191–200 of 371 posts
Something I don't understand about FreeBSD is why they use the evil daemon for the logo? Whatever story behind it, I just think there are many other alternatives they could use as the logo.
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Have you read the article? It isn't an ad-hoc distinction. You get the base system with a FreeBSD install. It includes the kernel and everything else that makes it a "FreeBSD system". This is stuff maintained by the BSD team. Everything else is an add-on. If you blew away /usr/local, you would be left with a pristine (mostly) BSD install. An analogy is a base windows install and all the associated tools and drivers.…
I read the article. The distinction is indeed arbitrary. How much do you need for a base system really? Do you need more than the kernel, network drivers, and the filesystem? Last time I checked FreeBSD came with way more than those things. So someone, somewhere decided to include a whole bunch of other things as part of the base whereas they could just as easily be addon packages. I think FreeBSD includes various co…
As far as the compiler goes, in my 10.3-RELEASE-p5, I can only see clang 3.4.1. No Python, no Perl, no even Bash. If I happen to need clang 3.8, I can just `pkg install clang38` and it will happily live inside /usr/local separate from the one in /usr/bin (that is probably presented for building the world). This one will be managed by pkg, but the one in /usr/bin will be updated when I upgrade to 11.0-RELEASE (which will ship with 3.8).
Thinking in Linux's terms, is probably like installing Debian stable only the minimum, and use pkgsrc to install the rest of the system to /opt.
Something I don't understand about FreeBSD is why they use the evil daemon for the logo? Whatever story behind it, I just think there are many other alternatives they could use as the logo.
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It's not a security problem really. That's just a side issue. The problem is, today, if I want to watch a movie, play a game, do anything that requires using some slightly advanced GPU stuff, I'll get tearing, artifacts, or downright crashes. This is mostly because X11 sucks. (It's also partly because the proprietary nvidia drivers sucks). Nowadays I reboot on windows to watch netflix or play games (even linux-compat…
I think this honestly comes down to driver support rather than the Xorg stack. I dual boot with Windows 8.1 (Which is the OS supported by my manufacturer) and Arch Linux, and Arch is consistently more stable and faster for viewing videos and playing games than W8.1. For example, I tried watching TNG from my external drive the other day (Using the latest VLC for both). On Linux this isn't a problem, the quality is goo…
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FreeBSD also has Netmap and DTrace out of the box. They will also get TLS support in sendfile(2) as soon as the patches from Netflix land in HEAD.
I understand the rationale for this (performance), but it scares me a bit to have something as complex as a TLS stack running in kernel-space, which I assume it will do.
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How much RAM is required these days?
There are definitely people running ZFS on systems with less than 1GB of RAM. I'm not sure if anyone is running ZFS on a system with less than 512 MB of RAM. (FWIW, at one point the amount of address space was far more important than the amount of RAM -- amd64 systems with 1 GB of RAM would run better than i386 systems with 2 GB. I'm not sure if this is still the case.)
No first-hand experience with ZFS on BSD, but I believe in the early days of the ZFS port there were issues where if the system came under sudden memory pressure, ZFS might not hand its RAM back to the kernel fast enough, leading to (I guess) a panic. So this is a fit-and-finish issue with a specific port, not an inherent ZFS issue, but it seems to have fed into the whole notion of "ZFS needs bucketloads of RAM".
> 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,…
The solution that worked for me was getting an SSD.
Now, I always have a debian VM working in seamless mode. Ctrl+alt+t opens a terminal window, all linux dev tools work without a flow.
With an SSD there is absolutely no lag. Virtual desktops in Win10 and snapping with win+arrow keys, eliminate the need for a linux DE.
Plus you can use Adobe products, Visual Studio etc. at full speed, without hassle.
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Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?
Back in 2011, security researcher, Joanna Rutkowska wrote a very enlightening article on the inherent security deficiencies of the X server architecture which allows allows any windowed application to control any other one: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-ci...
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. From my experience of "old" computers, workstations, and then "PCs as Workstations", Windows won the desktop because the UNIX camp could never check their egos at the door a…
The funny thing is that there's a reason for that: up until recently, the focus of FreeBSD has been on being a server OS. There's a push recently on improving the graphics situation, but it's only relatively recent, and is mainly focussed on getting integrated graphics on more modern hardware working. There are also some efforts to expand the driver compatibility layer so that Linux drivers can be run as kernel modules with minimal change.
Moreover, FreeBSD types aren't quite so fixated on making a "FreeBSD desktop" as the Linux community is. Sure, there are desktop spins like PC-BSD, but the project as a whole has never really had desktops as a focus.
FreeBSD as a project is pragmatic, and tries to focus effort on where the greatest benefit lies.
Of course, there's the larger issue of Linux being insular, with a tendency to reinvent the wheel (epoll vs. kevent/kqueue being a nice example) rather than looking at what the state of the art is elsewhere and adopting that. You just have to look at containerisation: Solaris and FreeBSD have long had this in the form of Zones and Jails[1], but containerisation on Linux is largely an independent effort that didn't look to learn lessons from those efforts or adopt them.
[1] And I remember containerisation being mocked when hypervisors and VMs were all the rage. How things change...