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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?

#51

Post by JdeBP »

geff82 wrote: post #3

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…

> FreeBSD ... on the desktop

However: the questioner wanted to know about TrueOS, not about FreeBSD. The desktop with TrueOS is significantly different to the desktop with FreeBSD. There is extra desktop stuff that comes in the box with TrueOS. And the desktop stuff is done somewhat differently.

With some FreeBSD-derived operating systems such as GhostBSD one gets "flavours" of the operating system according to the desktop environment, like "GhostBSD MATE" and "GhostBSD XFCE". With TrueOS, there aren't such multiple "flavours". Rather, PCDM allows one to select from multiple desktop environments at login time, and the desktop environments are available side by side in a single "flavour" of the "desktop" operating system. TrueOS is in fact "flavoured" as "desktop" versus "server", rather than as "MATE" versus "XFCE" versus whatever.

There are a number of "TrueOS-own" tools that are added to those desktops, as well, including (for examples) the Life Preserver, the PC-BSD Control Panel, AppCafe, and the System Updater.

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

#52

Post by nec4b »

drewg123 wrote: post #31
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…

I installed KDE on TrueOS, and it is working fine. I've never even tried Lumina, past my initial login to install kde. As to software disappearing. I think what might have been happening is that you'd go install something, but the upgrader had already run and created a new boot environment for the update based on a snapshot from before you'd installed the new pkg. So just as soon as you rebooted into the new BE, you'…

Unfortunately updates removed software that was already installed couple of updates before. If I remember correctly google earth was the first to go and when i tried to reinstall it, it didn't run and worse, after reboot I was stuck in shell because X failed to start. Regarding KDE, I read from TrueOS developers that it is source of troubles for them because KDE has become effectively Linux only and hasn't been updated since version 4.13 for BSD.

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

#53

Post by baldfat »

tracker1 wrote: post #44
baldfat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still fail to see the benefit for a desktop user with ZFS or BTRFS. I find that backing up policy of 2 copies local and one off site (I use CrashPlan) is a very robust system that saves any data loss. 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.

Beyond what others have said.. raid isn't backup and backup isn't raid.... re-installing your OS and restoring from backup takes a lot of time... recovering from a down disk in a redundant array means you aren't down during that time... install a disk to replace the bad one, and continue about your daily life. That said, it's always an exercise in frustration, and if personal hardware unexpected cost, when a drive di…

That's why I said 2 copies :)

1) I have a second hard drive that has a copy of the files from the first drive (They are not raid and it makes saves mechanical errors). It isn't for restoring the OS but for saving the file. I did play with a dd backup solution on a second drive but that wasn't very practical. rsync was way more practical for my needs as a content maker.

2) I have a home server that uses Crashplan that sends the files to their server. This is my offsite backup. If I accidentally delete a file this is where I get my backup copy.

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

#54

Post by itsautomatisch »

I don't think TrueOS is worth running day-to-day right now because of the constant changes and tweaks between versions, but I think OpenBSD and FreeBSD both work great, though the latter requires some work out of the box. OpenBSD folks are very much into dogfooding so they have better laptop support, including power management.

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

#55

Post by yebyen »

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

   xinit & && exit
I don't mean to ask a silly question, but what exactly is this meant to do? (What might it do that plain old `xinit & exit` doesn't do?)

&& is a binary op meant to execute the following command if the return code of the preceding command is success (0)

& is another shell builtin that sends the command preceding it to the background, and lets the shell continue with whatever comes next...

So, at first I read your edit and thought "Oh, this will exit the shell unless X can't be started" ... but exit should be running before X ever gets around to returning, no?

I just read the man page for my favorite shell, and it says the return code for `&` is always 0. So it's clear that `& &&` will work, but I don't see anything suggesting it will do anything that `&` alone won't do.

Just want to know if you know something I don't, and I figure there's no better place to learn a new shell thing than on a HN thread about BSD OS.

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

#56

Post by thomastjeffery »

tombert wrote: post #27

About four years ago I moved all of my personal computers away from proprietary operating systems, with most of my laptops running Linux, and one running PC-BSD. 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. T…

If you like snapshots and source-based packages, you might be interested in nixos.org

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

#57

Post by thomastjeffery »

badsock wrote: post #30

Not what you asked, but a couple of years ago I moved from Linux to FreeBSD on the desktop. 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, et…

Definitely a good road to go down, and you can also find several linux distros that have the same philisophy. When I went down that road, I found it looping back to where I was with great package management being a tool to handle what I understand, not what I didn't see.

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

#58

Post by OhSoHumble »

From macOS? Isn't Linux a better comparison?

Anyway, I ran it for a few days about two weeks ago. Without Chrome support, I can't have Netflix. Without Netflix, I can't watch cheesy fantasy TV shows while coding. Oh, and there was a bug in libressl that prevented me from using `go get`. Other than that, I thought TrueOS was pretty nifty.

I went back to Arch but I might try BSD as a desktop OS again in a few years.

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

#59

Post by dromenkoning »

yebyen wrote: post #55
dromenkoning wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

xinit & && exit I don't mean to ask a silly question, but what exactly is this meant to do? (What might it do that plain old `xinit & exit` doesn't do?) && is a binary op meant to execute the following command if the return code of the preceding command is success (0) & is another shell builtin that sends the command preceding it to the background, and lets the shell continue with whatever comes next... So, at first…

Nothing special going on here; my syntax is based on me not knowing the particulars of `&`. I'll try to remember using yours in the future as it's more elegant. Thanks for the reply.

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

#60

Post by grahamjperrin »

Yes, I moved.

Shortly after I began (AppleSeed) seed testing of pre-release Yosemite I decided that – after decades of happy use of Macs – the mash-up was not for me. An ill-fitting one-size-fits-all approach to the GUI, which was rushed through.

July 2014: I planned a three-year transition away from Mac OS X.

To the best of my knowledge, Apple's changes to human interface guidelines were not seeded. Instead, the changes were privately preset, published only after Yosemite was released.

October 2014: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/524642026261057537

Two years later, my experience with PC-BSD, expressed when TrueOS Desktop was announced: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/797724086898196481 "smart direction".

Should I recommend TrueOS Desktop to a user of Mac OS X? Not at this time; https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/created_by/grah... the most troublesome (time-wasting) of which is https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/287 – tl;dr the Mac metaphor would be an inappropriate switch off of Wi-Fi when simply switching network location. And https://discourse.trueos.org/t/-/378/18 too often I can not get network service without a restart of the operating system.

Generally, the majority of my discussion about the software is at https://discourse.trueos.org/users/grahamperrin/activity … you might need to scroll down a page to reach discussion of the software (to skip stuff arising from changes to community guidelines that were made without consultation with the community).

https://github.com/trueos/trueos-docs/issues/33 time for change :-)

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