel.
  
  So I loaded the legacy driver into the kernel, but it still didn't work. Apparently, the current driver takes precedence, even though it doesn't even support the GPU at all.
  
  In the end I had to reinstall the current one, unload both drivers from the kernel, uninstall the current driver and load the legacy driver.
  
  This took me a few hours and I am pretty sure that someone who doesn't have an IT degree would probably just not have a working GPU and that's that.
  
  Then I spent a few hours to get Optimus to run, but couldn't figure it out. So now this laptop cannot be used without a battery source for any decent amount of time, because the GPU is constantly running and consumes massive amounts of energy just to render e.g. a browser window.
  
  Edit: And for sure, anyone who says they have ever had difficulties with anything regarding Linux is directly getting downvotes. That's also a big issue regarding Linux. Whenever someone has trouble or asks for help, there's always some helpful fanboy ready to downvote and call you a noob. Funnily enough, these fanboys usually are running Linux for two weeks so far.
- Not OP, but I recently started switching my personal computer to Linux. First I ran Fedora, now I run Pop!OS.
  
  I have to say so far my experience was rather mediocre. As a software developer I know a lot about my windows computer and I am very able to handle Linux based VMs.
  
  When it comes to my personal computer, there is just so much that does not work.
  
  Under Fedora the Graphics Driver for nVidia would cause startup problems. I had to restart multiple times to get to the desktop.
  
  Pop!OS automatically installed a graphics driver which caused the system to black-screen. I had to uninstall it with a live boot.
  
  My mouse is super choppy and if I set it to a high sensitivity, it's so sensitive I can control it at all and I can't switch back to the old value.
  
  I have a GoXLR and that only initializes on every third try (reboot). The people working on that are super responsive and friendly, but still, I have to tinker, configure and I am unable to resolve the issues.
  
  Fedora would randomly put my system into read-only mode because the boot drive is corrupt. It was not corrupt. This happened with two Fedora installations, but not with Pop!OS and not with Windows.
  
  Pop!OS keeps resetting my main screen to a screen that is not my main screen.
  
  YouTube Videos are way slower now. I have to wait for 4-5 seconds for them to buffer, but it's the same browser as under Windows (Firefox).
  
  Both distros allowed me to use some kind of software store to download and install applications. Those applications did not work in many cases. VS Code could not start since it ran in a sandbox mode. TeamSpeak would not start as well.
  
  Don't get me started on gaming.
  
  I am really trying to like Linux and I will keep it as my OS. But so far, compared to Windows, there is just so much tinkering and McGuyvering.
  
  I hate to say it, but a modern Windows... Just works. There are several other things I do not like about Windows, like privacy issues, that totally make Linux come up on top, but for speed or ease of use there are definitely worlds between those systems.
Kind of hard to believe people still say stuff like this...

There is plenty of stuff that Linux does much better than Windows, for example containerized service and applications, which is why Windows needs a Linux subsystem at all. It's possible that the main reason you think Linux is bad is that you aren't as familiar with it.

The biggest downside to Linux remains official hardware and software support, though that's a business economics issue and not a technical limitation.

I honestly could not imagine a circumstance in which I go back to using Windows or switch over to Mac, because Linux does basically everything I want and then some.
- The point about the WSL doesn't really hold as a con - the NT kernel is a microkernel so it uses subsystems by design. Iirc there's even a hypervisor running below it by default. Architecturally Windows is absolutely marvelous, they just decided to make about the worst out of it.
If you like Windows just use it. Don't yuck someone else's yum, bud.
I don't know what sort of bubble people live in, or if people convinced themselves that a computer getting slower over time because of OS clutter is normal, but every Windows PC I ever had had shit ton of problems, getting slow to the point of feeling like I have a $100 laptop instead of a $2000 one being the most common.

And can't say MacOS is much better, at least judging by my gf getting freezes all the time and having to reboot by holding the power button.
- My Kubuntu work laptop is also getting slower and slower, same as my Android phone. That's just what happens if you useany OS extensively.
  
  Cleaning and maintenance is necessary on any OS.
  
  Also, with a bit of skill and care, a Windows PC can easily be kept fresh for a decade.
More context please. There are a ton of things that "just work" on Linux, just like Windows. I have spent hours troubleshooting and configuring things on Windows as well.

With either OS, time spent configuring and installing things is heavily dependent on the experience of the user and their ability to interpret logs and error messages. With most OS's, configuration and troubleshooting is just a matter of "knowing where to look" combined with understanding how the OS itself works.

Server services are much easier to configure on Linux, IMHO. Additionally, I find configuration to be much more flexible and (generally) more intuitive than Windows but that is my opinion. However, I have worked with both Linux and Windows since they were created, so I have a good number of years of experience.

My point is that it really depends on what you are wanting to do.

(Rant: Deep troubleshooting in Windows has always sucked and the methods to do so have changed a thousand times over the years. It's a royal pain to keep up, TBH. Very rarely have I needed "reinstall Linux" because something was broken beyond fixing.)
- The guy before isn't exactly wrong.
  
  Many things that "just work" on Linux are things you just don't do on Windows. E.g. swapping the DE or theming/customizing the whole thing usually works great out of the box. But on Windows you just don't do that.
  
  On the other hand, getting e.g. legacy Nvidia drivers working correctly and setup so that it automatically switches between the power-consuming dGPU and the power-saving iGPU is a major pain in the rear. On Windows that just works. Mostly Nvidias fault, but to the user who has to deal with the situation it doesn't matter who is at fault.
  
  And in general, if you come from Windows with a lot of Windows experience and then have to dive into Linux, you mainly notice the things that don't just work on Linux.
  
  Also, fixing problems in Windows might take you through the registry or arcane wizards. But you hardly ever get into CLI and never into config files. So if you swap over to Linux, where almost any help you find online will go straight into CLI and config files (even if a GUI solution would be available), that can be pretty jarring.
  
  I've been using Linux professionally for ~15 years and privately for ~5. But I still remeber getting into it very vivdly.
It always funny to me to hear this sentence.

Just look how it is to install software on Windows.

You need to open the menu and type the browser name(/click on a shortcut), open the browser, search for your software, check you're clicking on the right site and not some scam website, [sometimes you need to go few pages until you end up in the downloading page], clicking on the download button, and.. *if* the download completed successfully.. there's still more..!

Now installing..

On Unix-like systems-

<package-mangager> <install-command> <software-name>.

Ex: apt install i3. That's it!
- Or you can use the software store gui which is present on most systems. More clicks instead of clacks.
- Yeah I'm pretty sure I could go Google and search for notepad + website and download plus install before you finish typing that. I use Linux Mac and Windows and Windows is definitely the easiest most user friendly. Mac is second (And by far most restrictive os) with Linux last for ease of use. Doesnt mean it's bad but bro go tell my mom to type what you said and your argument crumbles. I can tell her to do what I said and she can get by.
I don't want to agree with this comment. And in fact I would say most of the time I don't. Most stuff "just works" nowadays. But I do occasionally have to fight with something I wouldn't in Windows. Easily worth it IMO but that's not going to be everyone's take.