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Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

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Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#11

Post by olavgg »

For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One pain point I recently struggled with was RocksDB with Rust, data got corrupted.. But the same code works great with Linux.

I really like FreeBSD, but I do not have time for it anymore. I really think FreeBSD is important, and I appriciate all the great work. But it needs to help me save my time.

I think spending effort and money on getting it to run better on laptops will not help adaptation. We have macs, which are a lot better than anything else at the moment. Even Linux on a laptop is a painful experience.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#12

Post by psychoslave »

beeflet wrote: post #2

I think that a major problem is that you can't legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute. Most importantly wifi drivers which are critical to making an operating system that people can actually use.

Laws come and go.

Forcing hardware vendor to disclose all information necessary to build drivers is something that is perfectly plausible to enact for example in the frame of a right to repair/maintain the hardware customers buy.

Note that it doesn’t need to be forcing to open source the vendor own implementation of any driver.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#15

Post by kortilla »

pmlnr wrote: post #10
DeathArrow wrote: post #7

$750000 seems very little amount for this task. I think they should somehow attract companies to invest in FreeBSD development. Apart from laptop support, FreeBSD is missing important things on server side suck as lack of support for Kubernetes. This is hindering FreeBSD adoption, too.

FreeBSD has jails if you need lightweight vms. The kubernetes monoculture is a horrible thing for long term.

Jails are akin to containers, not kubernetes. The value of k8s over just docker or whatever container runtime is in the lifecycle management, service mesh, scaling, monitoring, etc.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#16

Post by jensenbox »

I could be alone in this, but I think getting containers (OCI, Docker) running on FreeBSD seems like a better direction - I totally get that Docker is a Linux kernel thing but the idea of a file system with layers, registries etc could be a thing right?

I love FreeBSD but cannot really use it in a production environment until I can deploy containers on it as that is pretty much the defacto for our workflow.

Maybe it is impossible.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#17

Post by anonzzzies »

psychoslave wrote: post #12
beeflet wrote: post #2

I think that a major problem is that you can't legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute. Most importantly wifi drivers which are critical to making an operating system that people can actually use.

Laws come and go. Forcing hardware vendor to disclose all information necessary to build drivers is something that is perfectly plausible to enact for example in the frame of a right to repair/maintain the hardware customers buy. Note that it doesn’t need to be forcing to open source the vendor own implementation of any driver.

Yes, this is very plausible considering laws are in the making that forbid bricking of a device by stopping software support or remotely disabling it etc. Seems the only way to fix that is providing enough info to maintain yourself.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#18

Post by kmarc »

olavgg wrote: post #11

For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One p…

Switching (back) from om Mac to Linux, I can definitely say that the painful experience was with the Mac, I just got used to it along the years.

The Plasma desktop is now a breeze (literally ;-)). Battery is surprisingly long lasting, too (7 year old Thinkpad X1, easily 7-8h of battery).

It just works.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#19

Post by nonrandomstring »

olavgg wrote: post #11

For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One p…

So true!

My family have a secret holiday destination. It has unspoiled beaches, friendly locals, cheap beer, amazing restaurants. When people ask where we went for summer we lie. "Oh we went to Ibiza again". Some things are best kept for yourself, not to be popular. We don't want "those sorts" dragging the whole show down to the lowest common denominator.

So listen to the parent poster, and trust me, BSD is a piece of crap. It barely works. the documentation sucks. And it definitely is no use for servers, desktops, laptops or embedded systems.

Go where the crowds are! Linux has something for everyone, with over 8 million lines of code in the kernel! You never know, you might even meet a celebrity like Lennart Poettering hanging around your hotel.

Re: Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

#20

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

Personally, I think this is a good call. People have a tendency to go with what they know and feel competent in. As people move more and more toward using laptops as their primary or only workstation device, the chances that admins or enthusiasts will choose FreeBSD as their go-to server diminishes if FreeBSD isn't what they're doing their primary computing through. Constant context switching is also made more difficult when you're using a very similar, yet oh so slightly different system, where many familiar commands are present, do basically the same thing, but take different arguments, have the same arguments do different things, or behave in very subtly different ways from your main computing device. Of course, I'm assuming the admin or enthusiast is using Linux on their main machine.

I actually think the structure of BSD projects could be better suited to building laptop support than something more fragmentary like Linux. It doesn't have the same resources, but it can wield those resources in a more concerted manner to support specific models very well, in a way that the structure of the Linux project doesn't facilitate nearly so well.

Could be interesting if handled well.

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