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Ask Slashdot: Workaday Software For BSD On the Desktop?
An anonymous reader writes So for a variety of reasons (some related to recent events, some ongoing for a while) I've kinda soured on Linux and have been looking at giving BSD a shot on the desktop. I've been a Gentoo user for many years and am reasonably comfortable diving into stuff, so I don't anticipate user friendliness being a show stopper. I suspect it's more likely something I currently do will have poor support in the BSD world. I have of course been doing some reading and will probably just give it a try at some point regardless, but I was curious what experience and advice other slashdot users could share. There's been many bold comments on slashdot about moving away from Linux, so I suspect I'm not the only one asking these questions. Use-case wise, my list of must haves is: Minecraft, and probably more dubiously, FTB; mplayer or equivalent (very much prefer mplayer as it's what I've used forever); VirtualBox or something equivalent; Firefox (like mplayer, it's just what I've always used, and while I would consider alternatives, that would definitely be a negative); Flash (I hate it, but browsing the web sans-flash is still a pain); OpenRA (this is the one I anticipate giving me the most trouble, but playing it is somewhat of an obsession).
Stuff that would be nice but I can live without: Full disk encryption; Openbox / XFCE (It's what I use now and would like to keep using, but I could probably switch to something else without too much grief); jackd/rakarrack or something equivalent (currently use my computer as a cheap guitar amp/effects stack); Qt (toolkit of choice for my own stuff). What's the most painless way to transition to BSD for this constellation of uses, and which variety of BSD would you suggest?
Stuff that would be nice but I can live without: Full disk encryption; Openbox / XFCE (It's what I use now and would like to keep using, but I could probably switch to something else without too much grief); jackd/rakarrack or something equivalent (currently use my computer as a cheap guitar amp/effects stack); Qt (toolkit of choice for my own stuff). What's the most painless way to transition to BSD for this constellation of uses, and which variety of BSD would you suggest?
I have been a huge supporter of Linux since I brought up my first Linux box in September of 1996. I sneaked Linux onto the raised floor of a multi-billion dollar Fortune 500 company in about 1998. By the time I left that job, RHEL was the preferred O.S. with well over 200 (virtual + physical) systems in use.
On the off chance that someone in a position of authority over Linux development reads this, you people are cutting your own throats with lunacy such as systemd and networkmanager.
Like the original poster, I am starting to look for alternatives to Linux.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
It has been a fairly long slide.
I feel like at some point mass adoption became the big goal, and a lot of the things that really drew my to Linux in the first place have eroded away.
I always loved the variety of choices for just about everything and the general "if you don't like it, change it or make your own" mindset. The new thinking seems to be centered around agreeing on standards and rallying around a subset of options in order to make a more presentable solution to present to the masses. This is probably great for humanity and all, and even if we just end up with an open source version of Windows it's probably a good thing, but it's not what made me love Linux.
Systemd is just another step down that road.
If most of your applications are open source, switching to BSD will be fairly straight forward on that front. That's particularly since you're coming from Gentoo (i.e. you'll probably have to compile a lot of the software that you want to run under BSD).
The biggest hurdles are going to be the sorts of things that a generic question cannot address. Is your hardware compatible with the version of BSD that you've selected? Unlike Linux, where everyone is using the same kernel and has almost the same access to kernel modules, different implementations of BSD use different kernels. As such, selecting an implementation depends as much on low level details as it does on the userspace. (While I've pointed out hardware compatibility, any feature that is found in the kernel needs consideration.)
Another consideration is whether you're comfortable with managing BSD systems. Unlike hardware support, this is difficult to assess objectively. Some people like the core OS being a unified system that you update all at once. Other people like the piecemeal approach of Linux. Keep in mind that the core OS could mean everything from the kernel, to development tools, to the X server. (It does vary a bit from implementation to implementation.)
You will also run into a bunch of stuff that you'll have to relearn, particularly if you're accustomed to working in the shell. Software packaging and installation is the first one you'll bump into, but BSD also has it's own set of utilities. Some of these utilities are quite similar to the GNU utilities, but the extended functionality is quite different.
If you want to switch to BSD, I suggest doing it on a secondary computer first. If you run into specific issues, ask specific questions. Odds are that those issues can be resolved, but it will take time to sort through all of them. BSD can be an immense pleasure to use, but it involves a lot more than which applications are and aren't available.
You don't want to use BSD on the desktop.
I'm not saying you can't, all the usual stuff is in FreeBSD ports, there are distributions like PC-BSD that attempt to be good for desktops out of the box. If you really want to make it happen, you can. I've watched many Linux and FreeBSD folks spend countless hours making their desktops work.
Even going to a hard core sysadmin conference, you're going to see a sea of Mac's, some folks even using Windows, and a smattering of the hard core on Linux desktops. Why? To work with other people in their company or at other companies they need Skype, or WebEx to work. They need Excel to open the quotation for hardware, and flash player to view some mandatory training. They want resource browsing that just works so they can print to a printer in the office.
The reason BSD is great in the data center is lots of people use it for that. It's a network effect. You're standing on the shoulders of other folks. It's the same reason Windows and OS X dominate the user desktop market, the software you need just works on them, someone else has made it work. If I told you to replace all of your data center servers with Windows 8 boxes you'd probably laugh at me, and yet the opposite question does not provoke the same response!
So if you want to, try. It can be done, with much blood, sweat, and tears. You might find that fun, if so enjoy! You might work for a small enough company or even just yourself where you can mandate BSD, and LibreOffice and be happy. If so, you are extremely lucky. Otherwise as a long term, die hard, FreeBSD supporter I can tell you from 20+ years experience, you're going to just frustrate yourself.
Hi, adrian@freebsd.org here. If you've had issues with suspend/resume and poor battery life then please drop us/me a line. That's something a group of us are slowly fixing.
-adrian