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BSD vs. Linux (2005)

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Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#91

Post by ams6110 »

aceperry wrote: post #76

I'm a total linux user and have tried *Bsd from time to time. For some reason, the bsds have always taken a very long time to boot up and even to start X. The last time I tried FreeBsd (about 3-4 years ago), a friend asked me to help him debug why X windows didn't run. It was taking 15+ minutes to startx on his brand new server class PC that he built up himself. We didn't realize that it took so long to start up unti…

I have run OpenBSD as my primary OS for years and never experienced anything like that. It boots/reboots very quickly.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#92

Post by brulard »

_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#93

Post by aaron-lebo »

geff82 wrote: post #88

I have a lot of sympathy for the BSDs. I actually learned Unix with NetBSD in 2004. Problem with BSD nowadays, at least for me, is that all supported desktop hardware is really old. The newest, still available, Laptop that works is the Lenovo X240 (and other x40s....). And when everything works, like on my Samsung NP530, there is strange stuff like a super slow and unreliable Wi-Fi connection. So if you want a great…

The lead dev of Dragonfly worked to get it working on:

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720-Chromebook-11-6-Inch-4GB/dp...

That's a sub-$200 Intel Haswell machine. It also means Dragonfly (as well as the other BSDs) work fine on similar hardware.

Similarly, you can put together a modern sub-$300 desktop that will run it just fine.

Also see:

http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-May/500...

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#94

Post by thegeomaster »

_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

I use KDE and can confirm, unfortunately, that (at least on my setup) I have encountered many bugs pertaining to graphics. I also often get PulseAudio issues like the sound skipping when the system is under heavier-than-usual momentary load. I can't run Chrome developer tools without it crashing inside the driver every few minutes. Mounting an NTFS partition works on second try every time. I've used GNOME previously, which was too memory-hungry and often too unresponsive to use.

I love Linux as a developer platform and that's why I'm staying here. But if I could give up the shell, package management, understandable system architecture and the like, I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#95

Post by snuxoll »

lucaspiller wrote: post #62
nixos wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much RAM is required these days?

A big user of RAM in ZFS is dedup and compression - which can both be disabled.

Compression in ZFS doesn't use RAM, dedup tables, the arc and l2arc mapping tables are all that matters with regards to memory usage with ZFS. l2arc is where a lot of newbies end up shooting themselves in the foot, they go toss in a mirrored pair of 512GB SSD's for their l2arc on a system with 32GB of RAM and wonder why performance got worse or it crashed, or they enabled dedup on 24TB of data with 64GB of ram and wonder why it crashed and their zpool is beyond recovery.

If you are using ZFS without an l2arc or dedup enabled even a measly 1GB of RAM is "sufficient", you just won't get the best performance since it's going to have to constantly fetch from disk depending on your active data set (which is literally no different a problem than OS-level file caching in any other operating system).

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#96

Post by gvurrdon »

ktRolster wrote: post #54
badsock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big thing for me is that I trust the FreeBSD devs to not completely reinvent things unless they're sure it's an improvement. I got sick of the churn in Linux, having to relearn things all the time and then find out when I'm done that it's not any better, just different. Things I learned how to do in FreeBSD a decade ago still work. For example, to get a NIC configured I can either put one or two lines of text in…

Watching iptables get replaced was a really depressing example of that, after the developers swore that "this time we got it right" when replacing ipchains......

Thanks - clearly I wasn't paying attention as I had not noticed NFtables. Another exciting task to look forward too, then.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#97

Post by redwall_hp »

_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

ChuckMcM's criticisms seem to be of the X Window System, not of any particular desktop environment. Architecturally, it really doesn't fit with modern systems and has a lot of legacy baggage. It doesn't matter what DE you like, X still powers it, and it's the issue.

Wayland is on the way, which may bring Linux graphics into the 21st century, but I haven't been following that very closely.

Apple's way more on the ball about GUI stuff. While OS X lags behind in OpenGL support, which sucks for games, they nail everything their desktop environment needs to function. But notably, they don't use something like X. They have their own software stack.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#98

Post by thallian »

lajospajtek wrote: post #90

Another aspect of the "Linux vs. FreeBSD" story is Java. I was almost won over by FreeBSD few years ago, however what keeps me back is so to speak the "second class citizenship" of the JVM on FreeBDS. Or at least it was so pre-OpenJDK 8, when I looked. Is anyone successfully using Java on FreeBSD in production?

Depends on what you mean by production.

I've been running Gitblit and multiple Minecraft (Spigot) worlds with Openjdk8 on FreeBSD 10 for more than a year and never had any problems (Jenkins worked fine too but I used it only for a short time).

But my userbase is only about 10 people, mostly in minecraft (to get a sense of the main world's scale: [0]), so I don't know if that qualifies :)

[0] https://world.vanwa.ch/

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#99

Post by rayiner »

brulard wrote: post #92
_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.

I used Linux on the desktop from 2001-2007 or so. Switched to OS X until then. It's no contest: OS X is smoother, more consistent, and lower maintenance. Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#100

Post by idobai »

thegeomaster wrote: post #94
_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

I use KDE and can confirm, unfortunately, that (at least on my setup) I have encountered many bugs pertaining to graphics. I also often get PulseAudio issues like the sound skipping when the system is under heavier-than-usual momentary load. I can't run Chrome developer tools without it crashing inside the driver every few minutes. Mounting an NTFS partition works on second try every time. I've used GNOME previously,…

> I've used GNOME previously, which was too memory-hungry and often too unresponsive to use.

Maybe you should buy a dev computer instead. Gnome consumes far less memory than the average DE. I always try every DE at every release and as far as I've experienced gnome-shell and cinnamon are the best at customization/plugins/performance.

Edit:

> I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC.

I'm currently at work and I've a windows and an ubuntu on virtualbox - gnome-shell is pretty smooth while windows appends the "Not responding" text to every window's title, the search in the menu is much slower than it should be and the apps are often frozen - it is far from "flawless" for me.

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