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Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#11

Post by nec4b »

baldfat wrote: post #7
nec4b wrote: post #4

I went from windows machine to PC-BSD 10.3 about 2 years ago and then to TrueOS. At first I really liked it, specifically ZFS integration. I consider ZFS a hidden gem of data storage. After the second update troubles began. Every time there was a new system update, some software was quietly removed from the system. If I reinstalled it by hand again, usually something broke. I guess it wasn't compatible with the newer…

Can I ask why you wouldn't see Linux as your next home? (Trying just to have a conversation and nothing negative on anything in your remarks) 1. I also LOVE KDE (But mostly use a tile window manager i3) 2. I tried liking BTRFS (Similar to ZFS for my non-server systems and just went back to my old file system) I feel my 2 copies and one off site is a better system for desktop. I use OpenSUSE and never had a problem I…

I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a small NAS/FreeBSD server for storage and just install Windows on the main PC as it has always worked pretty well for me and other household memebers are more used to it as well. I will also give OpenSuse a try in a VM to see how it works.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#12

Post by dijit »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #6

It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit

Echoing this sentiment.

FreeBSD idled heavy on my Thinkpad X201s, but OpenBSD was much better, longer battery and all the hardware worked basically flawlessly (except X11 tweaks for the middle mouse button thing, which is not exclusive to BSD).

Also wifi being handled by "ifconfig" is super nice.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#13

Post by onli »

nec4b wrote: post #11
baldfat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why you wouldn't see Linux as your next home? (Trying just to have a conversation and nothing negative on anything in your remarks) 1. I also LOVE KDE (But mostly use a tile window manager i3) 2. I tried liking BTRFS (Similar to ZFS for my non-server systems and just went back to my old file system) I feel my 2 copies and one off site is a better system for desktop. I use OpenSUSE and never had a problem I…

I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a sma…

Just a +1 for trying out Linux here. Sounds like you'd really like it. ZFS is native by now, https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable, though I'm not 100% sure about the current state of the FS in the linux world. Last I read was Ubuntu integrating it by default.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#14

Post by dromenkoning »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #6

It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit

This way a malicious user with physical access to your machine can easily get around your locked desktop by switching to tty1. It would be better to fork the xinit proces to the background and exit the tty after:

  echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit & && exit

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#15

Post by X86BSD »

onli wrote: post #13
nec4b wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a sma…

Just a +1 for trying out Linux here. Sounds like you'd really like it. ZFS is native by now, https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable , though I'm not 100% sure about the current state of the FS in the linux world. Last I read was Ubuntu integrating it by default.

I would not use ZFS on Linux when it's much more stable and supported better on illumos or FreeBSD.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

dromenkoning wrote: post #14
TurboHaskal wrote: post #6

It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit

This way a malicious user with physical access to your machine can easily get around your locked desktop by switching to tty1. It would be better to fork the xinit proces to the background and exit the tty after: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit & && exit

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#17

Post by [deleted] »

dromenkoning wrote: post #14
TurboHaskal wrote: post #6

It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit

This way a malicious user with physical access to your machine can easily get around your locked desktop by switching to tty1. It would be better to fork the xinit proces to the background and exit the tty after: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit & && exit

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#18

Post by sdegutis »

nicky0 wrote: post #8
TurboHaskal wrote: post #6

It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit

The wonderful world of Unix.

Dunno why you're downvoted, you have a totally valid point. Trying to shoe-horn a hacker-friendly OS into a layman-friendly desktop/laptop experience is going to be painful. Extremely fun and satisfying, sure. (Well, sometimes.) But there will be pain.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

#20

Post by drewg123 »

I moved to PC-BSD and then TrueOS from Linux. (and kind of MacOS, I was using my Mac as my primary workstation for while).

The reason I chose PC-BSD over vanilla FreeBSD (or Ubuntu) was its integrated ZFS / beadm system, which creates ZFS snapshots at update time that are integrated with the boot loader. That means you can roll back if an upgrade fails, or breaks a crucial piece of software. There is less reason to do this now, as FreeBSD current now has decent beadm and zfs boot support baked in as of a few months ago.

The things that I hate compared to MacOS and Linux:

- No support for U2F in Chromium. In fact, if you have set up a security key, simply getting the U2F prompt will crash. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451248

- Chromium version historically lags Chrome on supported platforms by weeks or months (though, as of today, I have chromium-56.0.2924.87_1, which is pretty recent).

- No support for Google Hangouts (or other video conf. systems)

- "Complex" Linux commercial binary software (like Chrome, slack desktop client, my kid's Kerbal Space Program) does not work with the Linux API support.

To work around these things, I've actually installed a bhyve VM running ubuntu for Linux apps (and gone through the pain of routing pulse audio via a network socket so that sound works). With PCI-passthru, I can actually pass a USB controller into the Linux VM, so U2F and a video camera for conf. calls works. For KSP, Wine works reasonably well on the Windows binary.

If I had it to do over again, I might just reverse things, and run Ubuntu for my desktop, and pass the disk controllers through to FreeBSD and run my FreeBSD stuff in a VM.

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