A while back, I noted that I would try to live in a CLI-only world with FreeBSD as the driver. While an interesting experiment, I am throwing in the towel. Here’s a quick summary of the things I learned.

The Good

FreeBSD as an OS

All in all, I found FreeBSD to be an outstanding operating system. The core installation process is quick and easy, with largely sane defaults and a low-footprint.

ZFS

Hands down the greatest feature in FreeBSD, ZFS should be the only filesystem anyone ever uses.

The Bad

Hardware support

C-minus at best. Most of the core things work fine, but wifi is a dumpster fire. The latest trick is to wrap the Linux drivers, but that seems to be a concession.

Turning Knobs

While I appreciate the blank canvas nature of FreeBSD, I am not a fan of needing to spend hours and hours fine-tuning configurations in order to setup a system. It was fun when I was young and had nothing else to do.

The Meh

Jails

It doesn’t take long when reading about FreeBSD to hear about how good jails are. And they’re great. The problem I had with jails as the tooling. While jails are probably technologically superior to containers, the tooling around them is primative at best.

The Conclusion

I still use FreeBSD for some server use cases. I also run a Netgate security appliance with pfSense, so I’m running core network services on FreeBSD. I’m glad to have a Unix in my life, and I wish it the best. But without a more user-friendly approach, it will always be something of a relic.