I run both FreeBSD and OpenIndiana on their own bare metal devices, so what I'm about to say is based on my own experience. I hope it doesn't upset anyone.
On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 8:21 PM Lonnie Cumberland <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings All, > > Hope that everyone one is well today. > > Although I am assuming that this may not be the best place to ask this > question, I am wondering if there is an advantage of Openindiana (Illumos > based) or perhaps OmniOS over FreeBSD, OpenIndiana advantages: 1. RBAC 2. Good documentation *for functionality inherited from Solaris* via Solaris' docs 3. Stability 4. Zones 5. Unix (FreeBSD is Unix-like) 6. DE included in installer 7. TimeSlider 8. GParted (if you can get it to work) 9. More repos available than just the OS' repo or perhaps the other way around. > FreeBSD advantages: 1. Much better 3rd party package support (including recent Firefox releases 2. Much larger userbase 3. Much better documentation of the OS itself (documentation of Illumos itself is relatively lacking; Solaris docs remain the best resource) 4. Actual proper UEFI support 5. Much better hardware support 6. Lower RAM usage 7. Actual modern DE (I don't consider OI's MATE to be anywhere near current gen) available and easily installed via FuryBSD 3rd party installer (which is basically a stock FreeBSD installation with KDE included) 8. Single, well-documented control planes/locations for many critical features 9. Much easier email notification setup 10. Jails 11. Can do UFS installation if ZFS isn't your thing. Wouldn't recommend it, but it's possible 12. Config is a lot more straightforward and consistent 13. Behavior is sufficiently consistent and well-understood that seemingly complicated issues can be more easily remotely troubleshot than on other OSes If I had to choose between the 2, I'd run FreeBSD because at least if I have a problem there's a proper handbook and I'll get probably 5 replies in r/FreeBSD or r/BSD instead 1 or 0 in r/Illumos and r/unix. > > I am going to move from Linux to either OpenIndian or FreeBSD and seem to > be caught in the middle as both seem to have almost the same features with > exception that FreeBSD may have more support streams over OpenIndiana > although this could change as time goes on. > If you were migrating from Solaris, I'd recommend Illumos. Coming from Linux, definitely FreeBSD. That said, you will lose some hardware and package support on FreeBSD vs. Linux, and most tooling is built around Linux. > > Perhaps the only real advantage that I might be able to see is that FreeBSD > has more hardware support, but that may not be the defining factor for me. > This might be a bigger deal than you'd think. I recently went through a fresh OI install and was more than a bit disappointed that in AD 2020 I still can't achieve UEFI boot. To be clear, other OSes UEFI boot on that same hardware just fine. > > I am looking for that little gem in the rough, as it were, and do not > always believe that mainstream is the only stream that can yield a bright > future. > I run both of the above, in addition to 3 release channels of Windows, 3 Linux distros, and Android, because I love OSes and am fascinated by the different approaches various projects take to solve the same problems. You'll learn a lot regardless of which one you choose. > > Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated. > Thanks in advance > Lonnie > _______________________________________________ > openindiana-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
