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BSD vs. Linux (2005)

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Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#121

Post by voltagex_ »

snuxoll wrote: post #95
lucaspiller wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Ah crap. The advice I got was just about the opposite - I wanted an L2ARC device in my system for performance.

Atom C2758, 32GB ECC RAM, 4x4TB in RAIDZ2 (losing that much storage was painful, and the $1200AUD upgrade path to 4x8TB even more so) with a 128GB SSD as L2ARC.

I found out some time later that I probably wanted an SLOG device instead but I'm really too afraid to touch my config. FWIW it's pretty stable on FreeBSD 10.3 with around 5GB RAM in use.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#122

Post by throwaway2048 »

lisivka wrote: post #120
thegeomaster wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use Mate at Fedora. I see none of your bugs.

I'm sure that's of great value to him.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#123

Post by knorker »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #15

I tried freebsd. Gone back to ubuntu. In this day and age not having proper dependency resolution for packages is not acceptable. I've more than once had some tool based on ports just go into an infinite cycle when asked to upgrade some packages. The philosophy laid out in this article seems more like rationalization of historical accidents more than anything else. Linux file system layout is just as predictable as a…

> In this day and age not having proper dependency resolution for packages is not acceptable.

It still doesn't? Haha!

I remember ranting about this 10 years ago, with a friend who went to a conference in France… that was dedicated to package management in BSDs.

I asked him how I "just upgrade all the packages" (apt-get upgrade). I'd found two-three ways, but couldn't get them to work. He said that yeah there are three ways. They don't work.

I thought surely they'd fixed it by now.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#124

Post by pimeys »

lloeki wrote: post #107
_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.)…

> far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity? You're missing the point, GP is talking about a level below the DEs, namely the graphics stack, which if unavailable or inefficient makes any discussion about the DEs moot since the GUI may very well be unusable at all in practice. In that regard the "Windows desktop" has plenty of favorable points an…

> As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years.

> Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).

And then again, after using almost 10 years xmonad at work and at home for everything, using Windows or OS X is definitely not a nice experience. I don't really care about GUI tricks or clutter on my desktop. I just want my terminal, my editor and my browser to appear when I press the key combinations and I want my desktop to manage the windows so that they're always in the right place.

The other thing I don't miss from the Windows and OS X world are the updates. I don't want to spend one work day to update my system to the next version and possibly fixing things because something changed in the xcode and I need to reinstall it to get my toolchain to work, or something changed in the Windows Linux subsystem and again I'm spending time fixing stuff.

I like things to be simple and a very basic Linux installation with a good wm which you know by heart is miles ahead of everything else. And it doesn't change so you can focus on your work.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#125

Post by eropple »

microtonal wrote: post #118
_wdzx wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?

For a start, X11's security model. Every X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, do screengrabs of other window's contents, etc. In other words, your browser can snoop on what passwords you type into an X terminal if it wanted to or is compromised.

Yup yup. Like, I recall a blog post by a Docker core contributor and employee saying, "Run your desktop apps in Docker containers to sandbox them! Just volume the X socket into the container."

(Of course, the Dockerfiles were also running apps--like, say, Chrome--as root, with no user namespaces, so it wasn't exactly great anyway.)

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#126

Post by josteink »

nixos wrote: post #12

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have ov…

> I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS

Only ZFS dedup uses goobles of RAM, and use of that is discouraged anyway.

> I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need.

Last I checked, Debian now supports ZFS in form of a source DKMS package. No need to maintain your own setup.

If you go with Ubuntu instead, which provides binary ZFS packages, you can also use it as a rootfs to get full advantage of its capabilities[1].

That said, I've decided to just stick with btrfs, because it's in the mainline Linux kernel, and works well enough for my needs with absolutely zero hassle.

FreeBSD is nice though. No harm in trying it out to widen your horizon :)

[1] https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-...

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#127

Post by merijnv »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #106
_wdzx wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?

Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.

> Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. > If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly.

Maybe the fact that I have to give them time is one of the major problems? You know how much time I invested in getting my Windows and OSX desktops to work flawlessly? Zero.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#128

Post by lisivka »

m_mueller wrote: post #109
blihp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can appreciate that point of view (i.e. as a vendor), the definition does depend on whose POV you are looking at it from. From an end-user (individual or business) POV, the GPL is absolutely 'freely redistributable' what you're talking about is your inability to limit that ability. That's the GPL doing its job.

> That's the GPL doing its job. It also makes it really hard to earn a living with actual software (not services) that depends on GPL.

Buy commercial licenses from authors of GPL code, so they will earn something too.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#129

Post by vbernat »

eropple wrote: post #111
aaron-lebo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.

I run a Linux desktop for work (typing on it right now) as a dual-boot with my Windows setup. It is a "modern machine", at least if an i7-6700K and a 980Ti are modern, and I couldn't get X to start with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. And yet it did with Ubuntu 14.04, which is bizarre. My time is valuable enough that I didn't debug it further than that--if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have…

Without a bug report, nobody can tell if your case is unique or general. You spend time to rant here but with a bit of additional time, you could have opened a bug report with the appropriate information and maybe help people running into the same problem.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#130

Post by josteink »

nixos wrote: post #30
anexprogrammer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS only needs GBs if you need deduplication. 99% don't, almost everyone is better off with compression. 1GB is the min for ZFS though it can run in a little less.

Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS

> It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS

btrfs at your service then. Comes with the mainline Linux-kernel. Give it a spin!

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