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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?
It's basically a respin of FreeBSD with some packages preinstalled and a nice desktop from the get-go. It includes Firefox and Flash in a default install, works as a VirtualBox guest and host, there's a Java implementation for your Minecraft fix, and there's good documentation.
You can also choose between several DEs and WMs, such as KDE, Cinnamon, FVWM, Xfce, and many others.
Just go with FreeBSD. It's the one with most broad hardware support and easiest to transition from Linux. The major desktop projects (KDE, XFCE, GNOME (probably not any more) try to have FreeBSD support as their priority. Less so for the other BSDs.
OpenBSD and NetBSD have their pluses, and excel in their respective areas. I think that after getting used to FreeBSD, you will have an easier time with OpenBSD on your firewall and NetBSD on your toaster :P
Submitted this awhile ago and never actually thought it would get posted. Asked something similar (and got some good responses) over here: https://slashdot.org/comments....
The only problem with that is that Macs probably represent all of the anti-Unix nonsense he's trying to get away from by fleeing to one of the pure BSDs.
I also can't imagine a Gentoo user being satisfied with Mac hardware. Gentoo is kind of the polar opposite of the Apple mentality. The end user has limited control and is presented with limited questionable choices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"for variety of reasons". Who are we kidding? It's the fucking systemd by Redhat's Poettering.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Macs arn't exactly known for their low prices and frankly, while the OS, internal hardware and screens might be fantastic, the keyboards and mice are bloody appalling - a triumph of style over usability and then some. So you can add on the price of a proper keyboard and 3 button mouse (if you want full X app functionality) on top of the Mac itself if you're buying a desktop.
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.
FreeBSD is a safe bet. Used it for a year as desktop. XFCE, virtualbox, firefox are no problem. Flash might be a pain. Don't know about minecraft. Give it a whirl.
This post kinda nails it: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
If it was about functionality, just stick with Linux. This is about philosophy, and Apple is probably about as far away from the philosophy that a Gentoo user is looking for.
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.
...think you wouldn't be able to find a modern browser, media player or window manager for FreeBSD; Firefox, mplayer and XFCE are all available there. It's as if you think the BSD family is something completely different and incompatible with the rest of the UNIX world.
you're a bit out of date, Filevault 2 (introduced with Lion) encrypts the entire drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
David
FreeBSD is the fastest, easiest to use and most widely supported option you will find. You can run any program that you can run on Linux, you'll never have to worry about running out of RAM due to FreeBSD's advanced memory optimization algorithms, and installing software is a cinch. You have two ways to do everything, and you don't have to worry about being locked in to the vendor's way of using the software that's available to you, because FreeBSD gives you all the control you could want. Additionally FreeBSD doesn't crash, and it's completely invulnerable to security vulnerabilities due to the included bhyve hypervisor which keeps each process in its own FreeBSD jail. You'll have to configure the IPs for each jail statically, though which can be a pain, but it's worth it. Additionally, FreeBSD is much faster at opening files because it caches the entire file system in memory, which isn't possible in other operating systems, but due to the aforementioned memory optimization algorithms, is perfectly sensible. Additionally, you can mock users of all other operating systems, such as DOS or OS/2, which lack the great features and security of FreeBSD. If you want to compare FreeBSD to other BSDs, such as iOS or Android, that's understandable, but neither of those operating systems give you full root mode or allow you to compile your own software. Additionally, FreeBSD has recently adopted the Clang compiler, which emits a sound reminiscent of two metal bars colliding to let you know your compilation is complete, and colorizes your warnings if you have a hard time parsing your own output. If you want the the latest file system, or multiprocessor support, though, you should think about using Dragonfly, which has these features built in.
In summary, if you prefer emacs and lisp to vi and C, you should use Linux, which is written in lisp on an emacs editor. However, if you feel more comfortable with vi, or are looking forward to trying out the soon to be released second edition, vim, and write your programs in C, you should use FreeBSD. FreeBSD comes with vi and C support built in, and you can try the new vim text editor if you buy a CD from a third party vendor which will allow you to install it in a jail managed by bhyve to protect you from any bugs running beta software may introduce into the expected behavior of your installation of FreeBSD.
Both OpenBSD and NetBSD come with XFCE, OpenBox, Firefox, mplayer (or equivalent). NetBSD pkgsrc may be a bit closer to Gentoo than OpenBSD ports/packages, but both are excellent package systems. You may get more games with NetBSD, including Minecraft and others but I haven't checked, so don't quote me on this.
If you are used to Gentoo, picking one or the other should not be too difficult, but OpenBSD, while a bit picky when it comes to hardware, is also a bit easier to use: if a piece of harware is supported, it is supported. Period. NetBSD often requires compiling a specific kernel to add this or that peripheral. OpenBSD usually supports everything out of the box, as long as it is in its harware compatibility list. Plus, there is this schweet schweet security goodness, now with LibreSSL gooey core!
Here is a quick example: I have had a motherboard die on me. I just ripped off the main HDD out, put it into a slightly different machine, and OpenBSD just picked up the harware changes, reconfigured, checked the filesystems and worked without making a fuss. I have used OpenBSD for many years in a second-hand laptop, where everything was supported, and it was a pleasure to use as my main machine. The update procedure is quick and easy, and a new version of the OS comes out every 6 months like clockwork.
So there you go, hope this helps.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I use FreeBSD on all my desktop machines, and Gentoo on my laptop. Thankfully, eudev and USE="-systemd -consolekit -policykit" have kept my Gentoo install systemd-free. I tried FreeBSD 10.1 on my laptop, but poor battery life, suspend/resume issues, and X11 crashes forced me back to Gentoo.
The FreeBSD ports tree should have almost any FOSS project you're looking for. There was a period of time during the GCC->Clang transition where a lot of stuff didn't build, but those days are long gone. I'm not sure about Minecraft, but OpenJDK 7 and 8 work just fine. Mplayer is also in the ports tree, though I've long switched to mpv. VirtualBox, as well as Firefox and Chromium are also easily installed from ports. Flash can be made to work easily enough using FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer. Not sure about OpenRA (I assume that's a game?), but you might have luck using the Linuxulator with that as well.
Encrypted root is possible using ZFS now. There's an option for it in the installer. Openbox, XFCE, Qt, are also all available from the ports tree. Honestly, I've never found a Linux program I used that wasn't in ports.
Coming from Gentoo, you'll feel right at home with FreeBSD. The system is much more easily configured, using a central, well documented config file (/etc/rc.conf). The handbook is great. In addition, compiling package from source is a much more user friendly experience than Gentoo. Compile-time options are presented to you via an ncurses menu the first time you install an application, and compile times are much faster with Clang compared to GCC.
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.
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood and being an asshole, but I can't quite wrap my head around this post. "Hi everyone, I'm a random anonymous person on the Internet. For reasons I won't explain, I've decided I don't like Linux, and I want to try BSD. My needs are that I really want to play 3 specific games and run Firefox." I'm not even seeing where he actually asks a question, but timothy wants to know how Mr. Anonymous can fix his undisclosed Linux problems by moving to BSD.
Well, let's see. First, since you're apparently just running games, who cares what OS you're using? Does your current OS play those games? If yes, keep it. If not, look to see what operating system supports those games, and choose one of those operating systems to try out. Firefox and some kind of view player? I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Somehow the issue of hardware support isn't raised.
You know what? Use PC-BSD. AFIAK, it's basically the only BSD distribution, aside from Mac OSX, that's specifically targeting desktop use. Or maybe, since you only need a web browser and a couple of games, you should use whatever OS runs those games and stop worrying about it.
So is there a point to using OpenBSD if you install flash? I'm not trolling, I'm curious and open to the fact that there is almost certainly something I haven't considered, but running OpenBSD and then installing flash feels like spending a million bucks on a safe, and then writing the combination code to open it on a sticky note attached to the backside of a painting hung on the wall next to the safe's door.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
OS X is Unix. FreeBSD, Linux and every other crappy "work-alike" you idiots are talking about, by contrast, aren't.
a focus on usability and mass appeal over flexibility and choice.
Let's parse that, because there's a lot packed in that small fragment.
focus on usability, so your complaint is that a vendor is spending a lot of time and effort making the software easy to use? Huh?
mass appeal, it's somehow a negative if the best option available is something everyone likes? Or turned around, it can only be a good option if a lot of people hate it? Huh?
over flexibility and choice, in what? In software? On a Mac you can open up a terminal window and ./configure;make;make install pretty much any open source software I've ever seen. I think you'll be hard pressed to find any software that runs on FreeBSD that does not run on a Mac. Exactly how is a Mac limiting your choice of software? Perhaps you mean they only allow specific things in their App store? That's kind of like complaining that Ford limits your choice of tires by only selling Firestone in the service department. Maybe you mean in hardware? Except you can run any operating system you like on it. Plenty of people have installed Windows or even FreeBSD onto Apple hardware, it works just fine. You can throw out all of OS X if you want and still use the hardware. Now true, you can't do the opposite and run OS X on hardware of your choosing, so I'll give you that is a small limitation. But in the end what difference does that make.
You were drawn to linux to play. We've all gone through a phase where we tested 10 different window managers just to see what each could do. Linux, FreeBSD make that easy. It's fun. Other than a couple of guys at RedHat, I can't think of anyone who gets paid to do that though. Your job description probably doesn't include testing every software alternative in Linux.
...is a Debian userland on top of the BSD kernel. It lets you use all the tools you're used to while also getting all the FreeBSD kernel goodness, like in-kernel ZFS, etc.
It's still a work in progress and not all packages are built for it, but it works really well and is very pleasant to use; plus you get dpkg and apt.
Of course, one possible downside is that you don't get the BSD userland, which has a flavour all of its own. Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is purely a matter of personal taste.
| which variety of BSD would you suggest?
OSX
Maybe if you only want clicky clicky ways of changing things. Otherwise there is still a full terminal and BASH installed, and you can update many many system settings through the CLI. I am using a terminal right now as a matter of fact.
Then there is the questionable applescript / automator scripts you can make. I say questionable because I don't know if they can change any deep system things, but automator at least can do some pretty neat tricks... I don't know if Linux has something comparable, other than shell scripts which I can still run in OS/X.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
I've been using BSD for a long time, both in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is fantastic. I use mostly just plain Xorg and i3 window manager. With emacs, LaTeX and conkeror I can accomplish all that I need to do, and do it efficiently. However you can put as many bells and whistles on your installation as you want. True, you could do that with linux but there are some very important advantages with using FreeBSD:
1/ ZFS file system. This alone is worth switching to FreeBSD. If you don't know what it is, learn how to use it. What is extremely useful is doing "zfs send" of snapshots to another machine. Need more storage? Just add a disk to the pool. ZFS is very much production grade in FreeBSD 10.1.
2/ Jails. These are better than VirtualBox in my humble opinion, but they do have a learning curve. The advantage is putting each jail on a zfs filesystem where you can do snapshots of different stages of your application deployment and if something doesn't work you can simply rollback. Yes, I know you can do this with VMWare and the rest but jails allow me to access the filesystem directly in the command line and in general it is much more intuitive for my work habits. Note that you can also install jails of different flavors - for instance a debian jail where you can run everything just like it is on linux.
VirtualBox works just fine on FreeBSD, but I'll admit I haven't used it much.
3/ General simplicity of the system. Linux is fastly becoming as non-unix like as possible [though to be fair GNU is Not Unix]. Just a simple install of Ubuntu and you will see tons of processes running that you sometimes wonder what they are all up to. This may provide some utility for some people, but most people will never use those features. In FreeBSD I know exactly what each process is doing and it is very easy to turn off or enable as I desire. FreeBSD provides me control because I know the system, and the system is easier to know because it is much simpler and in my opinion more coherently designed.
4/ Much better documentation. FreeBSD (and BSD in general) has a good reputation for providing documentation. Almost everything you need is in the handbook. Also there is a lot of stability in the way things are done. Often in Linux the entire manner of doing things is changed from one version to another. Plus there are no monstrosities like NetworkManager which are opaque and not very well documented.
5/ More secure - a system is only as secure in as much as you know how it is working and what it is doing. In this case FreeBSD is more secure because I know more of what it is doing. With Ubuntu giving web searches every time you try to find a file on your machine, there is just asking for trouble.
6/ The system is more responsive. FreeBSD simple feels more 'alive' in the sense it is doing only what you want it to do. You don't have to wait for that useless application to stop doing what it is doing because it is not there. You don't need to wait for the indexing of the harddrive to give you back control of the system, as you decide when it should be done, etc. But I think even the UI elements are much smoother even on large desktops like KDE. The scrolling of windows for instance seems much more responsive than it is on linux, but that could be due to all sorts of factors.
As to your particular needs:
A/ Minecraft works just fine. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com...
B/ I have no idea, but an acquaintance tells me it works. In the forums they mention FreeBSD so someone must be using it.
C/ Mplayer works just fine, but I've seen a lot of people use VLC.
D/ Firefox works extremely well, though I use Conkeror which is simply a different shell to the same browser.
E/ Flash works with a multiple of different options.
F/ No idea to be honest about OpenRA. If there is source code I'm sure you could get it to run. At the very worst there is a linux-emulation layer.
G/ All the major Desktop Environments are in
I use PC-BSD, and here too, there seems to be just 1 integrated way of doing things. The other day, I needed to change the gateway address of my router, since a Netgear had replaced a Belkin, which was toast. I tried editing /etc/resolv.conf, but it wouldn't stay saved. Finally, from the PC-BSD control panel, I went to Network Configuration, and viola! It worked.
In PC-BSD 10.0, I did have a few hiccups: when I added users from the User Manager, it would initially not show up in the login menu, so I had to do CLI adduser. However, after an update, I saw that problem go away: users created under User Manager would show up. Similarly, I installed GNOME 3.12 a few days ago and had a problem moving GTK apps, but after the upgrade to 10.1 and to GNOME 3.14, that too went away.
My only beef w/ PC-BSD has been the lack of WiFi support for Centrino. Otherwise, the apps I use are Thunderbird, Chromium/Firefox/Web, FreeCiv. Aside from that, I store my personal PDF documents. For Office, I use Calligra SmartSuite, but that one could use a lot of improvement.
I dunno about Skype or Steam, but what's it about Chrome that you won't get w/ Chromium?
For me, the biggest issue is that most videos still require Flash.
Google is the biggest hypocrite here. One part of the company paid a lot of money to promote patent-free video on the Internet, but the YouTube team won't use it for music videos and prefers to use Flash even when HTML5 <video> is available. The Chrome team not only backpedaled on removing patent-encumbered <video>, but also partnered with Microsoft and Netflix to bring DRM into the HTML5 standard.
My practice is to use Google Chrome when I really do need Flash or some other Google monstrosity, but otherwise keep that browser closed.
Have a nice time.
Uh, if you get the PC-BSD DVD, you get the option of installing not just that, but instead FreeBSD or TrueOS as well. The last being PC-BSD w/ only the server specific commands, so that it can behave as a lightweight server where all of FreeBSD is not needed.
There is no support for Flash...
There is no need for Flash anymore.
Indeed, I'm very much against the idea of owning a mac.
It actually kind of represents the extreme form of what is driving me away from Linux, a focus on usability and mass appeal over flexibility and choice.
Not much of a Linux expert, but enjoy playing with Slackware from time to time. It hasn't changed too much from an "usability" perspective and puts you in the drivers seat.
I think this is the OS version of "I loved that band when they played in Jimmy's basement, but now they have a van and go to clubs. Total loser sellout band now, no cool person would go see them". YMMV and all, but I am loving Mint. It does stuff I want without spending all day fsking with it.
No. Apple is lame and restrictive.
If he uses a real BSD, he can install it on any hardware he likes.
If he uses "marketing-bullet-point-BSD", he can only install it on a small number of overpriced machines in strange novelty form factors.
HELL, he could try the real BSD of his choice in a VM right now without disturbing his Gentoo install and without spending any extra money.
If only trying "marketing-bullet-point-BSD" were so cheap and easy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've done this myself as an experiment a few weeks ago. With the exception of FTB (the site has a jar file for it, so it'll likely work) everything you mentioned is available in ports. http://www.freshports.org/
There's also a binary packing system (pkg) but packages seem to randomly go missing there. A couple of weeks ago it was Xorg, until yesterday no Firefox. BTW can anyone explain the dynamics behind that?
The best way to get in is head first, install it on the least fancy PC you have. I'd strongly recommend FreeBSD and the handbook (This should be your first place of reference). http://www.freebsd.org/handboo... (take note of chapter 11). If you're a gentoo man you don't need PC-BSD.
Putting my view on *nix desktops aside (Are they worth the effort?), If there is a show stopper it'll probably be hardware support.
I just went through this a few days ago. Seems every year or two, I re-visit FreeBSD and ask myself, what would I miss if I switched entirely. A brief description of my encounters with FreeBSD 10.1 this week below:
/KVM, but VirtualBox could certainly fill this need.
1. ZFS cross platform worked beautifully. I have a multi-disk "ZFS on Linux - created" pool. I had no problems importing the pool with FreeBSD. And, as I switched back after running the pool under FreeBSD for a few days, I encountered no issues re-importing the pool under ZFS on Linux.
2. I have many KVM/qemu VMs. I'd love to run bhyve, but many VMs are Windows. It's not too hard to convert the images to boot up under VirtualBox. VirtualBox under FreeBSD works very well. For managing multiple VMs across several servers, I prefer virt-manager
3. While copying large vm images, I realized BSD's cp command doesn't support sparse files. One is left to use rsync. There is the linux/compat cp command which does support sparse, however this cp command crashed on me while copying large files.
4. Minecraft -- It worked great under FreeBSD -- just be sure to follow the directions to point to the correct Java runtime in your Minecraft profile.
5. I installed serveral other programs I use frequently (some binary installs from pkg and some source compiles): Chromium, Thunderbird, Blender, KDE, Gimp, Kdenlive, LibreOffice, OpenJDK , NVidia driver using a 3-headed display, VLC, MPV, HandBrake, FFMpeg, and others. All these worked fine. For the most part, my FreeBSD desktop was indistinguishable from my Linux desktop.
6. I set up several NFS4 exported mount points. No issues mounting these from multiple Linux hosts.
7. Webcam tested no issues. I had to install webcamd and follow the instructions.
8. Audio tested and worked well out of the box.
9. VNC server and clients worked fine.
Overall, I'm -- once again -- very impressed. Setup was fast ( even ports package compiles were very fast ). I'm familiar with FreeBSD, so that helps with the install time. Newcomers should always expect to put in extra time (As mentioned, PCBSD can help get you into a graphical environment quickly, so less of a learning curve). What would I miss if I switched over 100%??? I would miss KVM/virt-manager, native cp support of sparse files, native mkvmerge, and I'd love to get a native Eclipse IDE Luna port., and an intel 7260 Wifi driver. To be fair, I still need to give it more time. I might try again this weekend and coming week, since I'll have some free time. If you enjoy tinkering and learning the details of configuring your OS, FreeBSD is great. For a quick, get-it-up-and-working, PCBSD works very well.
Remind me to change where I hide the passwor.... ummmm I mean redecorate my office.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Also due to "a variety of reasons", I've also been looking at BSD on the desktop. Co-incidentally, I was just trying out the new PC-BSD release in a VirtualBox VM as this article appeared. It gave me a nice KDE desktop and so far looks pretty slick. The other stuff there like the package manager and control panel is enough to give Ubuntu a run for its money. I'll be interested in seeing how good it is in practice after a few weeks of real use.
Over the last year I've been slowly moving my software away from Linux. It's now mostly on FreeBSD or in the late stages of porting to BSD (adding BSD-specific features e.g. ZFS support, jail support). The desktop is really the only thing I still keep a Debian system around for. My last system will be a GNU/kFreeBSD jail instance on a FreeBSD server. I'll do a bare metal PC-BSD install in a few days and give it a try. If it works nicely, I think my last Debian unstable system will be removed in the near future. I was trying out (since 10.0) the newcons console and radeonkms stuff; mostly worked fine, and now with the new Xorg, no different than with Linux (maybe better, even, due to missing the worst parts of the freedesktoppy crap).
Linux in general, and Debian in particular, have been the major focus of my life over the last 14-16 years. It's been quite sad to let it go after the amount I've invested into it personally, but with systemd becoming unavoidable in unstable, it's no longer a system I wish to use or develop for, and developing went from being a joy to quite unpleasant. The enthusiasm I had was killed by several years of systemd flamewars and the last sparks were extinguished by bad interactions with a certain number of gnome and systemd people. It was clear over 18 months back this was an inevitable outcome unless something dramatically changed (which hasn't happened), and that my needs, goals and wishes were almost diametrically opposed to the new world order. systemd is the straw which broke the proverbial camel's back. Over the last few months I've had a few bug reports for my software. All due to systemd changing how the system works fairly fundamentally, and yet every upstream is supposed to work around this. This is code which is pretty much just using POSIX features directly out of APUE (Stevens). The lack of care for backward compatibility is unbelievable for such a fundamental part of the system, and altering the behaviour of basic POSIX features even moreso.
So is there a point to using OpenBSD if you install flash?
Is there a point to using any operating system, or any software at all, that lacks features you need? Flash is still sadly a major component of the web. Certainly not as major, and its importance is definitely fading, but it is still essential for using many sites at full-feature. less than 5 years ago flash-driven uploaders were all the rage. A lot of video sites have not transitioned to HTML5 video. Many games still require flash, and this "workaday" setup seems very games-centric. (government work?)
I'm curious and open to the fact that there is almost certainly something I haven't considered
A few reasons I can think of: automatic ZFS on root, ports system, and stability. Also, it's arguable (I lack any technical grounds for this statement) that BSD does a better job of "compartmentalizing" processes than Linux, so if you have to run Flash there might be no better way to do so.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
How the hell does this absolute crap get posted?
Seriously. This is getting silly. If people want to flee the main Distro's because they think that Debian is getting stupid. Can they please just fork Debian and improve on it? Apt-get works really well. I just feel that a ton of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Linux kernel does not mandate systemd. There is no reason to ditch Linux. If the problem is distributions mandating systemd then it is time to start a distro that removes systemd and Gnome. Let's not kid ourselves here. Right now it's Gnome and systemd that are pushing this move on everyone. If people don't like it, they should be looking to fork a distribution and fixing the issue. Maybe brand themselves as a POSIX/SYS-V init Compliant distribution.
OS X is no more heavily controlled than any Linux in the sense of putting what software you like on it. The only downside to it is that you have to buy your hardware from Apple.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I'm honestly very interested in openBSD and it is obviously better to have fewer rather than more vulnerabilities. How would a person figure out which parts of openBSD go through the auditing they're famous for? I wouldn't want to be one of those people who installs openBSD and then believes myself invulnerable because of that fact alone -- that is just smug ignorance. So for example, the openBSD website advertises "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" How much worse is that figure if I also install Gnome or KDE; xine or mplayer and all the codecs; etc. etc.? Anyway, is there a list of what is and what is not subjected to the openBSD audit process? I can't imagine they have the resources to look at absolutely everything.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
In FreeBSD, network configuration data is stored in the /etc/rc.conf file, which overrides default options stored in /etc/defaults/rc.conf.
If you want to manually set the IPv4 address of an interface, you could use:
ifconfig_xx0="inet 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="192.168.1.1"
If you're using DHCP, remove the default router line and set the ifconfig string to "DHCP".
You can also use the command line tool sysinstall to set network options.
Also remember, FreeBSD uses network driver specific interface names. So instead of eth0, eth1, eth2, you can have fxp0, em0, and de0. If that's not your thing, you can always create an alias:
ifconfig_em0_name="eth0"
The only problem with that is that Macs probably represent all of the anti-Unix nonsense he's trying to get away from by fleeing to one of the pure BSDs.
But fleeing from Linux to BSD doesn't solve the problem, that's just running away from it. If the major BSD distros decided to incorporate a systemd-like system then what?
Now you're just changing his/her requirements to suit your point of view and serve your agenda.
yes there is, plenty of admin web gui demand it, plenty of banks and other financial web gui demand it (retirement accounts)
flash might need to die but it'll writhe and groan for a few more years
The answer to all your questions is "it is there". For any future questions of the same kind, go to http://www.freshports.org/ and search for the package that you want.
"...browsing the web sans-flash is still a pain..." Is it? Which sites now require Flash? I recently reinstalled my OS and decided to forgo adding Flash as a little experiment to see how well it would work. I've managed 3 weeks so far without it.
Positives: YouTube works better in HTML5. Flash-based ads do not appear in uTorrent.
Negatives: There was some news site where the video wouldn't play, but it's a 50/50 chance whether that was due to Flash or Noscript. In any case, I'm used to those not working, and had no problem passing it by.
While I think that most of the posts to use FreeBSD or PC-BSD are spot on, I think I should cover what you shouldn't use in the BSD world due to your requirements.
My own os, MidnightBSD, does not have virtualbox. The nvidia binary drivers work from FreeBSD on it, but that won't be the case forever.
MirBSD wouldn't support at lot of the software you mentioned and doesn't have recent java support for minecraft.
OpenBSD might work, but you would have to check on a few packages.
NetBSD is probably your next best bet after FreeBSD due to the wide variety of packages.
DragonFly is weak on packages, although they're working on it.
FreeBSD does offer disk encryption. Note if you use encrypted swap, there is a massive performance hit. I used to have this a default in MidnightBSD up to 0.4 and it was not a pretty picture on server hardware. Sometimes you'd get panics if there was too much swap pressure with it.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
FreeBSD is great, except for all the drivers it lacks which Linux has. There is no substituting the kernel as long as FreeBSD doesn't support things that the Linux kernel does. It's unhelpful to suggest that people just change kernels. Especially when there has been no declaration that Linux itself requries systemd, or ever will require systemd. Right now this is a packaging and distribution issue.
A few things on that list are where BSD is lagging behind, just like linux is lagging behing on ZFS. Last I looked Virtualbox was not working at all. However with X you don't have to run the software on the same machine and the one you sit in front of.
There's plenty of stuff where there are linux binaries available but nothing for BSD - however so long as they are 32 bit there's an emulation layer that's pretty solid, even for flaky Adobe stuff or antivirus scanners written to be run on linux. I should get around to installing the old loki games on a netbook I've put FreeBSD10 on.
OSX is XNU which is not UNIX.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Wow, add that to systemd and pulseaudio and it's almost looking like he's on the MS payroll to break stuff in linux. However, the reality is likely to be that he has a vision to change linux into something different to what it is now which of course is not going to be painless and seamless - hence the annoyance with pulseaudio during the first few years of development and the annoyance with NetworkManager until relatively recently. NetworkManager may have pissed me off at times on fixed systems (and earlier in development) but it's now a pretty nice thing to have on laptops.
If you want to completety change the compartmentalised idea of linux (where you change settings and they stay changed) to something very interdependant there's going to be a pile of glitches on the way to pretending to be a Mac. Complaints about beta software going into distros are fairly pointless since it's not going to get much better without a lot of people hammering at it and finding the problems. It does however mean that there is a very large and widening gap between what's acceptable in an office environment (RHEL6 or Fedora13 from 2010) and the cutting edge (Fedora20).
Agreed with most of what you say. There IS one area where Mac loses in flexibility, it's system programming. If you ever have to do anything with hardware or drivers etc, working on OS X is often like trying to run a marathon in a thick jungle.
I.e. yes you have all the freedom with your software in userspace, but touch any foundation layers and you are at mercy of apple.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
OSX is XNU which is not UNIX.
Does he really need to spell it out for you? He isn't saying that OS X is literally the UNIX developed by AT&T Bell labs but that OS X conforms to the Single UNIX Specification and meets the certification requirements of the Open Group which is the industry standards consortium that manages and publishes the UNIX specification.
Also, you may find that you need Flash a few times per year. Most Flash is ads, splash pages, and other stuff that's not useful to me. What I do is install Flash in a browser that I rarely use. My daily surfing isn't exposed to Flash vulnerabilties, but those few times per year I want to use Flash I just open the Flash-enabled browser.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With FreeBSD you've got to be a little bit more picky about the hardware. I can highly recommend using an nVidia video card. This will allow you to get full OpenGL acceleration (for Minecraft) and h264/vc1 acceleration in mplayer with libvdpau (makes sure to build the port manually, as that option is not selected by default). Flash is a little more finicky, as it uses the Linux emulation layer. Fortunately the internet is moving to html5 video which is well supported by Firefox/Chrome on FreeBSD. So youtube works fine without flash.
I've been using FreeBSD on my media box since about version 6, and on various servers professionally as well as at home.
Also, ZFS fucking rules.
wrong answer
1. has launchd which is systemd-ish and can be pain for custom daemons (plists for non-apple things don't always work)
2. has many, MANY extra processes running, for added bloat one doesn't need or want
3. can't even change system font size or face, very UNCUSTOMIZEABLE UI. Don't they even consider the sight-impaired?
> The other day, I needed to change the gateway address of my router, since a Netgear had replaced a Belkin, which was toast. I tried editing /etc/resolv.conf
Setting the network gateway in the resolver config? Would that ever work in any version of any OS?
Unix is a trademark brand and certification. OSX is indeed a Unix(tm)
As my desktop is a powerful laptop, the show-stopper for me was touchpad support. The module responsible for touchpads in FreeBSD is very out of date and does not work for synaptic touchpads on all the HP Elitebooks I have tried. My current is an Elitebook. Poor touchpad support may sound like a minor thing however when using the laptop keyboard a ton, it's a big problem; too many ghost taps with no way to configure the drivers. Only option is to disable the touchpads which for me is far from ideal. Besides this issue, FreeBSD does it all. Note that whole disk encryption is not possible with ootb Installers for PC-BSD last time I checked. Several folks on FreeBSD team is recommending avoiding whole disk encryption and going to alternative methods. If you are super paranoid about security and can afford sacrifice a bunch of functionality, then OpenBSD is the one to target.
Maybe just maybe people just want a unix like OS and not care about learning commands.
Mac is great and Windows 7 is now a somewhat decent desktop OS which is quite shocking. I run www.turnkeylinux.com in VMware Workstation for web development. Do not have time to set stuff up and do not care. It is an appliance and just works.
My advice is to use a real desktop OS and keep the server stuff in vms. Virtualbox is free. Even if you are a Windows only dude these virtualizers can simulate a whole network with a domain controller and everything.
http://saveie6.com/
I just encountered a link about refracta. It turns out to be absurdly easy to fork Debian, at least for now.
Refracta is rather close to Debian testing. Its home page
is http://www.ibiblio.org/refract...
At http://forums.debian.net/viewt... it is described as
(for testing, without libsystemd0, it's pinned).
It even uses the Debian repositories!
Are there any other forks?
-- hendrik
I needed Flash to file my tax return last night. The bigger problem was viewing the calculated result, that needed Acrobat (all other PDF viewers show the content "this PDF musy be viewed in Adobe Reader 9 or later"), which you can't download anymore and my other laptop that should have a copy is out of action. That's when you need virtualisation of some kind ... (kvm/virt-manager in my case).
"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.. What's the most painless way to transition to BSD for this constellation of uses, and which variety of BSD would you suggest?"
It would be informative if you shared with us the reasons for your disenchantment with 'Linux', and what improvement BSD on the desktop would be?
"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"
This wouldn't be a wind-up by any chance?
Yeah, there are some websites you might want to go to that still need Flash or some equally ugly support to get video to work. Right now I've been trying to get SliTaz Linux to let me watch YouTube as well as finding the right operating system and VMware settings to make the display resizeable, but I'm also trying out DragonFly BSD (still at the "installing Xorg" stage.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm looking for a small desktop BSD, something that runs Xorg and fits in a GB or less of disk, so I can run multiples of them as virtual machines. I need some kind of browser that can run YouTube, plus ssh, and otherwise I don't much care what it does, but small disk is good.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why can't people read beyond the first sentence before writing a two paragraph reply?
I would like to know what kind of administration you are doing through a 'flash web gui'? Isn't command line sufficient for admin work? Or am I missing the point in some (not so) subtle way?
Interestingly enough, as I wrote the above, the flash player in Chrome decided to die...heh.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
But fleeing from Linux to BSD doesn't solve the problem, that's just running away from it. If the major BSD distros decided to incorporate a systemd-like system then what?
Then it will be time to fork Linus...
J/K
However, maybe someone should give the Linux POSIX APIs some loving - and implement a new improved non-systemd distro, and add good support for features/apps that were lost in the 'Great Systemd Landrush of 2014' (basically fork projects that decide only to support systemd - if they are something we gotta have on BSD and Linux).
The one thing I think we can depend upon is the Linux Kernel itself...everything else is questionable given limited resources; if you care about having a given feature that is threatened - put your money/sweat where your mouth is - and support it.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I am not getting something. The original poster talked about his desktop, right? Why all this nonsense about feeling from systemd or OS/X being too restrictive? I care about optimising my servers, in my desktop I just want something that works and is nice to use.
Twelve years ago I grew tired of trying to make Linux work on a Desktop. I noticed that when I wanted to have some work done I ended up using Slackware. Slackware uses the BSD init type, instead of SVR4 most of Linux systems were using at that time (and that is now being replaced with an upstart or systemd). I also noticed FreeBSD discussion forums that had simple instructions *that worked* for configuring things like switching keyboard layouts in Xwindow. ;-) ). Note that this was time where KDE was at its peak - around version of 3.8.something.
So I have tried FreeBSD 4.something. It worked great. When 4.8 came along I was already proficient and I had the best desktop ever. I was never this satisfied with a Linux desktop before.
The documentation is fantastic. Whatever you need to configure, just open handbook at the appropriate chapter and follow the script. (It was recommended at the time to do yourself a favor and make csh your default shell instead of Bash you wanted to use as a Linux refugee
Installing software was super easy, just use binary ports - ports that somebody else had built on a pointy-hat server farm, so you do not have to spend [many] dozens of machine-hours compiling stuff like KDE.
For smaller stuff, you just identified port you wanted to use, changed into that directory within port structure, typed make install and watched the magic happen.
Fast forward a few years. I grew tired of having to tinker with a computer for a month to configure all the little things, such as Flash every time I wanted to do a major update from scratch. At that time installing things like Flash was highly non-trivial, you had to use Linux version on top of some compatibility layer that emulated RedHat system for Linux calls. So I started to use PC-BSD and I was happy again.
Fast forward a few more years again. FreeBSD kernel of certain generation of major release had problems with my motherboard, and my existing system built on previous major release was getting obsolete. My Flash was old and other important ports couldn't be updated to a desired version. So I went looking for a Linux distro that I wouldn't have to fight with.
I have discovered Mint Linux. Out-of-box it came configured JUST the way I like it. I just needed to install a few little things, like [g]vim built from the most recent vanilla sources, Krusader, and a few others.
I do try FreeBSD out from time to time when an interesting release appears. I am always disappointed with the hardware compatibility. My very good friend runs it as his main desktop at work with a lightweight desktop manager. Besides other things he uses it to host a bunch VMs in Qemu. We (the company I work for) also use FreeBSD for various little stations and small servers for operators in industrial system.
Let me tell you, FreeBSD ain't what it used to be around what I perceive as a "FreeBSD Golden Age" [4.8Release]. Things aren't backward compatible and releases get old fairly quickly. When shell-shock (that nasty bug in Bash) came out I was very surprised that you can't patch an older system - you have to install a fairly recent release. I know, the default shell is tcsh, but some [web]server ports require bash.
Who cares about drivers? We are running all our systems on virtualisation farms...
I think the final nail in the anti-system movement [a proud member] was Torvalds' non-chalant, I-can't-be-bothered-with-such-trivialities response when asked about this virus. I can't be the only one that was stunned by his attitude, assuring the rapid takeover of Linux by the Red Hat / NSA consortium.
They will be coming for your kernel one day, Linus, but there will be no one left to speak up.
Adobe does not provide one. Gnash does. You only said Flash, not "official Flash plugin from Adobe", thus you are incorrect. See the first reply to the OP in the thread, which is a list of the 3 commands which will install a Flash plugin. You are incorrect. QED.
For the record, I run OpenBSD and Flash works fine. That link you provided even links to Gnash!
See the second post in the this thread. You are incorrect. FFS, it gives the exact commands needed to install a Flash plugin.
One example is VMWare's VCenter to mange vmware virtualization. Various disk array and SAN switch vendors also use flash UIs.
Other things major companies have to deal with: PCI compliance auditor might have sample/issue system that uses flash, the famous one I have to deal with does.
Why the hell people keep playing minecraft when there is the open source free alternative available? http://www.minetest.net/
You go all the trouble of getting a completely different OS but can't get rid of a microsoft java game?
Minetest with addons is doing everything the proprietary game does and more. Plus, it doesn't need java and performs much better.
Leaving games aside (steam), Freebsd is perfectly suited for a desktop. Yes, lets get rid of systemd once and for all.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
I was going to say that they do have accessibility options for font size and other things, but the configuration now is more limited than I remember. I can only assume their solution now is to lean on their Retina displays operating at a non-ideal resolution to make the entire interface larger with fewer artifacts than at non-Retina resolutions.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I'm also a Gentoo user and have been thinking the same things. I did try FreeBSD on one of my computers and I liked it to an extent, but I'm also a BOINC user and nVidia refuses to offer opencl support.
So, I just switched to KDE to sidestep Gnome3/systemd. I don't like it as much as Gnome2, but systemd doesn't agree with me (tried it, too).
If nVidia ever gets a clue and supports FBSD properly, I will definitely switch at least one computer to get more proficient at it while contemplating the switch two the two main desktops.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Thanks
I tried that. I liked it less than Gentoo or FreeBSD on their own. It's not Gentoo, it's not FreeBSD. You can only do so much with it.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
I see how you got there. That's the address of your _name_server_. It just so happens that your router (gateway) can also serve as a DNS server. You could have put 8.8.8.8 as your name server, or better yet the name servers of your ISP, and it would work fine.
The gateway is set elsewhere, and needs to be the IP of your router. You'd never go to resolv.conf to set the _gateway_.
I could do that. Of course I already have both Firefox and Chrome installed anyway, but there is no "install a separate browser for one plugin".
In this particular case, either way is probably fine. For security I tend to think in terms of principles, though. Which is a better principle
a) Open a hole, and put a bandaid over the hole
b) Don't open a hole
Hint - Windows does a lot of choice a).
The kernels used don't define what is or ain't UNIX. There have been Unix versions sitting on top of Mach 3.0, which ain't UNIX. Versions like OSF/1. In fact, on the Linux side of things, there has been L4/Linux, which is Linux sitting on top of an L4 microkernel. As others have said, what defines UNIX now is the Single User Specification, which Apple has tested OS-X to and passed.
Chances are that both Linux and *BSD would pass this as well, if someone decided to take the cash needed, pay OpenGroup and run the tests in question. However, until they have, one can't legitimately call either Linux or any of the current BSDs UNIX
I too saw that touchpads didn't work, which is what delayed my migration from Windows 8 to PC-BSD. I had to buy a separate mouse and stick it into a USB port. But I like it this way - under Windows 8, touchpad constantly came in the way, and even touchfreeze didn't fix things completely. So given how buggy the touchpad support could have been, I'm actually glad that it's not supported at all.
Particularly the current generation of touchpads where a single touchpad covers both the touchpad as well as the left & right click buttons. Oh, and without any button to disable touchpads altogether.
Version 10.1 was just released this week - had new updates to my system as late as yesterday
none of that changes the truth of what I said
It's more like a large violin. One doesn't typically strum a viola (i.e., guitars don't come with a bow).
BSD-Based, supports everything you want, great hardware...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism