Post #2755733

2026-05-21 12:02 UTC

@markmcb@mas.to @thismarkp@mastodon.social Something's subtly missing from the front page. We see four aspects of the OS, but (unless I'm missing something) no catchy overview. A keyword with which very few people argue: ― cohesion. Development of FreeBSD is not uniquely cohesive, however IMHO it is a very strong selling point. Toying with two chunks from the Foundation's description of FreeBSD, in no particular order: ― secure, stable, high-performance, modern, community-governed, open source, enterprise-friendly permissive licensing, single production-ready package ― long-standing, highly active, democratically managed, elected core team, FreeBSD Project, FreeBSD Foundation. Cherry-pick the best from those two chunks to form something like an elevator pitch for the front page. Can it be done without creating friction? I don't know. Ha. Postscript: not just the best; the truest. ,

Replies (1)

@grahamperrin@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-05-22 02:43

Quoting Will Orr @worr@bsd.network at (April 2025): ＂… My impression as a user is that FreeBSD isn't concerned with providing a cohesive OS experience for end users. Other BSDs like OpenBSD (the other server OS I run), NetBSD, etc. are much more concerned with this. One of the big examples has been talked about here: jails. There isn't a cohesive end user experience for jails in the base OS, instead you're given some of the low-level building blocks, and expected to build it yourself. There are a number of jail managers that work various degrees of ok. Another way this manifests is the 3 different firewalls they ship, with differing feature sets and ways of interacting with them. More debatable would be bhyve, in that the tools for it are quite low-level, and even the docs refer you to an example script for common operations. The user experience pains around tools like these end up pushing people towards 3rd party tools, which kills a lot of the cohesiveness typical of other BSDs. That's not to say that low-level tools aren't useful, but there seems to be a huge gap between tools targeted towards end-users and what the OS provides out-of-the-box.＂ Cc @encthenet@flyovercountry.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @FreeBSDFoundation@mastodon.social #FreeBSD #jails #UX

Open ##2755732