21–30 of 60 posts
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
Ok, I'll bite, what does that do?
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
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 d…
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
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…
My main data loss comes from hardware problems or a command problem like mv photo.jpg and forget the don't over wirte command. That's a simple fix on my side. I copy the effected file over.
PC-BSD is very good, but there are some weird quirks compared to Linux. For example, I have still never really figured out how to get my screen-brightness to adjust properly, and none of my laptops' integrated WiFi seem to work out of the box with any BSD. The latter problem I have been able to solve by cheap USB wifi dongle, and the the former I just haven't solved since this laptop doesn't need a particularly good battery anyway.
However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git).
I also have come to really appreciate the ports system, especially after I started doing a lot of stuff with video processing (specifically FFMpeg). Being able to have freshly compiled packages, whilst still having them managed by a package manage (which happily resolves compile-time dependencies), is incredibly useful, and makes it kind of hard to go back to Linux (though I hear Gentoo might be up my alley).
Overall, the transition isn't terribly hard, but I wouldn't recommend it if you don't want to get down in the weeds of the system. I enjoy that stuff, and I suspect most of the HN audience does too, so I recommend trying it out.
It is very picky on the hardware it supports out of the box. That means you'll get problems with Hardware that came out after Haswell. It works ok on my Lenovo X240 (that I bought brand new in Juli 2016 in a maxed out version at a very good price). But after a short trial I decided to go with Xubuntu as the hardware support is much better and most developer relevant software today runs on Linux without hassles. I lov…
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 d…
WebRTC-based video conferencing like appear.in or hubl.in don't work either?
With computers you can either learn how computers work, or use tools that try to hide how computers work so you don't have to.
For example, you can configure a network interface by hand - it's a few lines of configuration - but, you need to know how networking works at a basic level (e.g. vocabulary like SSID, subnet masks, etc.).
The alternative is what Windows/macOS/Linux do, which is wheelbarrow code into GUI wizards and daemons that try to automate everything. That's either good or terrible, depending on who you are.
It's good in that often you can click a bunch of buttons and it will "just work". It's terrible in that if anything goes wrong, not only are you dealing with the complexities of the actual problem, you also have to guess around what the hand-holding code is doing on your behalf, and half the time it will fight you or not let you do the things you need to.
Worse is that bugs are proportional to the lines of code, so the likelihood of it mostly working but sometimes not (randomly at times) is many times higher, because the amount of code involved (including that of all the different subsystems talking to each other) is many times larger than the code that actually does the job.
I sat down and learned how LAN networking works about 17 years ago. It took a few hours of reading and messing around. The dividends have been huge: I just paste network configuration from one rc.conf to another, and if anything goes wrong the language that the computer reports the error in is the same language that I speak, so the solution tend to be obvious.
Also, nothing in terms of how I use tcp/ip or ethernet has changed in all that time, and I doubt it will 17 years from now either. Learn it once and you're done. How many different ways to configure networks have Windows/macOS/Linux had in that time?
The reason I left Linux is due to all the code that was supposed to "make things easier", but for someone who knows how things work, actually makes life harder. For a long time I could ignore all of it on Linux - the old low-level stuff still worked - but then they started messing with that (systemd was the last straw) and I had to get out. FreeBSD was a wonderful escape - it looks like complexity to people who don't know how computers work, but to me it's absolute simplicity.
Computers are important - if you're in this field it's worth taking the time to understand the tools that you depend on.