It’s not like iptables was any better, but it was more intuitive as it spoke about IPs and ports, not high-level arbitrary constructs such as zones and services defined in some XML file. And since firewalld uses iptables/nftables underneath, I wonder why do I need a worse leaky abstraction on top of what I already know.
I truly hate firewalld.
I’d love a Linux firewall configured with a sane config file and I think BSD really nailed it. It’s easy to configure and still human readable, even for more advanced firewall gateway setups with many interfaces/zones.
A have no doubt that Linux can do all the same stuff feature-wise, but oh god the UX :/
I have been using for many decades both Linux and FreeBSD, on many kinds of computers.
When comparing Linux with FreeBSD, I probably do not find anything more annoying on Linux than its networking configuration tools.
While I am using Linux on my laptops and desktops and on some servers with computational purposes, on the servers that host networking services I much prefer FreeBSD, for the ease of administration.