Live data from Hacker News

PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

trueos.org

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

#12
post #2

Well and good. The ® slapped everywhere is very annoying.

Indeed. I don't understand why they do that (it was already like that before the brand change). It just scares away many potential users (people who have already used Linux, like open source etc.).

It's not like their management is clueless either. The project is sponsored by an advanced technology company (https://www.ixsystems.com/).

Re: PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

#15
post #3

So why would one want to use TrueOS instead of FreeBSD? When it was still called PC-BSD some people claimed ease of use, but I never understood that; since it used the same ports as FreeBSD, you could install the same ports or packages on FreeBSD. Now they abandoned this desktop focus. So what is the selling point here?

The desktop focus has not been abandoned.

I've experimented with a PC-BSD desktop in the past. It was significantly easier to get going than setting up FreeBSD from scratch. While the FreeBSD documentation is excellent, there's a lot to do to make it a functional graphical desktop, and PC-BSD does all that stuff for you.

Underneath it's still FreeBSD, so I couldn't see any reason not to use it.

Re: PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use PC-BSD on my desktop. The reason that I chose it over FreeBSD is due to their upgrade process and their use of ZFS boot environments (beadm). And the fact that X "just worked" with their installer. In terms of packages and uppdates: The way a pkg update on FreeBSD goes is that you do pkg-update && pkg-upgrade, and it updates your packages in place. In PC-BSD, it makes a new clone of your current root environmen…

> It makes this the new boot environment, and at reboot, you boot into the updated system. So you have to reboot to apply the changes? Sounds familiar :)

Unbelievable, right? One could instead do a zfs snapshot and retain everything. You don't even need zfs for snapshots. UFS could do it for ages.

Re: PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

#17
post #3

So why would one want to use TrueOS instead of FreeBSD? When it was still called PC-BSD some people claimed ease of use, but I never understood that; since it used the same ports as FreeBSD, you could install the same ports or packages on FreeBSD. Now they abandoned this desktop focus. So what is the selling point here?

The desktop focus has not been abandoned. I've experimented with a PC-BSD desktop in the past. It was significantly easier to get going than setting up FreeBSD from scratch. While the FreeBSD documentation is excellent, there's a lot to do to make it a functional graphical desktop, and PC-BSD does all that stuff for you. Underneath it's still FreeBSD, so I couldn't see any reason not to use it.

FreeBSD took me an afternoon to set things up, but that was one afternoon in a decade.

Re: PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

#19
post #5
post #3

So why would one want to use TrueOS instead of FreeBSD? When it was still called PC-BSD some people claimed ease of use, but I never understood that; since it used the same ports as FreeBSD, you could install the same ports or packages on FreeBSD. Now they abandoned this desktop focus. So what is the selling point here?

I use PC-BSD on my desktop. The reason that I chose it over FreeBSD is due to their upgrade process and their use of ZFS boot environments (beadm). And the fact that X "just worked" with their installer. In terms of packages and uppdates: The way a pkg update on FreeBSD goes is that you do pkg-update && pkg-upgrade, and it updates your packages in place. In PC-BSD, it makes a new clone of your current root environmen…

> beadm

This is how it works in FreeBSD too. At least that's how I do it. beadm is not mandatory, nor is used "by default", but it is there, it's the only way I update.

So I see no advantage here.

Post reply on HN