FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1 • Hacker News Board

Re: FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1

#51

Post by grahamjperrin » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:56 AM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #27

ladyanita22 wrote: post #25

I'd LOVE for BSD to be a good alternative for daily use to Linux. But it's simply not. There's more and more stuff that is Linux only nowadays (wayland, gnome, several drivers, power management, wifi, Steam and proton... to name a few, very important ones)

What do you mean by "BSD"? As I'm sure you know they are not distributions of the same underlying operating system. FreeBSD has supported Gnome for years for example. Wifi drivers are not Linux-only either AFAIK they just take time to get ported from Linux (or sometimes NetBSD) to FreeBSD. While it's true that FreeBSD isn't as easy a desktop system as Ubuntu is, it sounds like some (but definitely not all) of your re…

> … FreeBSD has supported Gnome for years for example. …

Sadly, in relation to AMD GPUs:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=257810#c5>

>> … disable dri 3 in xorg.conf (use dri 2)

Re: FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1

#52

Post by grahamjperrin » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:57 AM UTC

cylinder714 wrote: post #29

bell-cot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing a quick compare with the 12.1 Release notes - https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/relnotes/ - I will speculate that the 13.1 Release Notes are not a finished document, and quite a bit more will be added before the April 26th (current schedule) "final" Release of 13.1.

From the original post, "Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.1-RELEASE cycle progresses."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30649753

Re: FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1

#53

Post by grahamjperrin » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:27 AM UTC

eternityforest wrote: post #31

ladyanita22 wrote: post #25

I'd LOVE for BSD to be a good alternative for daily use to Linux. But it's simply not. There's more and more stuff that is Linux only nowadays (wayland, gnome, several drivers, power management, wifi, Steam and proton... to name a few, very important ones)

I'm kinda glad it isn't, that would be more fragmentation and BSD has a very different philosophy. Probably best to not try to make BSD into modern Linux which is basically FreeWindows. I wouldn't want to use a BSD that BSD people like any more than they'd want to switch to Linux, it seems they are different for a reason.

> … Probably best to not try to make BSD into modern Linux which is basically FreeWindows. …

airyxOS, based on FreeBSD, aims to provide "… the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD. …".

https://airyx.org/>

I wish well to projects such as this, however I rarely engage – testing and feedback – because the focus on Apple keyboards is too much for me.

(I taught myself to use the keyboard in a very different way when I switched away from Apple after twenty-something years. I don't intend to un-learn that switch.)

Re: FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1

#54

Post by tcmart14 » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 2:50 AM UTC

NexRebular wrote: post #43

mrlemke wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why BSD?" wasn't the question. I have already read a lot of the arguments about that particular question. If I were to generalize my question to ladyanita22, it would be, "Why would you want to run a BSD for Gnome, Wayland, Steam/Proton, and other generally Linux software, instead of running it directly on Linux where it is supported best?" What does the user get out of running a BSD for Linux software that they can…

The problem is that software used to be portable and worked well on !linux systems. Little by little majority of important FOSS development is heading towards linux-specific EEE, I feel, and that is setting a dangerous precedent...

As a follow up to add more context. Yes, the hassle of getting GNOME running on NetBSD or FreeBSD or OpenBSD has been more recent. GNOME used to be pretty portable, but then some dependencies on systemd specifics and other 'linuxisms' got injected into GNOME and now patches have to be written where patches didn't have to be written in order to run GNOME on the BSDs.