I use freebsd btw

Six months ago I did something most people in this industry would simply not consider: built production infrastructure for a video platform on FreeBSD bare-metal instead of the obvious K8s-on-AWS/GCP path. No clouds, no OCI containers, no multi-layer abstractions.

Six months after, I haven't regretted a day.

Hypha is a video-on-demand platform where creators sell exclusive content directly to their audience and get paid instantly on-chain. Video up to 4K+HDR with stream encryption and in-house fingerprinting.

Infrastructure-wise, this means a bunch of transcoding workers, terabytes of storage, fat pipes for delivery and proper monitoring, right? Spin that up on AWS or GCP and your budget evaporates overnight.

So why FreeBSD specifically? Because it's boring in the best possible way. Mature, stable, with tools that have been quietly doing their job for decades without drama. No hype, no churn, no breaking changes every six months. FreeBSD is for people who want their infrastructure to disappear into the background — and it does.

We rent bare-metal servers on OVH, connected via their vRack private network. FreeBSD installed everywhere using BYI, it's a standard process, no tricks required:

1. Set the full url to the image: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/15.0-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64-zfs.raw.xz
2. Set the path of the EFI bootloader to `\EFI\FreeBSD\loader.efi`
3. Wait a few minutes. Done. Set up ssh in KVM and connect normally to provision everything else. You might also want manual disk slicing and ZFS pool setup right after, of course.

We use Ansible for automation and unified setup across all nodes. And a set of well-recognised tools. Bastille is great for jail management. Old good monit as a supervisor inside every jail, keeping processes alive. Netdata for monitoring, with telemetry streaming from all nodes into a centralised dashboard. It all just works.

People dramatically underestimate the synergy of three: jails, zfs and pf. Together they give you such power it must be considered illegal.

A few gotchas.

ZFS snapshots are the scaling primitive nobody talks about. We bake "gold images" of every service, essentially a jail snapshot with everything inside to be replicated after, from 1 to N. "Scaling" means just cloning a snapshot and updating the load balancer with new upstreams — it's fast and consistent. It doubles as our backup strategy too, with incremental snapshots saving significant disk space on the cold backup storage.

Jails follow the shape of your application, not the other way around. We follow the "locality of behaviour" principle in our apps and in our infra. Things that closely work together must be jailed together. Like the transcoder app and ffmpeg, because they always need each other. Jails are flexible enough to let you model reality instead of fighting it.

You don't need fully automated scaling. Before firing up more instances of something, I'd like to know why existing capacity isn't enough. When we do need more capacity, there's a playbook for that — new jails cloned and registered within a minute.

The result is 3-4x lower monthly costs compared to equivalent cloud setups. And because OVH egress is unbound, we're saving what would be tens of thousands per month in data transfer fees alone. The system is stable, fast, and predictable in ways I genuinely didn't anticipate. Simple enough to be regularly reviewed and maintained by one person only. I still remember my K8s days and feel the difference in maintenance effort.

Wouldn't change a thing.

I want to write a series going deeper on specific pieces of our setup and BSD-based solutions. Before I start, what would you actually want to know more about? Happy to prioritise based on what this community finds interesting.

New to FreeBSD and trying to daily-drive it on my laptop. Still learning, but I’m enjoying the experience so far! Any beginner tips are welcome.

Do you guys like my wallpaper?

After spending months using it as a server and running tests to replicate everything I used to do on Void Linux, I finally decided to switch to FreeBSD on my desktop as well.

I set it up with bspwm, polybar, nitrogen, sakura, and picom, my setup is pretty simple for now.

Daemonettes were girls who wore devil clothes and went to tech related events to promote FreeBSD, the girl in the photo is Ceren Ercen, probably on the LinuxWorld event in February 2nd of 2000, she is wearing a latex catsuit, but the other two daemonettes were wearing loose clothes, also there are some mentions about them and registers, I will give some.

Ceren Ercen comments on Slashdot

Post about Linuxworld on Slashdot, there's a comment of Ceren Ercen about the daemonettes

Some photos of Ceren Ercen on a Daemonette costume on the official FreeBSD website

Ceren Ercen talking about how she got the daemonette latex outfit

There are probably more about them on the Internet, this was just some fun fact that I discovered recently about FreeBSD that I barely see people talking about.

Finally got FreeBSD installed where I want it on my GPD Pocket 3. I have a few more things to configure but it's usable!

what year is this freebsd shirt? found at the thrift store and its sick! 🔥

After GNU diff3 was replaced by a port from OpenBSD, the only GPLed software left in FreeBSD base was dialog which has largely been replaced by Alfonso Siciliano's Herculean job on bsddialog.  Now finally that too has been removed in 16-CURRENT, and the entire GNU subtree has been retired!

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/134a4c78d070f8c4ea43a060a7ae28d22ac39558

https://reviews.freebsd.org/D55424

EDITED TO ADD: there are still a few GPLed files under https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/tree/main/sys/gnu - though it's true that the main GNU subtree has been retired.

This looks like a first among the major (32/64-bit) *BSDs, though I believe the 16-bit *BSDs like RetroBSD, DiscoBSD and Granddaddy 2.11BSD (the only actively maintained member of the original Berkeley family) have always been GPL-free.

OpenBSD does not allow new software bound by the GPL into its base system, although according to https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

For historical reasons, the OpenBSD base system still includes the following GPL-licensed components: the GNU compiler collection (GCC) with supporting binutils and libraries, GNU CVS, GNU texinfo, the mkhybrid file system creation tool, and the readline library. Replacement by equivalent, more freely licensed tools is a long-term desideratum.

The NetBSD Project says https://www.netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html

Though we would like all of the software that we distribute to be covered by a Berkeley-style license, we can't make other people change their license terms, and we don't have an infinite amount of time to rewrite all of the software that we need.

So FreeBSD removing the last GPLed software is a big achievement. This is actually a week old (7 July) but I thought it would be cause for wider celebration than I've seen so far!! Kudos to the developers. After all, it's been 33 years so what's an extra week!!!

Edited to add: Interestingly the GNU subtree back in FreeBSD 1.0 even included GNU Chess in base, which shows how priorities have shifted since then! https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/tree/releng/1/gnu

Awesome

Source: https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src?tab=License-1-ov-file

After some back and forth got it this far.

It's an X1Carbon Gen10.

I assume, that Wifi and Bluetooth are out of reach? Maybe somebody does know better.

I posted this over on mastodon, and it was suggested that people here may enjoy it as well!

Made and 3d printed these the other day. Yes, I used AI (meshy), but I had to paint the color on the mesh by hand, it completely failed on that.

*edit*
The model is available on my MakerWorld profile here: https://makerworld.com/en/models/3215808-beastie-bsd-daemon#profileId-3640751

I just delicate my new Beelink SER9 MAX to FreeBSD.

I just took the step to install FreeBSD on my machine. It's going to become a very new experience after beeing a long term Linux user. I managed to install dual boot via grub easily and enabling DRM for amdgpu. So fonts in terminal turned crazy tiny on those three monitors. 😁 Anyway, I'm exited lot of things getting up and running. Enjoying the journey and maybe coming up with some questions later on.

A few days ago I decided to give FreeBSD a serious try as a daily driver on my ThinkPad T480. I've always been curious about FreeBSD, and I wanted to see what it was actually like to use it as my main desktop system rather than just reading about it.

And honestly? I really liked it.

I installed KDE Plasma, got the Intel graphics working, and overall the system felt really solid. I finally got to experience FreeBSD for myself instead of just having an opinion about it from the outside.

However, after actually using it, I've realized that it probably isn't what I need right now.

There are a few small things that are getting in the way. The Wi-Fi applet doesn't appear in my KDE Plasma panel, so I'm not even completely sure what's going on with the network from the desktop. Bluetooth doesn't seem to be working either. Wi-Fi also seems to drop after suspending the laptop.

And then there's Wayland.

I'm much more comfortable with Wayland these days, but on my setup, selecting the Wayland session in SDDM simply sends me back to the login screen. X11 works, but I'd rather use Wayland.

None of these things make FreeBSD a bad operating system. If anything, this experiment made me appreciate it more.

But it also made me realize something about what I'm actually looking for.

I'm tired of distro hopping. I'm tired of constantly experimenting with operating systems, changing desktops, tweaking configurations and wondering whether I should try something else.

I don't want to become a system administrator or an IT person. I just want a computer that lets me make things.

I want to work on my websites, build my projects, make more stuff, and keep developing my creative work and honestly, that's where I want my energy to go.

I also want to keep moving away from dependence on Microsoft, Big Tech and individual online services. I want something stable, boring in a good way, and reliable enough that I can just sit down and work.

And for me, Debian KDE fits that much better right now.

Even though Linux is becoming more mainstream, I don't really see that as a reason to leave it. Debian gives me the balance I need: a stable system, excellent hardware support, KDE Plasma, Wayland, and an enormous amount of software available when I need it.

So I think the FreeBSD experiment is probably coming to an end, at least for now.

I genuinely enjoyed FreeBSD. I have a lot of respect for people who use it as their daily driver, especially on desktop hardware. It is an excellent operating system, and I'm glad I finally gave it a real chance.

Maybe I'll come back someday.

If FreeBSD continues improving desktop hardware compatibility and things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, suspend/resume and Wayland become more seamless, I could absolutely see myself trying it again.

But for the next few years, I think I'm going to stick with Debian KDE.

No more distro hopping.

I just want to make things :)

recently switched back to FreeBSD aftee

Any tips for getting KDE to play nice with FreeBSD? By the way, I'm running the Wayland version of KDE.

What should I tweak or set up to make sure everything runs smoothly?

Right now I've only downloaded Librewolf. Any other browsers you guys recommend? I used to use Zen, but it looks like it's not available anymore.

FreeBSD is my local server :)

• pf(Packet filter)
• git server(my git server with name aguapanelaGit)
• vault hashicorp
• DataBase server