HACKER Q&A
📣 hiAndrewQuinn

Technical reasons to favor FreeBSD over Debian for servers?


FreeBSD used to be very performant compared to most Linux distros when it comes to things like file and web servers, but I've gotten the impression that this technical advantage dried up or even inverted given several more years of rabid development on the Linux kernel.

Is this true? Am I missing something?

  👤 GianFabien Accepted Answer ✓
I have found some informative comparisons on https://www.unixsheikh.com/index.html.

As always, to accurately answer your question, you would need to benchmark your specific circumstances and workload.

Personally I use Debian Bookworm as my desktop. But prefer to use Alpine Linux for servers with external access. I have tried various BSDs, but I find the cognitive load of remembering two different ways of doing many sysadmin tasks an unnecessary burden.

👤 evanjrowley
I recommend FreeBSD-based OPNSense to anyone wanting a capable router for a small to medium size wired network.

Also, I feel like FreeBSD will eventually enter the "immutable server distro" space. ZFS boot environments have had 1st class support for over a decade already. New container advancements are being made on FreeBSD every year. I really believe it could compete hard with Fedora Atomic and OpenSuse MicroOS.

👤 LargoLasskhyfv
How did you get that impression? By using it, or just reading about it, in benchmarks by moronix et al.?

If using it, did you tune it, or the Linuxen, or let them be at their defaults, more or less?

How do you expect/want to use it?

Would 'less churn' be of value to you?

👤 Gud
No, FreeBSD is performant as ever.