Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu).
Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparently being better than containers, it doesn't really matter, there isn't the ecosystem there.
FreeBSD might be as good as this blog author makes it out to be, and maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility) but I can't help but feel it causes more friction than I'd like, it's just "slightly" harder to do anything. In the age of LLMs I have to tell it (or put it in my system prompt) "I'm using FreeBSD" or it will be give me Linux advice. It just feels like death by a thousand papercuts.
> I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD.
Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources:
FreeBSD Handbook[0]
FreeBSD Porter's Handbook[1]
FreeBSD Developers' Handbook[2]
The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System[3]
Not to mention that the FreeBSD man pages are quite complete. Granted, I am biased as I have used FreeBSD in various efforts for quite some time and am a fan of it. Still and all, the project's documentation is a gold standard IMHO.
> Documentation certainly is not gold standard. I'm a former doc tree committer, familiar with many of the bugs …
As "a former doc tree committer", I am sure you are aware that no set of documentation artifacts are without error of some sort. To be exact, you provided two examples of your identifying what you believe to be same.
I stand by my statement that the cited FreeBSD resources are "a gold standard" while acknowledging they are not perfect. What they are, again in my humble opinion, is vastly superior to what I have found to exist in the Linux world. Perhaps your experience contradicts this position; if so, I respect that.
Arch Wiki can't never cover a userland+kernel documentation by design. FreeBSD does. Arch it's utterly lacking in tons of areas. Forget proper sysctl documentation. Say goodbye to tons of device settings' documentation. Forget iptables/NFT's documentatiton on par of PF.
I don't agree about that ZFS issue. Using whole disk isn't inheritantly wrong. When you have data pool separated from boot disks, using whole disks is better. No need to create partition table, when replacing disk. No worring over block alignment.
I would not be surprised if FreeBSD NFS is slower than Linux NFS, but 10x slower is too weird to be correct. Have you used the same NFS version, e.g. NFSv4, on both FreeBSD and Linux?
I have used for many years file servers on FreeBSD, servicing a great number of users and they certainly were not slower than Linux and they had perfect reliability. It is true however, that I have used Samba, not NFS.
I have also used NFS in a few cases, but I have not run benchmarks. I mean that I have not tested intensive random accesses, but I have just copied entire disks through NFS and that worked at the speed limit imposed by a 1 Gb/s Ethernet link, so at least for sequential transfers NFS did not seem to have any speed problems.
The speed of NFS also depends on the speed of the file system used on the server. If you have tested a FreeBSD with ZFS versus a Linux with XFS or EXT4, than your benchmark might not reflect anything about FreeBSD vs. Linux, but only about ZFS. ZFS is significantly slower than XFS or EXT4, regardless if it is used by FreeBSD or by Linux.
Nobody uses ZFS for speed, but only when the extra features provided by ZFS are desired. ZFS is still faster than BTRFS, but not by so much as XFS/EXT4 are faster than ZFS.
On FreeBSD, its older file system, UFS, is faster than ZFS, though not as fast as XFS/EXT4. But if you use NVMe SSDs on the file server, the speed of NFS should be mostly limited by Ethernet, not by the file system of the server.
It is though. Had the same experience, dog slow transfers in FreeBSD on brandnew servers with 10/25G+ cards, hovering at 1-2G speeds. Only switching to Linux helped, and now easily saturates the links.
> speed limit imposed by a 1 Gb/s Ethernet link
FreeBSD might be slow, but its not that slow that it cant saturate a 1G link ;)
All this would be true if Linux and FreeBSD had similar exposition. But there's obviously less users and less hardware in the BSD world, so we must expect a higher variance.
For instance, searching in recent FreeBSD issues, some hardware is compatible but 3× slower, as in "NFS is much too slow at 10GbaseT"[^1].
Or a FreeBSD upgrade to v14 could sink the NFS performance, as in "Write performance to NFS share is ~4x slower than on 13.2".
Of course, these bugs happen with Linux, but there are vastly more resources to detect and fix these problems in the Linux world.
FreeBSD originates from Unix and as one who started in the professional programming world using Unix I find FreeBSD far more obvious than Linux. Don't let your lack of knowledge of Unix tools caused by Linux confuse you or hold you back.
> Claude Code is very likely to soon offer 1 million tokens as well
You can do it today if you are willing to pay (API or on top of your subscription) [0]
> The 1M context window is currently in beta. Features, pricing, and availability may change.
> Extended context is available for:
> API and pay-as-you-go users: full access to 1M context
> Pro, Max, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers: available with extra usage enabled
> Selecting a 1M model does not immediately change billing. Your session uses standard rates until it exceeds 200K tokens of context. Beyond 200K tokens, requests are charged at long-context pricing with dedicated rate limits. For subscribers, tokens beyond 200K are billed as extra usage rather than through the subscription.
I so wish the author had made their screenshot at the top an image map so you could click on the icons to jump to each section below. But so cool!
I loved playing with HyperCard in elementary/middle school before I moved on to coding and saw what was possible there. But HyperCard will always hold a special place in my heart.
EDIT: Ok, I couldn't help myself, this [0] will inject the image map into the page (paste it into your console). Don't worry, it's simple and easy to read what it's doing). Video of what it looks like once injected: https://cs.joshstrange.com/t1T3KGxF
This feels like a start difference with how Ars handled their recent mistake.
While I don’t use Windows or read PCWorld, I find this, depressingly, refreshing and I appreciate owning one’s mistakes. Publicly and unabashedly, without mincing words.
I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?
If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.
I know, but that doesn't mean there aren't people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone/Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.
I used to only want black/silver "base" colors for resale reasons but that has fallen far on my needs for a laptop since I keep/repurpose them or cycle them through friends/family instead of reselling in most cases now.
What are people’s general thoughts on Interac? As someone who just implemented support for it in a POS application I don’t have a high opinion of it.
You must be online [0] to process the transaction and you can’t refund/void unless the card is present. Which means if you call in later with an issue, we can’t refund you remotely, you have to come back into the store to do a refund.
[0] I know this may seem strange to some of you, but restaurants don’t always have stable internet. Most do, but there a long tail of locations with flakey or slow internet. And business owners are not always willing to pay for 5G backup.
I like it just on principle for being something the Canadian banks collaborate on without involving Visa or Mastercard, unlike in the US where debit also goes through their networks.
From the consumer side, I don't use it all that often for purchases just because I'm aware of the interchange fee tax on cash purchases so I try to maximize the value of my credit cards: 3x Avion points for grocery spend on RBC ION+, 2 Aeroplan pts/$ for dining on Amex.
As far as a requirement to be online, given the nature of debit that doesn't surprise me; the whole point relative to credit is that no one has to trust you to pay a bill later. If offline transactions were possible then it would just be a credit card by another name.
The refund thing surprises me, but I expect that has to do with preventing some fraud scenario, maybe like an inside job where an employee issues remote refunds to a confederate? Overall it seems like the design of the system is fairly conservative and that's reflected in the much lower fees; the whole point is to not have to have whole armies of people answering the phones to help grandma get back $50.
Yeah, I can understand needing to be online and I can 100% get on board with not using Visa/Mastercard. It's the in-person refunds that are annoying, just sucks for customer support "You have to come back in".
I current use STT (MacWhisper) and just hold down a hotkey to speak into any application. While I’d hope that this option would provide better SST for technical things, maybe even using your code/context to steer the transcription, I think I’ll stick with my system-wide SST support that is way easier to use.
Current: hold button, talk, release button, hit enter
Voice mode: type /voice, wait for it to connect, talk, ??? Just detect when I’ve finished? Or hit a key?
Nah, I prefer being able to edit what it thinks it heard and pause for however long I want while talking without it thinking I’m done
Just had a friend reach out yesterday about this issue. His outlook account for 10+ years started having issues receiving emails from his dad and a company he works with.
All I could find was that his dad’s email was missing SPF/DMARC but the other email address that was having problems looked like it was configured correctly.
I only was able to get a screenshot of the email voice his dad received and it mentioned being on a block list (like in the article).
Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparently being better than containers, it doesn't really matter, there isn't the ecosystem there.
FreeBSD might be as good as this blog author makes it out to be, and maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility) but I can't help but feel it causes more friction than I'd like, it's just "slightly" harder to do anything. In the age of LLMs I have to tell it (or put it in my system prompt) "I'm using FreeBSD" or it will be give me Linux advice. It just feels like death by a thousand papercuts.
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