FreeBSD is an excellent and performant operating system that allowed me to run a development environment on older hardware
August 08, 2021
FreeBSD is an excellent and performant operating system that allowed me to run a development environment on older hardware
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with FreeBSD
I have been using FreeBSD as a development environment on several machines for work and personal projects - mainly NodeJS and MongoDB based. I chose FreeBSD as my environment initially because of its speed on older hardware, it allowed me to make use of older laptops and machines that would have otherwise been thrown out. FreeBSD is a modern operating system under active development and to be able run that on older hardware and have it perform so well - is actually quite amazing. I first tried different distributions of Linux, but I had trouble getting them to install or they did not perform on older hardware well at all. From my use of FreeBSD I have come to really really like it, I appreciate it's robustness and performance and I also like that I am using a direct descendant of UNIX.
- Performs really well, even on older hardware
- Secure
- Robust
- Package manager (pkg) is excellent
- Large collection of ported software from Linux
- Documentation is excellent (FreeBSD Handbook)
- Installation can be tricky for first timers
- You need to be comfortable using a command line terminal most of the time
- Active development and strong community
- Documentation
- Security
- Robustness
- Performance
- XFCE
- Support for NodeJS and MongoDB
- Package management
- As FreeBSD is free - the ROI is at least the cost of some commercial Linux or Windows based OS (which can be very expensive)
- Allowed the re-use of older hardware that would have otherwise been disposed
- No cost development environment
- Opportunity for a no cost server setup also
FreeBSD was the only operating system out of many I tried to install easily on older hardware and to run in a very performant way. For example, I had a lot of trouble trying to get Ubuntu to install on older hardware and when it did, it was too slow to use. FreeBSD installed quite easily and even after installing a desktop such as XFCE - it still run surprisingly fast. I was very impressed with it's performance, which it seems is a goal of the FreeBSD project.
Do you think FreeBSD delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with FreeBSD's feature set?
Yes
Did FreeBSD live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of FreeBSD go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy FreeBSD again?
Yes