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You should try FreeBSD (2014)

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Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#141

Post by JdeBP »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #73
byuu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a word of warning, Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy work for iXsystems and are pushing for both PC-BSD and FreeNAS to move to NextBSD, which is basically bringing half of OS X into FreeBSD. (Probably inspired by Jordan's days of working at Apple.) Which many people, including myself, feel is a disastrously bad idea (ex http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/ ). It has a lot of similarities to Linux and sys…

Thanks for the shout-out. Thankfully, the FreeBSD Foundation itself doesn't seem particularly receptive to the NextBSD effort (judging from their most recent quarterly status), so there's no danger of it being merged soon.

On that subject, see http://marc.info/?t=144763538600004&r=1&w=2 .

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#142

Post by JdeBP »

floatboth wrote: post #104
protomyth wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll watch. LaunchD isn't bad on the OS X boxes we have[1] and I guess coming from NeXTSTEP, Mach isn't something I have a problem with. I will see how it works, but I'm an OpenBSD user these days so I will wait and see what they think. 1) my main complain has already been addressed with the switch from XML

I've actually listened to the BSD Now podcast episode where they discussed NextBSD… IIRC, launchd is a simple process manager, and it never had anything to do with XML. XML/plists are used in Apple's implementation of launchCTL, the command line client. http://www.nextbsd.org/welcome-to-ghost/ NextBSD is explicitly a "science project" – they don't want upstream FreeBSD to become NeXTSTEP :)

> IIRC, launchd is a simple process manager, and it never had anything to do with XML.

Everyone thought that, until someone came along and wrote a launchd attempt that put an XML parser into the process #1 program. It was publicized back in 2014.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/la...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#143

Post by feld »

bsg75 wrote: post #75
myztic wrote: post #56

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of…

Where is ZoL not up to speed compared to FreeBSD / ZFS?

Matt Ahrens, one of the original ZFS authors, has somewhat recently stated that for ZFS the OpenSolaris/Illumos/FreeBSD versions are on par, but Linux and OSX are behind.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#144

Post by feld »

jms703 wrote: post #101
jamescun wrote: post #8

I recently switched my personal box to FreeBSD. I honestly find it significantly easier to manage than Linux, and have greater trust in its reliability merely from its simplicity. The single biggest thing which stood out for me was PF (from OpenBSD). Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux, give PF a go with /etc/pf.conf (docs: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html , my confi…

That PF code is from OpenBSD 4.5, released in May 2009. I wonder what fixes and improvements are missing.

Internally it has changed so much you can't consider it to be the same as the OpenBSD pf. It's a permanent fork.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#145

Post by feld »

thinkingkong wrote: post #79

Not sure which operating systems are still pushing the enveloppe but I get the impression that these system designs are congealing. BSD and Solaris were different enough to create real competition, if only friendly. Now it seems that momentum of linux has turned it into the only real option for doing "serious" things, unless you need the license freedom of BSD for an embedded device.

That's an impression a lot of people have been getting and it's very unfortunate. It doesn't help that OS isn't really taught anymore.

But if you're interested, check out http://teachbsd.org

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#146

Post by drcube »

I expect almost any laptop I buy will work (with minimal tinkering) with any flavor of Linux I use, but something tells me that is not the case with BSD. Are they all running it on a virtual machine? Or is there a lot more people writing drivers for BSD than I imagined?

The BSDs seem like they have a lot of what I love about Slackware, only more so. I'd really like to try installing one, and might do so on an old laptop this weekend.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#147

Post by floatboth »

tobik wrote: post #127
floatboth wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11. But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-) You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.

> But you don't need it really. You need it to run Linux Docker containers on FreeBSD. More on https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker

I don't think that's a good idea. I don't want to run Linux anything ;-)

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#148

Post by KirinDave »

vox_mollis wrote: post #140
KirinDave wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. I am using Windows 10 on a surface book. There are some minor glitches in a 1st gen product I admit wholeheartedly. Most are fixed for me. I had a defective unit off lot 0 but the replacement and recent driver updates have fixed everything but the "somet…

This sounds great, except some of us are wary about using an OS with a built-in keylogger and ambient sound recorder.

The ambient sound recorder is disabled by default, but is no different than any other option that does the same.

As for the keylogger, stop spreading FUD. Cortana is nearly identical to every other search including Apple's spotlight. Proxy your traffic and watch each keystroke. Ubuntu's search also does this.

Or were you under the impression that your Siri voice snippets or OK Google or Firefox awesome bar was magically not phoning to a cloud service?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#149

Post by protomyth »

JdeBP wrote: post #141
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the shout-out. Thankfully, the FreeBSD Foundation itself doesn't seem particularly receptive to the NextBSD effort (judging from their most recent quarterly status), so there's no danger of it being merged soon.

On that subject, see http://marc.info/?t=144763538600004&r=1&w=2 .

nice, relaunchd looks interesting and I was not aware of svc from DragonFlyBSD https://www.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=svc&section...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#150

Post by jake_morrison »

davidgerard wrote: post #90

I like FreeBSD a lot more than Linux at the administration level. I ran it as my desktop for a few years. The big problem: all the software I wanted to run assumed the whole world was GNU/Linux. So I ended up running lots of Linux binaries under emulation. (yes, I could have compiled everything from ports. But the time I spent 3 days compiling OpenOffice to discover the port was known-broken put me off that a bit ...…

Honest question: has FreeBSD become more automation friendly? i.e. putting all the configuration in /etc/rc.conf may be nice for a systems administrator manually editing things, but makes it hard for installation scripts which configure the system incrementally (e.g. Ansible). One thing I like about Linux is support for /etc/foo.d directories instead of /etc/foo.conf. Or is this not a problem in practice?

In our new "cloud native" systems we are ending up with a number of single-purpose VMs in AWS or GCP. So being able to run a minimal OS image with OpenBSD has it's attraction. At this point, it's easier to use CentOS or Ubuntu due to application compatibility.

I suppose the next logical step is Docker or NixOS.

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