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Discussion on: Which Linux distro do you use?

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alexgeorgiev17 profile image
Alex Georgiev

I've used FreeBSD but only on job-related servers and not on my personal servers that I use. FreeBSD indeed offers more freedom and people can take advantage of a lot of features.

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Please elaborate. I'd like to learn, and choose my next distro. (Maybe between Fedora, Arch, FreeBSD.)

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alexgeorgiev17 profile image
Alex Georgiev

It basically depends on what you're planning to do. I'll be quite happy to try out Arch and see how it will go with the time. Fedora is considered as the bleeding edge, however a lot of people say it is stable enough so this might be a suitable option as well.

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darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

Feel free to ask anything you'd like to know.

FreeBSD isn't Linux based at all, but most userland utilities are the same. One major thing is FreeBSD doesn't use Docker or Linux based containers, instead using its own Jails system. I personally use iocage as my Jails manager, which makes things easier.

Jails on FreeBSD act more like a traditional virtual machine, where they get their own "filesystem" (a dataset from ZFS on the host), and optionally their own complete independent network stack via VNET. This means you can do things like DHCP client within a Jail to get its IP address, SSH into the jail, install any networking or other utilities, and they all "just work" without fussing around. With changing some security flags, you can even install VPN clients inside a Jail too.

For things like databases, Jails are nearly perfect! With persistent and direct access to the storage system, these high performance applications run at native speed, and act exactly as you'd expect them to if they were running on bare metal (because they essentially are, but within a security isolated environment)