Slashdot Mirror
In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying — at least I've said it many times — that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'"
I'm sure I'm opening myself up for an onslaught here, but I thought all their OSX-based stuff was basically just a very elaborate FreeBSD distro. And you get the benefit of one of the best GUI's in the desktop world, to boot.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
At least it's that way for us in HPC. Sure, FreeBSD is rock stable and all, but if you run stable, you'll be trailing behind and won't get to use the latest packages. This may be fine for ordinary HTTP server, but when you need an updated NUMA aware scheduler for your 48 core/4 socket machine or the latest drivers for your InfiniBand hardware, then you'll happily give up some alleged increase in stability in favor of real performance. Same is true for Debian stable.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Are you really suggesting that the time I spend will "come back in spades?"
Sorry, but as a longtime FreeBSD user and having wasted days of my life getting the graphics card to work and then tuning every last parameter, I'll take Ubuntu or Fedora on my desktop, thanks.
Sorry, but it's not worth the time and whatever "spades" you're getting paid pack in are 99% emotional, not physical.
Kriston
I dual boot my Linux desktop, and spend a lot of time in FreeBSD (I used PC-BSD, which installs pretty easily). These days, one of its advantages is that you can still have a KDE3 or Gnome2 desktop - worth it indeed!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
How can you run it if it's dead?
tl;dr - guy uses 10 years old hardware and wonders why an OS that works fine for him doesn't appeal to everyone else...
/.?
We switched our last servers from FreeBSD to Linux about 10 years ago because FreeBSD had crappy SMP support. Seriously, why does something like this get posted to
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The maintenance involved easily costs $50/hr.
An i7 costs $300.
Why finetune and keep maintaining a software system for thousans of dollars when you can just dish out a few hundreds and get a faster CPU?
I was all for finetuning, Gentoo, LFS, even played with BSD. But when I run the math on how much it costs me (from a time/lost profits perspective), I quickly reverted to Debian and bought me a beefier PC.
Sure, playing around with an OS and finding out more about it as fun, but let's just keep it in perspective. For low/mid systems (like the ones we all use at work/play), the effort is not worth the gains.
The scales tip when we're referring to systems that cost significantly more (10's of thousands of dollars), and most of us would rather snuggle with such them rather than maintain it.
The author himself gives the reason: "Right up until last week, this FreeBSD box had an uptime of 1,057 days, or nearly three years. This streak was broken only due to a UPS failure during a brief power outage... And this box has been rock-solid stable the entire 10 years, with only a disk failure or two in the middle." Considering hardware failure will eventually bring down the machine anyway, there's little to no difference in uptime between a "rock solid" BSD install versus a "also-solid" Linux install.
I'm not saying I wish to argue with the article's position, but saying "You'll get better performance out a finely-tuned install of X than a generic install of Y" isn't really all that useful; with enough effort for X=Windows Server and enough sloppiness for Y=Some-Flavor-Linux Server, this still is true; that doesn't mean I'm saying Windows Server is the best choice.
FreeBSD ports just aren't as comprehensive as Debian's repository.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Linux does better in a virtualized environment that FreeBSD does, especially in file access, because Linux's kernel is visualization aware and FreeBSD's is not.
Been using FBSD for past 12 years on my desktop... recently switched to CentOS 6 because of stability problems with the nvidia driver.
What you have to understand about fbsd is that it is a server operating system. They put NO effort into it working on the desktop.
The installer is text-based. If you installed X during the install, it is out of date. You will configure X from the terminal. If you install KDE or GNOME, you should know FBSD did no work on fixing any bugs (and there are a TON of bugs).
You will never see a desktop feature as part of the improvements in a release.
The community is hostile to new users.
If you really wonder why people don't use FBSD on the desktop, try it. You'll figure it out within an hour.
I've been hearing continually for years about how BSD performs so much better and is superior to linux in every way--but i have yet to see anyone actually post some hard data to back this up. It'd be nice for someone to actually find some way of quantifying this--or to just admit it's a philosophical difference and be done with it (yes, i know, that'll happen about the time that the universe suffers heat death)
The FreeBSD community takes a "blame the user" stance that is going to alienate most desktop users, who want to use the machine to get something done and don't want to be held up by snafus that may take days to fix.
Much of BSD's documentation is wrong or vague, many things are still broken within the OS and especially in the parts a desktop user would use, and when there is a problem, there's nowhere to go for a clear, quick solution.
A friend of mine installed FreeBSD on some older hardware and couldn't get the mouse to work. After two weeks of back-and-forth on the mailing list, someone else chimed in that they had the same problem... and then another... and another. It turned out that for the previous for years the FreeBSD community had been screaming "RTFM" at people, when the error was actually in the FreeBSD code.
Most desktop users are going to prefer Linux or Windows, despite the decreased efficiency, because they work and when you have a problem, there are multiple resources so that you can resolve it quickly. With FreeBSD, a broken driver may require 30 minutes to fix, or 48 hours of solid hacking. If you're trying to use your computer to do something unrelated to the operating system, that's too painful of a loss of time.
Futurist Traditionalism
When I have a list of 200+ servers and VMs that I'm responsible for, as well as the applications that run on them, who has time to tune each server? While a nice idea, it's simply not practical at the scale most large businesses run at.
We used to use FreeBSD on some servers, but they all quickly became dead ends, as OS patches and upgrades were painful and time consuming. Now we're a SLES house.
So taking the time to tune a FreeBSD box allows you to beat a generic Linux binary installation. Seems an unfair comparison, don't you think?
If you are making the (generally unfounded) argument that building from source gets you vastly better performance, then you can still use Linux, with something like Gentoo. Even if you're using a purely binary distribution, there are ways to tune it (e.g. choosing a different scheduler, etc). Compare apples to apples, or at least apples to Malus sieversii.
The real question is: is a "tuned" FreeBSD box both faster and more stable than a "tuned" Linux box? Answers should include (non-anecdotal) evidence.
I'm more of a BSD fan than most Linux users, but there are many more people claiming that the BSDs are superior than there are people providing evidence of this.
I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop for at least 10 years now. You pretty much have everything a Linux box has, KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Openbox, Windowmaker, whatever you want. Only lately things aren't going too good. Mainly because Gnome and XFCE have decided to solely depend on Linux' udev which FreeBSD doesn't have. Sure we could 'add' udev to FreeBSD but why would we want to do that when we have a perfectly working devfs that's better and older then the latest Linux fad.
If you want your Operating System tuned and customized to your hardware can't you just use Gentoo Linux? Then you won't lose the benefits of the better support that Linux has.
all the linux fanbois i know are always raving about "OMGZ teh linux is uber stable, i only have to reboot every 6.1 years!" and looking down their noses at me as a poor, foolish windows user. youre saying theres something even more stable? those guys must be insufferable
2012: The year of the FreeBSD desktop? Hurry while we still have time before the Mayan calender and the asteroids and Nibiru hit!
Frankly, I've tried using FreeBSD three times in my life and gave up each time. It's just too bleeding involved to get it up and running to your expectations especially when there's a Debian installation that I can have up and running to perfection in about an hour.
From memory, the stumbling block was inevitably drivers, and often when you couldn't get your NIC working, it decidedly becomes a chore. I refuse to even try to recollect the veritable nightmares that I experienced trying to get my graphics card going the first time.
I suppose I should give it another shot using virtualbox.
P.S. even the "post options" popup on bsd.slashdot.org fails to open right. Poetry.
Especially for "multimedia" hardware such as GPUs? Linux is already a bit behind in this field, but FreeBSD is even worse.
Not once did I read any phrase relating to *BSD on the desktop. He specifically says "Linux on the desktop, BSD on the server".
Very well done, editors.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
If you use Chrome then it presumably would, as Flash is built in to Chrome.
which is totally what she said
I tried yum install x y z, but nothing hapenned.. I'm running debian.. Should I be concerned?
I thought it was pretty easy to install both server and desktop. http://noone.org/talks/kfreebsd/kfreebsd-fosdem.html
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
You are dead wrong. Wake up call. Flash works. Since years....
In every professional environment I've worked in we choose the best tools for the job; it was usually Windows, Solaris or some form of Linux. I've only seen one instance of using FreeBSD and even then we were migrating to CentOS. Why? It's the maintainability and time-savings, stupid! Not only are the tools you need widely available for those platforms, the updates are easily accessible as well, they're generally configured to work out of the box (granted it may not be optimized but you can "spend the extra time to tune it"), and far more people know how to use those platforms vs FreeBSD.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
- It is because we don't want to have to compile basic applications.
- It because we don't want to use a system with a lack of QA.
I assume they still don't have it. Wake me up when that happens and I will use FreeBSD on the desktop.
Your assumption is wrong. A simple search on the internet would have shown you that Flash works on FreeBSD, and it works for a while now (both 32 and 64bit). I've used it with Firefox and with Opera.
See the handbook.
So, um... wake up lazy!
They've had it for years, there's at least two different ways of doing it. The easiest way is just using Wine and the Windows version of Firefox. The other way is to just use the Linux version of Flash. And really, it's only necessary because of incompetent web developers anyways.
These sorts of FUD posts about a largely unimportant feature that isn't native, is really not conducive to a decent discussion.
"Here I sit, watching a freshly installed FreeBSD box run through cvsup on all ports, to be closely followed by a new kernel compilation. As the output flies by in the xterm, I find myself wondering why I don't run into more FreeBSD in the world."
There's your answer right there. Perhaps people want more from their OS than to sit watching a kernel compilation."
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
I remember the first time I looked into FreeBSD. It was back in 1994 and I needed to run some Unix variant on my 386 and it came down to FreeBSD or Linux. At the time, FreeBSD seemed to be significantly farther along than Linux... but in a completely unusable way, to me. I was a rank newbie to Unix that had just learned how to exit 'vi' without powering down the computer. FreeBSD had almost no documentation and certainly none for somebody like me.
Linux, on the other hand, had the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The docs there were incredible! I hogged the computer lab's laser printer printing off the SAG and the NAG and, most importantly, Matt Welsh's 'Installation and Getting Started Guide'.
It was no contest. FreeBSD was an impenetrable mystery but 60 something floppies of Slackware later and I was hooked on Linux for life.
I've installed BSD systems a number of times. They've always required more effort than a Linux box to get configured for what I want.
Sure BSD is a cool thing. To some people MS-DOS 6.11 was a great thing, too. You'd be surprised how many systems in the world are still running MS-DOS (a lot of point of sale systems). Just because something is cool or can be made to work doesn't mean it's the best for any particular use.
You could use a Porsche 911 as a dump truck, but why? You could make a pickup truck into a limousine, but why? Wise use of tools is a sign of maturity.
In theory, I prefer FreeBSD. I have been running it as my primary server OS for 16 years. I have 30+ VMs running it right now. At the time they were easy to spin up an configure for my friends for whom I provide hosting.
In reality, the nearly constant state of screwed up dependencies in the ports tree makes it pretty much impossible to keep those 30 systems up to date without serious amounts of manual prodding. Keeping PHP up to date alone has drained my will to keep running FreeBSD.
At my job I maintain several thousand CentOS boxes, via puppet. The ease of keeping these systems patched is like night and day compared to my mere 30 FreeBSD VMs.
The only things keeping me running FreeBSD are nostalgia and inertia. The next time I need to do major updates I plan on swapping them out for CentOS.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
It's even easier and faster, since you can just tweak the stuff that matters. Install something sane, perhaps debian-testing, ditch the background daemons you don't need, compile your own kernel (way easier than with FreeBSD), and compile any app that you really really care about. Done, easy, and you still get fast/easy access to the gigantic Debian software collection.
I am currently using FreeBSD as my main OS, even on a recent (2010) laptop. It works great, for me. I have great control what is going on on my computer and I love the combination of a stable (as in "API/ABI stable" _and_ as in "upgrades do not break basic functionality") base system and very recent applications from ports.
Anyhow, I still have to agree with you that for most people, it is just not worse the time. For anyone else, I usually install Ubuntu. Ports are very powerful, but just not suitable for everyone.
If there were just stable ports (ports that come with a release and get only security fixes until the next release), one might come to the conclusion as the original article, but currently, you can either use release ports and live with the security holes (not a good idea to have an outdated browser and Flash plugin on the desktop), or you upgrade all ports very frequently.
PC-BSD might be a different story, I have not tried it in some time. Even though it brought me to FreeBSD, there were some good reasons not to use it anymore: How can you suggest users to use FreeBSD ports, if there is no PC-BSD PBI, and then wipe them at an upgrade? Probably not an issue anymore, but for me, that stuck.
Hey submitter, you are forgetting about the Debian/kFreeBSD project! http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ Complete with apt and everything. I've been running it on a laptop with pretty decent success for almost a year now.
I've been using Linux (Ubuntu LTS) professionally on the desktop for a few years to support my company. It wasn't a full time job when this started so I also had plenty of time to spent on administrating it.
But now that I am working full time one of the first things I discovered was that Linux may be free of charge to get it up & running. Support is a totally different aspect! For example trying to get Ubuntu 8 LTS upgraded to Ubuntu 10 LTS. I tried, hard, with several years worth of experience. From a direct upgrade to upgrading from one version to the other until 10 was reached. It failed, horribly. The only way I would have succeeded was to do a clean installation and then try to figure out how I could manually restore my configuration (thus also hoping that it wouldn't break things).
Long story shorter; I moved the desktop to Windows 7 & Office 2010. Sure; it costs money. But now I can also rest assured that I'll be able to continue to use this environment until 2018 or so (- 7 - years) before any upgrade might be required.
Now; lets take a look at the FreeBSD Support cycle. Release 8.2; Feb. 24 2011 released and expected EOL is Feb. 29 2011. That is one year.
If you use a desktop professionally then one year is totally out of the question. Quite frankly, with such a short lifespan I wouldn't even consider it for personal use either.
Mr. Venezia doesn't seem to understand the basis of desktop usage: Most desktop users want to use their computers (desktop) instead of tinkering with it.
There is a very good reason why Microsoft continues to support their OS's for so long.
did Slashdot get taken over by ADD/OCD redditors? FreeBSD is not hard to install, use, and configure. It has the best documentation out of any *NIX I've seen. It can easily utilize resources, great for server daemons, clusters, DB, and can run Xorg. There's so many damn distros to choose from nowadays, people see it for 30 seconds, download a new ISO of something completely different, install it, get bored, try another, etc. Maybe if you actually put some time in to making the system just the way you want, and RTFM, then you might be happy with the results you get from FreeBSD, or any other OS for that matter. Just tired of the ADD. Pay attention!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
These benchmarks say that Linux is usually faster than any BSD flavor.
As for stability, I can't find any definite stats on this. Personally, haven't seen a Linux crash since 1997, and that's a pretty damn long time.
.... Because a rolling release, build-it-yourself based software package model is too big of a hassle (ports tree, I'm looking at you).
I've been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years. I ran FreeBSD on the desktop for many years, but I switched to running Ubuntu Linux 4 years ago on my desktop because "apt-get install foo" and "apt-get update" are about 10x simpler and faster than doing the same things using the FreeBSD ports tree, and I don't have time to deal with broken dependancies, unfetchable files, etc.
For those who don't know, FreeBSD base system is maintained directly by the FreeBSD "src" team, and is what constitutes a FreeBSD release. This is the "basic" stuff like the kernel, a few shells, fs utilities, ls, cron, a customized system compiler, etc. This stuff is rock solid, and security updates fix bugs.
The "interesting" stuff (X server, web browser, most shells, perl, python, IDEs, etc) are provided by a rolling-release based "ports tree". The big problem is that the FreeBSD ports tree is a "rolling" release. If you need to update your X server due to a bug, you risk breaking some totally unrelated piece of software which has had a version update. Worse, you have to compile all ports yourself when you update, so updates are unnecessarily time consuming and complex.
Compare this to say, an Ubuntu/Debian/Mint or RHEL/Centos/Fedora release where there are no huge surprises when updating. Every apt-get update or (or yum equivalent) fixes bugs, and you don't have to worry about an update to fix program "A" totally hosing program "B"
This is the same reason why Debian or Red Hat based distros are so much more popular than "rolling release" distros like Arch or Gentoo.
I have hope that the new PC-BSD might be as easy to deal with as Linux. I love their "PBI" concept, where every every package contains all of its dependencies. I'm planning to replace an older Fedora on my laptop with PC-BSD 9.
Who cares.
Linux/FreeBSD/OS X/Windows are all about the same.
The Unix Based OS's (Linux/FreeBDS/OSx) have the advantage that for the most part they are immune to most viruses and spy where that slows your PC down.
The Windows desktop when clean can run just as fast as those Unix Based OS's sometimes faster because they are better drivers for it. But it really comes down to how you use it. For you x is important so one OS does x better then the other. So you found your OS. But for the most part the OS is becoming more and more irrelevant due to more Web Based Software that actually follows the standards.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Let's take a look at the Top500.
Both FreeBSD and Linux are free in all senses of the word. Licensing and costs are not barriers to using either one or swapping one for the other. One does not spend over a hundred million dollars on a system and chuck any old OS on it. One wants to squeeze the highest amount of performance (number crunching and data flinging over the interconnects) as one can. All things being equal, one selects for speed. One could argue that if Windows had an edge, it would have more of a toehold in the Top500 than it does now because of extra deep pockets or Microsoft giving a deep discount on licenses for bragging rights.
Over 90 percent of the Top500 is Linux based. You would think that if FreeBSD had an edge, however slight, over Linux, you'd see the Top500 dominated by FreeBSD, or any BSD for that matter. Indeed, Microsoft has 6 times as many supercomputers running their OS than BSD. Before the Windows people get up to brag, the number of BSD systems is 1.
Linux has been dominating and pushing out the standard Unices like BSD for years and for good reason.
BSD is dying. The bad news rolls in like a river of tears.
--
BMO
PC-BSD is built on FreeBSD, and does a great job of packaging up common desktop functionality. It comes with out of the box support for webcams , flash, sound, and a preconfigured desktop environment. It also has many common applications available as binary packages using its own package manager (including Skype, for example). When you need more applications you can turn to the ports tree, which is somewhat behind the common linux distros, because there is a long UPDATING file with manual tweaks necessary for updating. If you refrain from installing from ports, there are automatic binary updates in PC-BSD. Version 9 also supports automatic in-place upgrades of major versions. On the bad side, the support for sleep and hibernation is entirely reliant on the BIOS, meaning that it doesn't work (I've asked on the forum for a motherboard that supports ACPI S3 sleep, but I got no reply). There is no 3D acceleration with AMD graphics cards, so no dekstop effects are available (I've seen on the IRC that someone may be working on this). NVidia cards are supported using a binary driver, and comes with PC-BSD of course. The installer is very easy for any setup that's less complicated than ZFS mirroring + full disk encryption.
I've been running my home servers (web, mail, dialup, other) on Debian since before Debian got to version 1.0. I've run it on single processors and with SMP. I've run it on x86 and on Alpha.
I've never had stability or performance problems due to the software.
Is it possible that FreeBSD is more stable? I'll grant that it's possible, but... "the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics"? Really? No, I cannot see how. I do not need more than five nines of uptime.
FTFS:
Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics.
Big deal. Yes, your machine might run slightly faster, but the simple fact is that computers spend a lot of their time idling these days (as they should). The whole point of computers is to value people time over machine time, and that means it's probably not worth the time to really tune your OS.
Same story on stability: For desktops, stability is nice, but you aren't generally trying for really long uptimes.
I am officially gone from
The article talks about servers, not desktops.
Mada mada dane.
And really, [Adobe Flash is] only necessary because of incompetent web developers anyways.
Is it that, or is it because of the existing IE 6-8 user base whose browsers don't even support a lot of HTML5 features needed to make user interfaces comparable to those possible in Flex? Or is it because Adobe Edge (HTML5 counterpart to Flash CS) is still in preview?
Not sure how this got marked as a desktop story. I am talking exclusively about servers in this piece.
-Paul
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ubuntu (and it's variants) and OpenSuse are pretty damned good, it's literally minutes and you've got an integrated, modern KDE, or Unity or GNOME up and running. You want more software of security patches? It's just a couple clicks and you're there. Now if you had some concrete numbers on instability or performance numbers then you could talk about something, real numbers, not just hearsay.
Thing is, I don't think you can find and interesting performance difference between Linux and FreeBSD, excluding the possibility that there might be a few pathological cases where one really out performs the other, and the Linux community is such that if you could produce a real benchmark, they'd invalidate it before too long and fix the performance problem. And from my own experience shipping products and running businesses on it, I don't think you could show a substantial difference in reliability. Now one thing I know you could measure the difference on is the amount of time managing them and I think Linux has a gigantic lead here.
I'm not a BSD hater exactly, but they need a better story than they've had and they need a different sort of community. If you like oldskool like UNIX, real UNIX, then BSD is just the thing. If you want UNIXy like stuff with some more contemporary things (think upstart, systemd, I don't know a full desktop UI) then Linux is pretty clearly the choice. Now that newer stuff may not be what you want, I'm personally sort of surprised how well Linux does in the embedded world where a BSD might be far better suited in a multitude of ways. PCBSD is getting nice, it's still nowhere near the level of polish that Ubuntu is though. LLVM and Clang have finally provided them with a non-GCC build chain option, there has been a ton of cycles spent on GPL vs. BSD licenses and in this particular case, I don't see how BSD has benefited in those discussions, at the end of the day the difference fundamentally lets businesses do stuff and just not contribute it back. Maybe I'm wrong but while BSD was worrying about a build chain, Linux platforms were building GNOME and KDE and remarkably simple graphical installers and easy to use automatic patch systems and support for tons of hardware and the list goes on.
"Note to all: Despite what you might read on Slashdot or other aggregators, this piece is about servers, not desktop FreeBSD use. Not sure how that got misconstrued, but I'm talking exclusively about server use. I haven't run *BSD on the desktop since 1998, hence my comment about Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the servers. "
I assume they still don't have it.
Wake me up when that happens and I will use FreeBSD on the desktop.
Admittedly, the only reason I really use flash tbh is because of youtube, and now that there's minitube in the ports tree there's really no need for flash support technically.
Maybe there's a reason that over 80% of the Top 500 Supercomputers run Linux. I couldn't find FreeBSD on the list....
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I've used FreeBSD on the desktop since 2.1.5. A couple years back I gave Debian a whirl. I grew to dislike apt compared to pkg_*. Dependency management is a pain no matter what you run, but with linux the glibc dependencies drove me crazy. No such problem with FreeBSD. I also grew to dislike the levels of indirection for things like startup and configuration. I can remember doing a Debian upgrade and having my network interface fail to start. That's not insurmountable, but it is annoying. The interface was found and configured automagically the first time. (nice) I had to try a couple different edits before I got to the _actual_ place where network configuration was stored. (not so nice)
I've been running FreeBSD with XFCE on version 7.0 and on for the last couple years. It works great. Oh, and it doesn't take any more time to install FreeBSD than Debian.
Regards,
Jason C. Wells
Linux does everything I need my comp to do except play games, but don't get me wrong; I think BSD is great. It's a great option. I'm glad the alternative exists. It has just got a loooonng way to go to catch-up with Linux. Consider all the legal wrangling in it's past. Libraries have had to be hacked up, cut up, forked and fondled. You can't just download/untar/compile (Ports ain't all that either). It's a whole new kind of dependency hell. If I wanted the experience of heating my living room via CPU I'd run Gentoo first.
From a desktop perspective, It's taken over 20 years for OpenGL and the underlying X libraries on Linux to evolve far enough to be able to play Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena, edit an MPEG, do a screencast, or even get a desktop screenshot. Yet, after 20 years things are still buggy and slow and difficult. I still can't pull down the OS Options menu on amazon and pick a Linux option when I buy the latest game (and Wine is just pathetic for gaming).
If the unix desktop was all that great these days we'd see lots of mainstream inroads being made across the *nix platforms in general. Switching to BSD would be easy but it's not.It's too difficult. Yeah, Macintosh is BSD but what you get is another highly polished proprietary, paid-for, hacked up OS that nobody is quite sure what hell is going on with. Nothing compiles on it unless you write in objective C or succumb to the Apple kool-aid-kult. I'd still run Gentoo.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
There's nothing wrong with FreeBSD, it just that for most of the companies I've worked for, Linux strikes a better balance between ease-of-use, features and stability. You might know how to install, configure, update, etc FreeBSD, but the guy that replaces you might not.
Of course, it also has better vendor support the the *BSD's.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
They've had it for years, there's at least two different ways of doing it. The easiest way is just using Wine and the Windows version of Firefox. The other way is to just use the Linux version of Flash. And really, it's only necessary because of incompetent web developers anyways.
These sorts of FUD posts about a largely unimportant feature that isn't native, is really not conducive to a decent discussion.
Are you serious? Flash is an unimportant feature? What year did you fall asleep? It's 2011 now.
The best things in life are free, and that is why people don't buy the best. It is better to live on the edge of life and run Windows. Those who cannot bear such excitement use MacOS, which has its roots in BSD. I, on the other hand, run OS/VS2 and submitted this comment using JES job. Browsing the web is so much more exciting using a deck of Hollerith cards and a TTY terminal.
Every Linux box that I've ever had, the main and usually only cause of instability (other than dodgy hardware) is closed source graphics card drivers. If FreeBSD have fixed that, I'm sold. Or is their stability of the so-long-as-you-don't-want-decent-performance-in-X variety?
More or less, FreeBSD is not commonly supported by the same hardware vendors which do provide Linux support and drivers. RedHat / Fedora / CentOS is most commonly supported by the hardware vendors. Debian/Ubuntu is a close second. If I want full support of the features in my new Core-i7, NVidia graphics card, SSD hard disk, InkJet printers, or WIFI cards I am much more likely to get traction in the Linux space (and even that has been a long and hard road and is still sketchy coverage at best).
And for the server space, when you start getting into various RAID controllers, out of band management drivers (and SNMP MIBS), 10Gb networking, and fiber channel cards; the picture looks pretty much the same as in the desktop space.
So yeah, if all I want is a web, FTP, ssh, or similar server on standard (commodity) hardware then FreeBSD and variants are a perfectly valid option... until I want to start using SAN, 10Gb networking, fiber channel or centralized lights-out administration technologies (hardware out of band monitoring) where Linux support is common, but BSD support is not so much.
I work in an industry which requires extremely low latency (quasi-realtime server response times) which FreeBSD would be OK for, however the hardware we must use to achieve those results is NOT supported on FreeBSD by the vendors which make the drivers, nor are the 3rd-party libraries we use for communication with other data vendors.
Switching the OS to something more well supported is MUCH easier than trying to get all of the rest of the applications, drivers, and vendors to switch without some sort of tangible reason for it.
- Toast
FreeBSD rules, Linux sucks. Ubuntu might as well be Windows...all noob friendly.
Drivers. Good luck getting a modern amd/ati card working. On a server, that might be fine. On a desktop, good use convincing someone to run an os without their gpu, sound card, or trackpad. And yes, all of those are devices on my new toshiba laptop which freebsd lacks support for.
Computers and redundancy are relatively cheap these days the engineers to set them up and maintain them are really expensive. Perfection isn't needed when you can afford redundancy and automation.
On the other hand, where is all the BSD hate from the old days on Slashdot?
I can't speak for FreeBSD, but Flash is not built into Chrome in Linux. I had to install the plugin separately. Not so for my Windows desk, of course.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Youre an idiot
FreeBSD has some great features, but most of them are lost on the desktop/laptop. Even more so, a lot of software that is important to a lot of users doesn't care about FreeBSD (wine comes to mind in particular on this one) and FreeBSD doesn't tend to care about those ports / packages because they aren't important to the mission of "the power to serve".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Isn't the FreeBSD that Apple uses a variant that sits on top of Mach 3.0? Whereas IIRC, FreeBSD itself doesn't use Mach.
One thing I didn't get - did the article focus on just FreeBSD, or was it a generic question about BSDs? In other words, was the author wondering why people don't use any of the BSD distros out there - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or TrustedBSD? (And yeah, I did read the full article, but didn't get which of the above questions it was!)
Huh. Half my incoming spam is nixed at HELO.
And, arguably, the load for spam analysis is undertaken whether the message is spam or ham.
I've seen Paul Venezia articles linked before. I can't remember if it had a similar level of dubiousness, but I'm wondering now.
I put Ubuntu on my girlfriends laptop and she loves it. I downloaded the latest iso. Easily had it partition the drive, set up the boot loader, install the os and the video, network and audio drivers were all installed. Since she wants to watch tv shows online and check email and facebook she has a great environment (I did put in Gnome and let her pick between that and Unity and she picked Gnome) to mess around in and the effort level on a scale of 1 to 10 was a 2. What would BSD have done for me that U11.10 didn't?
Just repurposed a G4 Powerbook. Was planning to use FreeBSD... It took longer to just build X on FreeBSD (which, of course, failed the first three times and never did get more than 8-bit color before I shitcanned the idea) than it took to install, configure and customize MintPPC as a fully usable system.
My Suse Enterprise Linux Server has only been up for 1042 days. Paul's FreeBSD box really has me on system stability. The bottom line is I don't see any advantage to using FreeBSD for what I do. If other people do, then more power to them.
Most people, perhaps geeks included (myself certainly) just want their desktop to work. I'll worry about what OS to choose for my server, but my desktop just needs to be (a) compatible with all of the latest hardware, (b) able to run loads of great software for pictures, videos, games, desktop publishing, etc. and (c) just work when I want it to. I have enough to worry about. Building my OS from scratch and compiling the software for it just isn't on my to do list.
My personal experience with FreeBSD has been 2 motherboards that wouldn't work, because nobody in the community could figure out the drivers for them, no hardware RAID support for the card I wanted, and several days of my life getting it all loaded and configured the way I needed. No thank you, not again!
I like FreeBSD, especially the PC-BSD spin-off, but neither works on my hardware. Nor are all the applications I use on Linux available in the ports collection. Put another way, I don't run FreeBSD on my desktop/laptop because it won't run on my hardware and can't run the programs I want. That makes the OS pretty useless in my case.
"but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'"
Prove it.
I just tried to install FreeBSD-8.2 on my laptop, but I wasn't even able to boot the installation CD or DVD or USB stick image.
All i get to see is a list of registers and finaly the line
BTX halted
Same with PC-BSD.
After searching the net for this, I found the advise to turn off AHCI in the BIOS, which isn't possible, because the bios setup of my laptop is pretty minimal. So now I'm stuck.
So if anyone wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop, this is the reason.
At least for me.
Sven
How long ago was that? I see news stories from 2009 saying Chrome for Linux ships with a built in flash plug in.
which is totally what she said
Clean install of Ubuntu six months ago, updated less than a week ago. Chrome is installed via Google's .deb installer, which adds their repo's to apt.
I am running 64-bit though. Possibly the 32-bit version of Chrome on Linux comes with Flash preinstalled, but I wouldn't know.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Since a lot of people have mentioned how they switched from FreeBSD to Debian Linux, wouldn't they be getting the best of both worlds if they switched from FreeBSD to Debian's kFreeBSD? I.e not have utilities change b/w versions, but still be able to use Debian packages and other such features?
We develop authentication software for Aix, HPUX, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Linux. We have quite a few issues getting the FreeBSD desktop to work out of the box before we even try integrating our software. Some of the issues we've come across are non-standard PAM (configuration files can be located in multiple places, generates console messages for odd reasons), getting Gnome set up properly can be a real pain, login names limited to 15 characters by default (a huge number of corporations use LDAP or first.last name or something that violates that limit (and the limit is done wrong and can lead to a simple root exploit)). Now some of these could just be errors because I didn't read the docs right, but I have read a lot of FreeBSD docs.
After having messed with FreeBSD at work for a few years, I would never install it for the desktop and the bugs I've seen would make me reconsider it as suitable for the server.
I think the list of advantages pretty much explains why: DTrace, ZFS, pf firewall, and more standard TCP stack. Even Linux/Unix desktop users don't generally care too much about that (ZFS possibly exempted). The advantages of FreeBSD aren't solving problems desktop users face. The problem with Linux in general is that it is too annoying to configure apps. FreeBSD is no worse than say Debian but much worse than the popular Linuxes: Ubuntu, Mint, Mandriva... when it comes to configured apps.
And as for the other BSDs, they are even worse choices for the desktop. As a niche, sure. If it is a BSD shop (and I've worked in those) sure. But otherwise?
FreeBSD variants of most features are inferior to Linux variants. Excluding ZFS, Grand Central Dispatch (and of course the friendly developers very willing to help end-users without flaming on official lists)... allow me to explain why I find FreeBSD completely inferior on the desktop:
Linux: Kernel Namespaces (with cgroups)
FBSD: Jails
Kernel namespaces are more flexible and are designed for individual apps as well as full containers. One can isolate in many different ways and on many more different levels with kernel namespaces. In addition, cgroups provide better granularity over scheduling and RAM use in a jailed environment, as well as for individual apps and such granularity may be nested ;-)
Example 1: I want a separate network namespace but not filesystem isolation /dev tree and my app to only see it's own PID (as PID 1) and have restricted CPU/RAM use but no filesystem isolation /tmp namespaces for added safety between users
Example 2: I want to have a restricted
Example 3: I just want a separate set of virtual terminals, so I can run truly unprivileged SSH that can only login as one user, without screwing over permissions on my desktop VTs...
Example 4: I want a jail with limited RAM, CPU, allow IPC safely, allow access to only a specific graphics card and per-user
None of this stuff can be done in a non-convoluted way with jails, when compared to the Linux equivalent.
Linux: CFS Scheduler
FBSD: ULE Scheduler
Both are designed with desktop interactivity in mind on one level or another. But CFS supports cgroups, providing far more granular control over process priority than that of ULE, making it inferior on the desktop. Nesting of CPU limitations makes it possible for desktop applications to never lock-up the Xorg server via CPU usage, while on ULE, it is possible in my experience to lock-up the desktop with five or more unresponsive applications hogging CPU time.
Linux: CFQ
FBSD: C-LOCK (elevator)
Welcome to I/O hell people. 2 apps using the HDD will lock up the desktop totally on FreeBSD, because the I/O scheduler is crap for desktop use. While on Linux, CFQ handles I/O far more gracefully, without totally locking up the desktop (until 8 or more apps hog the HDD with random write patterns). Ironically, Windows in my experience handles constant random write patterns the best... but I suspect some proprietary hackery in Windows elevates the priority of core system components to avoid lockups from being as noticeable.
Linux: ASLR
FBSD: No ASLR
Address Space Layout Randomisation. Even Windows supports this for its wonderful protection against address-specific exploits when combined with No eXecute (NX).
Linux: KMS and/or UMS
FBSD: Only UMS
Kernel Mode Setting is used by almost all modern 3D-supporting F/LOSS Xorg drivers. Without it FreeBSD can't run the latest graphics card drivers.
Linux: ext4
FBSD: UFS
Until recently (-CURRENT) background fsck would run, gobbling up tons of resources in the background post-crash (in -CURRENT, UFS cleans up any issues via journal, in addition to Soft Updates). As much as I like Soft Updates, ext4 is just so much better when it comes to overall I/O performance in my (admittedly, non-scientific) experience.
Linux: ALSA
FBSD: OSS
On Linux, every onboard sound card i've come across has been way better supported than on FreeBSD. In addition, devices like my USB webcams have also always been way better supported. ALSA is also far more stable and with PulseAudio sitting on top, provides better per-app volume controls.
Yes, it's an unimportant feature. The most common use of Flash is those annoying ads, and for things like YouTube, you have the option of gnash. YouTube itself is getting out of Flash and migrating to HTML5.
I'm sure there are still some incompetently designed sites that require Flash, but it's not like it used to be several years back, I rarely encounter sites where a lack of Flash is a deal breaker.
After reading the article I have only two major things to point out against FreeBSD which I feel is why it's losing out. First of all the installer is a mess, I've only ever been able to boot the installer in safe mode and I've never been able to finish a full install of the system, I've tried about 10 times. Now I've been in the IRC channel and they keep telling my drives have a faulty IDE controllers and etc.... but seriously if Linux can install perfectly fine then there is no reason FreeBSD shouldn't be able to.
The second thing I want to point is the learning curve is incredible. They say the learning the curve for Gentoo Linux is big but it doesn't hold a candle to FreeBSD, not even close. If they made the FreeBSD system operate more like a Linux system then I think this could also help.
In closing I think if they just cleaned up the installer and the base system to be more Linux like, doesn't have to be GUI based, they could probably convert a lot of Linux users over. .
As a user that's been attempting to put together a functional linux/bsd box since the late 90's I've got one comment - lack of support. I've built and installed several flavors of linux, with a friend's help I manage a BSD router/ftp server, and I'm putting together an ubuntu box running xbmc for video at home. Am I capable of making the OS work for 90% of my needs? Yes I am. It's that othr 10% that usually gets me moving back to microsoft. I get on forums to ask questions, and the moment it becomes obvious I'm a newbie the forum respones dry right up. The community wants to see the operating system flourish, but the majority of users either point a newbie to a section of the manual or simply don't respond. The new user base can't possibly learn to properly edit conf files or recompile kernels without a bit of help, and when veteran users feel that providing this help is beneath them you have your answer.
They have, but who wants to install any browser plugins? We aren't in the 90s anymore.
Chances are, if all the distros out there of both BSD and Linux (as well as Hurd & Minix in future) were subjected to the Open Group's certification tests, they'd all pass. The only reason to not call them Unix is that nobody has thought of subjecting any of them to such tests.
Multi-track audio recording is something I always want on my desktop. For multitrack recording, latency is key. Real time access is what makes it possible on Linux (I think Ingo Molnar did most of the work on that.) Anything around 6ms or higher is too much. Maybe it's possible to have single-digit latency w/out an RT kernel, but I've never seen it.
I believe that real time kernel is simply theoretically incompatible w/ BSD's security model. Unless they can get the latency down to usable levels, it'll never work for my desktop.
Welcome to Slashdot, where even the submitters don't RTFA.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Yes!! Yes!!! After this post, this might finally be the year of the FreeBSD Desktop!!!
Did the submitter (or editor, ha ha) even read the article? Or even read the article headline: "Why aren't you using FreeBSD?".
Nowhere does he mention the desktop except to say "There used to be a saying -- at least I've said it many times -- that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD", and he finishes with "you may decide you'd be better off running FreeBSD on the next set of Web servers, SMTP relays, or application servers you build".
Staggering lack of reading comprehension.
Why is uptime so important for a PC? Most of the PC's are rebooted daily, or at least weekly, thus there is no need to be able to run 5000 days w/o reboot. A few days uptime is good enough for me. Even if it crashes once in a while, it's not the end of the world, I let my 2 yr old play on the computer anyways.
When your server-to-admin ratio is in excess of 60-to-1 and your server counts is in the thousands, a "generic X binary distribution" scales a bit more effectively than a shitload of one-off custom-tuned Y installations.
True for any X and Y.
Not all of us are hobbyists with unlimited time to tune and tweak. From the time the installation media finishes, I'm lucky to have 10 minutes hands-on a given installation to configure networking, get any SAN/filesystem space up, set password policy and create a handful of user accounts before it gets turned over to the users.
An analogy would be that of a fleet-vehicle maintenance crew versus a shade-tree hobby mechanic. The STHM may be able to tune and tweak their single Crown Vic to be the hottest thing on 4 wheels. The fleet maintenance team can't give that kind of attention to one car, we've got hundreds to keep running.
FreeBSD on the desktop, this works for me, thank you very much.
The last time I rebooted was for the upgrade to 8.1-REL.
After a few months I've to restart firefox, but otherwise: It just works.
FreeNAS is the project that got me finally using FreeBSD. I have it in my 2004-era single core Athlon64 box full of (new) disks. Everything is supported included the newer SATA controller and the Gigabit ethernet NIC. It runs ZFS well in spite of only having 2GB of RAM, and it is hosting my backup. It is easily controllable via its web interface.
No way I'm using this on the desktop though.
* you want Suspend2RAM work on a notebook. Even an old T60p doesn't wake up after suspend
/home
* you want DVB - There used to be a driver, but with the USB-stack rewrite this doesn't work anymore
* you actually want to use Flash
* you want to use your ext2/3/4 filesystem, say from your old
I like FreeBSD, in fact I started my *ix experience with 2.2.6, but for regular desktop use, the above are true show stoppers, at least for me.
What's minitube? Enlighten us.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Compared to FreeBSD, configuring a linux box is quite a hair pulling experience. Why must syntax change for all of the simplest commands? Because somebody wanted to urinate on their own corner of the OS? NO! BAD LINUX USER!!!
Tell me, if linux is so great, why did I spend 5+ years trying various linux versions only to leave dissatisfied and angry? It took me less than a year to get hooked on FreeBSD.
I used to run FreeBSD on the desktop and liked it a whole lot. It's a really nice Unix and I deeply approve of it.
The secondary reason for giving it up was that Linux supports more hardware, specifically the laptop I had at the time.
The primary reason was that the ports system sucks ass, and when I tried synaptic on Ubuntu that converted me.
YMMV, of course.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
rob> uname -a
FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE #0: Mon Oct 10 15:43:12 BST 2005
rob> date
Tue Nov 8 22:26:49 GMT 2011
rob> uptime
10:26PM up 2084 days, 7:27, 1 user, load averages: 0.29, 0.32, 0.26
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
Indeed. Did anyone bother to even read the article first?
I clicked the article because the Slashdot headline mentioned FreeBSD on the desktop. The article doesn't even _contain_ the word desktop, and there's only a passing reference to 'workstations' made by the author "that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD".
I've come to the conclusion that Slashdot's primary reason for existence now is for simply testing your powers of observation.
Not the time will not come back in spades.
I was unhappy enough to use a server at work where somebody believed he is better in getting a freebsd system with a kernel configured by him stable and running as a server than a dedicated linux configured and supported for a specific hardware (e.g. HP servers which are certified for Redhat). I can say: no, he was not....
It may seem to you that you can do all the testing and problem solving easily and that the idiots just put in too much features, but in a real use case you may have a tricky locking issue between samba and multiple clients. You may have some configuration which creates data corruption under highly specific circumstances. You may even have weird performance bumps which you never figure out.
Yes. You could do it. If you know the kernel well. If you invest time. And if you have the resources and skills to reproduce the test cases well enough.
Users will be pissed if they loose Data once to a weird locking problem and they will be more pissed if that happens twice. If you cant figure it out then the server is completely useless until you figure it out.
Unless you have that, please use yum or apt-get to install preconfigured software. Your creative freedom should be the one to choose the right (linux) distribution (Remark: If you need it running and fixed, the buy support). There is at least one for everybody nowadays.
I moved from Linux to FreeBSD on the desktop something like 10 years ago. The same arguments apply as used to apply in the Linux vs. Windows debate. FreeBSD is more secure than Linux (but is that because it's less of a target?) Linux has better Flash support (with its attendant security holes.) FreeBSD has the ports system and ZFS though, and the system is cleaner, better integrated, easier to maintain, and I simply like it better. Use whatever OS you want for whatever you use it for. For me FreeBSD beats Linux any day.
I'd love to use PC-BSD as my main host/desktop OS but for me it boils down to: 1) No Vmware support 2) Very patchy Virtualbox support Vmware adamantly refuse to ever support BSD, and the drive for thorough Virtualbox is half-hearted enough that I'm not expecting any noteworthy progress in the foreseeable future.
Smoke my peg.
Having just spent a couple of weeks performance tuning RHEL servers and workstations for maximum 10GbE throughput (incl disk and NFS tuning) it strikes me that this is a massive hole in the capabilities of Linux. When I install linux why can't I check a box that says: optimise for single user or multi user; and another for maximum throughput vs balanced or redundancy. If you want linux to make inroads into uninformed userland rather than propellorheadland then you need to make config a bugger of a lot easier. Oh, and by the way, Yum is a total abortion of a package manager. Joe average user does not want dependency hell when trying to install skype... why does it only seem to be Debian (that I know of) that will handle all of that elegantly for you?
One would have to be a masochist to run FreeBSD On the desktop. It's way too cryptic and limited in functionality for dssktop use. Hardware support is not as extensive as Linux and it lacks simple things like a native flash player. Nope. BSD should stick to servers.
The benefits you get from it are of limited importance to a desktop user, and if i need to test something on BSD before deploying it to servers, its small enough to run in a VM under Windows or OS X in any case. The drawbacks (3d hardware support, commercial software support, etc) outweigh the benefits for a desktop user. Most desktops are turning into laptops these days also, and this is not a focus of freebsd development.
If you want freebsd on the desktop with support for things like flash, hardware support, etc what you probably really want, is to let go of your bias and just get a mac.
This is what I did, and couldn't be happier. Most things "just work". If i want the unix shell, it is there. If i want GCC (or clang), it is there. Plus there is neat stuff like applescript and automator to boot.
Unfortunately, some people think that one OS should be capable of fulfilling all tasks, and unfortunately (or fortunately) that just isn't the case. But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail....
Figure out what apps you want to run, determine what operating systems support those apps, and make your choice. For me, that works out to be FreeBSD for internet facing devices, Windows 2008R2 for stuff at work, and OS X at home. Yes, you can make choices outside of that and make it work, but the number of IT staff who are savvy enough to make things work, and support them when you go against the grain are a lot fewer. And personally i like the ability to take a holiday if i want and leave work behind to someone else.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You have to wait for the Package Masters...Also, with ports I have a much more fine-grained control. But let's get this out of the way: you can install packages in FreeBSD, and you do binary upgrades. There are lots of tools to handle ports. With today's speeds and RAMs, it's no big deal compiling ports.
I look at today's Linux and I don't regret my choice. What's the sane choice? Fedora is an experimental platform for Red Hat. That means, from time to time, they'll make you their guinea pigs...Debian can't even be considered secure (no less than twice they had their servers hacked), and who cares about dinossaurs, anyway? Ubuntu's the new Debian. Ubuntu shoves their choices down your throat and continues the Debian tradition of delivering broken software (the new GUI, etc.) and infighting. And Ubuntu is a fantasy. The only reason it exists is because there's a money-loosing millionaire backing it up. The fantasy island one day will blow up in the fanboys' face. Mandriva I find agreeable, but they don't offer many packages, and they have too few commercial partners (so why pay?) Other distros aren't even worth mentioning.
and this is why i use Gentoo (source-based distro with binary installation support; pretty much FreeBSD of GNU/Linux) and my girlfriend uses Sabayon (binary-based Gentoo-derivative with source-based installation support).
I've used expensive proprietary mathematical software for Linux on FreeBSD, using their Linux binary layer, after the Linux upgrade destroyed library compatibility (they pride themselves in having unstable ABIs).
no, "they" take pride in doing their thing with disregard to proprietary requirements (which mostly are in not changing architectural design as long as proprietary authors are unwilling to make changes in the basis of their software which relies on that design. and they mostly always indefinitely are).
Linux are a mess. Each one is different, full of stupid little quirks.
well, you can't please everyone by the same thing.
Libraries differ in place, version, even names.
which is an inevitable consequence of things rapidly happening. 'stable' branches are made exactly to counterpart that but you said it yourself - they are stagnate.
though i too believe that there is a problem with this: there is no distinction between feature-complete "stable" and on-the-way "development" branches because there are no proper roadmaps in most GNU/Linux-centric software . BUT distro maintainers can't do much about that.
FreeBSD is just as good for the desktop.
sorry, but i, like most people, prefer to, at least, have useful video output on my desktop's monitor :) and for that working video drivers are needed, but i haven't heard anything good about those in *BSD.
FreeBSD maybe is a perfectly good server OS for some instances but i still would generally prefer CentOS/RH or OpenSUSE and specific distros for specific purposes
who dares wins
Sad part is for most here the desktop is their server...
Your post wins musial! I've never bothered to figure out the mod point system but if I had I would mod you 1000000!!! (Yes, with the exclamation mark)
There's a reason for acronyms like RTFA and TL;DR. The reason is being a know-it-all-computer-nerd. If we had to RTFM before we posted... well we wouldn't already know the answer before we started and then what kind of a know-it-all would we be? Not very knowing. That's some strange off topic idea like listening.
How is java support these days?
We have an internal application and I could chose which OS I wanted back in 2001. I really wanted FreeBSD -- it just seemed faster and more coherent. Configuring the system and various userland settings worked similarly whereas Linux was all over the place. But, I was writing the application in Java and FreeBSD didn't support it natively then.
Is there native support for JDK 6 or ... dare I ask ... 7?
I used to install and play with most of the linux and *nix flavors out there, loved Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD etc. Still prefer OpenBSD on firewalls. Running linux/*nix on my desktop frankly costed me too must time at work, struggle to work with the exchange server, struggle to do smbmount's etc. the whole time when developers dump code on fileservers that I need to deploy, etc. yes...I could and have automated alot of it. FreeBSD and Debian is just too far behind, our developers code break on them. Frankly I am geeked out, lost too much of my live tinkering with linux, *nix, got a macbook pro, and run ubuntu server and could not be happier.
I haven't run *BSD on the desktop since 1998
I'm running FreeBSD on desktop since 2001.
Paul Venezia is not wondering why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop: on the first page he tells us about the uptime of his server (which runs FreeBSD) and whatever he has to say about other uses of FreeBSD is on page two -- and quoted in full in the summary. In other words, he's not making a strong case in favor of FreeBSD on the desktop, except for a generic reference to "performance and stability" which, let's be honest, could be said just about any recent OS.
That said, my desktop of choice is FreeBSD and not because I dislike Linux, but because I like FreeBSD better and, assuming you have the right hardware, it makes for a more than viable desktop. And no, I don't think that hardware support is as limited as it used to be: for instance my little ZOTAC HD-AD01 is fully supported (video, audio, wired and wireless network all work with a plain FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE).
Anyway, since Paul Venezia also mentions virtualization, I'll go ahead and leave with a shameless plug about VirtualBSD which, as the name implies, offers a virtualized (but desktop oriented) FreeBSD that can be used with VMware or, after a few tweaks, VirtualBox.
Oh, and version 9.0 will be out as soon as FreeBSD 9.0 is ready! ;-)
RT.
FreeBSD is a joke. It has no support for wireless "N" devices and poor support for the remaining ones. Getting a simple sound card up and running in FreeBSD can be a serious PIA. In fact, the number of modern devices that don't work or don't work correctly in FreeBSD far exceeds those that do. FreeBSD is dedicated to finding the hardest way to do things and then doing it. It spends way to much time trying to reinvent the wheel rather than taking advantage of it. When you add in that the FreeBSD "INSTALLER" is straight out of the dinosaur age, I can not fathom why anyone other than a true masochist would bother with the OS. Even KDE and Gnome work poorly under FreeBSD. Not surprising when you consider that they have to extensively patch those desktops just to get them running all. Applications like LibreOffice work poorly under a FreeBSD environment.
It has been my experience that the best way to turn a prospective user away from OpenSource software is to let them spend 30 days attempting to install and configure a FreeBSD system and desktop. They soon come running back to Microsoft at light speed. When you then consider that FreeBSD offers no support other than its poorly maintained and often highly abusive "mail forum", I can see why it is easier to find a virgin in a whore house than finding a satisfied FreeBSD user.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
I use FreeBSD as my desktop workstation and an old thinkpad laptop, and the only thing I miss is flash support, although it helps me to stay focus on work :)
Personally I don't see great differences compared with other linux (slackware, gentoo, debian, fedora), but every person is different. I use it for near two years developing java/scala/groovy applications. I agree you need to invest time reading the documentation, as unfortunately sometimes we want to force the operating system to do stuff the way we want instead of the way it was designed to be.
It is also true that I was a competent linux user before I moved to FreeBSD.
Despite the lack of support for some hardware, it is important to remember that it is supported by a community, not a company, and you can always help them to improve it: it is open source.
but GAWD! desktop bsd is EPIC FAIL!
someone take a few hours and TWEAK THE HELL OUT OF IT!