Possibly the best operating system on earth. Review on FreeBSD

Dear reader,

Most excellent things in life are free. By free I mean both gratis in terms of not having to pay any money and also freely accessible and usable in terms of freedom.

For instance if you want to learn spirituality through Yoga, then I am damn sure nobody will teach you this for money. Because if someone charges you money he cannot be spiritual at all. But this also makes it all the more difficult for you to identify such great yogis. In other words, you cannot buy excellence with money...

I can give other examples but let us not digress. We are here to discuss why FreeBSD is the best operating system on earth. This is a sweeping statement and I have to substantiate it or else people will flame me because most people have only heard of the term FreeBSD and heard tidbits from here and there.

I am an operating systems researcher though I am not really a kernel guy. Operating system is much more than a kernel in the UNIX world. In Windows there is a very grey line but in UNIX terminology, the two are always very distinct.

You can have an excellent kernel and a moderate userland on top of it and it would make a very bad operating system because as a end user, I don't really care whether the kernel is technically superior or not. As a user, programmer, systems administrator, the only question I ask is, '' How can I get my job done with the minimal effort and learning? ''

We are going to try answering this question. Linux is a kernel. Nothing more, nothing less. That is why there are gazillions of different distributions (https://distrowatch.com/). Now, as an operating system it is very difficult to specify accurately what we mean when we say ''linux''. For most people it is RedHat. Unfortunately linux is best represented by Debian or Gentoo ...

Now coming back to FreeBSD, it is a tremendous beast. So massive that its sheer size will drown you. On top of that it also supports linux binary emulation allowing us to run linux binaries directly on FreeBSD without any modification. You compile the program on linux, copy the executable to FreeBSD and directly run. Simple.

You want to install a program? Type

# pkg_add -r bing.tbz

and you are done if you want bing. And of course you have the /usr/ports directory. Go there to the right folder and type ''make install''. FreeBSD will automatically download the source file, check its integrity to avoid trojans, apply relevant patches, install and register with the package management system. All that is not your concern. You want to get your job done, right?

Applications? My God, my friend said the other day, '' Why try linux when all the applications are there in Windows? ''

Correct. Frog in the well. Go try FreeBSD. I told you, almost every linux application runs directly without any modification on FreeBSD and FreeBSD itself has several thousands of native applications.

Skype VoIP software is not open source, they only release binaries for linux, Mac OS and Windows. I am able to use skype from FreeBSD rather than Linux. Why?

The FreeBSD operating system is rock solid. The kernel is marvellous, very efficient and stable. The userland is very well integrated to make it a complete whole. The UFS filesystem is much much better than the broken ext2 or ext3. It is not a system hacked together to get something working. And it shows in everything.

Support for modern hardware and drivers? Good question. I wouldn't confidently say that FreeBSD is decidedly better here. Because the user base of linux is so much more, so it takes a while sometimes to get some esoteric hardware working in FreeBSD. At the same time I never had trouble with the sound card in FreeBSD.

Kernel compilation? Ah, linux users think only geeks compile the kernel. Welcome to FreeBSD. You can not only compile the kernel, but the entire userland with just two commands. And you can never render the machine non bootable. Compiling the kernel is a breeze in FreeBSD. Any idiot can do it.

Need I say more? I have a 233 Mhz machine with faulty RAM chip. Compilation fails several times when gcc builds huge data structures in RAM. I give the same command again and it goes through. With such a machine, I even compiled the FreeBSD kernel. And that is what I use as my primary development machine instead of my brand new linux machine.

You will never run into a kernel panic or glibc or ext2 error or package dependency problem. But like everything else in life, FreeBSD is also not perfect. It is much better than other alternatives.

No matter how muchever I try I cannot fully justify why FreeBSD is better. You should try and discover it yourself.

Some advocacy may help to prove that you are not crazy in trying something spooky. Mac OS X from Apple is nothing but FreeBSD. So is GNU Darwin. So is juniper's router software. Yahoo! works only on FreeBSD. So does Amazon.

But wait... We are not bothered about why others are using FreeBSD. Back to the question we started with.

How can I get my job done with the minimal effort and learning?

Your learning curve is really short if you have experience with a UNIX like OS like linux. Even for Windows users, I recommend trying FreeBSD directly.

All knowledge is experience. Experience the magic of FreeBSD!

And you won't come back to this review again.