Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

FreeBSD vs Linux & “Values” Shift

  • Several commenters say they left Linux (often Ubuntu) for FreeBSD or OpenBSD because they prefer a simpler, more coherent, “old-school Unix” feel and dislike perceived shifts toward snaps, telemetry, age-attestation, and faster-moving ecosystems.
  • Others remain happy on Debian/Fedora, seeing them as stable, well-documented, and easy to upgrade if done regularly and with some care.
  • Performance-wise, linked benchmarks and anecdotes generally claim Linux outperforms BSDs, especially in networking and scalability; others note that non-identical hardware/configs make casual comparisons inconclusive.
  • FreeBSD is praised for ZFS, jails, and a clean base system, but some hit pain points: process managers (e.g., pm2), logging with rc.d, firewalls, and power-failure behavior when not using ZFS.

Long-Term Support, Upgrades & Maintenance

  • Long support cycles are important to many, especially for small teams or single-purpose VMs. Options discussed: RHEL/Alma/Rocky (10 years), Ubuntu LTS + Pro, Debian + (E)LTS, Slackware, and NixOS-based approaches.
  • There’s a split between:
    • Those who prefer infrequent large upgrades to minimize change.
    • Those who prefer more frequent smaller upgrades (Fedora, rolling distros) to avoid huge version jumps and ecosystem drift.
  • Some report years of painless in-place upgrades on Debian/Ubuntu; others say major upgrades frequently break configs or third‑party binaries.
  • High uptime is seen by several as a liability: no practice rebooting, hot patches that may mask unbootable states, loss of operational knowledge. Regular reboots and config-as-code (Ansible, NixOS, Proxmox+Terraform) are recommended.
  • Rolling and immutable/container-focused systems (Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll/MicroOS, Fedora CoreOS, Talos, NixOS) are praised for freshness and rollback, but also criticized for occasional serious breakages and ongoing maintenance load.

Static Blog Hosting: VPS vs CDN/Pages

  • Strong disagreement over hosting a static blog on a VPS:
    • One side calls it objectively worse than GitHub Pages/S3+CloudFront/Cloudflare Pages: higher cost, lower availability, more security risk and maintenance, and no built-in CDN.
    • The other side values control, learning, flexibility (custom metrics, server-side integrations), and considers a cheap VPS sufficient and not hard to secure, especially behind Cloudflare.
  • Consensus: for people who enjoy self-hosting, the extra work is part of the hobby; for those optimizing for “no maintenance,” static hosting platforms are preferred.

Misc Technical Notes

  • Reported memory discrepancies on FreeBSD often stem from ZFS ARC/page cache being counted differently by tools.
  • FreeBSD includes simple firewall presets via rc.conf (IPFW), though more advanced setups still require manual rules and reading documentation.