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PC-BSD Follows a Rolling Release Model, Gets Renamed To TrueOS
prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: By following a rolling release model, TrueOS promises to be a cutting-edge and modern FreeBSD-based operating system for your personal computer, designed with security and simplicity in mind -- all while being stable enough to be deployed on servers. TrueOS will also make use of the security technologies from the OpenBSD project, and you can get your hands on the first Beta ISO images right now. The development team promises to offer you weekly ISO images of TrueOS, but you won't have to download anything anymore due to constant updates thanks to the rolling release model. TrueOS will use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL, offer Linux DRM 4.7 compatibility for supporting for Intel Skylake, Haswell, and Broadwell graphics, and uses the pkg package manage system by default. "TrueOS combines the convenience of a rolling release distribution with the failsafe technology of boot environments, resulting in a system that is both current and reliable. TrueOS now tracks FreeBSD's 'Current' brand and merges features from select FreeBSD developer branches to enhance support for newer hardware and technologies," reads today's announcement.
I predict a steep rise in popularity now then BSD has a cooler name.
Ref: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit/_tl4WBguewE/x-00eYR0u4AJ
Apart from being an utterly uninspired naff name, its already been done - OSF/1 (Alpha unix) was renamed to Tru64 by compaq which did precisely zip for its sales or penetration. Product names get changed when the people managing them can't think of anything else better to do to promote it.
So now PC-B, er, TrueOS is tracking FreeBSD-CURRENT? What exactly is their intended use-case? From the wonderful FreeBSD manual:
FreeBSD-CURRENT is the “bleeding edge” of FreeBSD development and FreeBSD-CURRENT users are expected to have a high degree of technical skill. Less technical users who wish to track a development branch should track FreeBSD-STABLE instead.
FreeBSD-CURRENT is made available for three primary interest groups:
1. Members of the FreeBSD community who are actively working on some part of the source tree.
2. Members of the FreeBSD community who are active testers. They are willing to spend time solving problems, making topical suggestions on changes and the general direction of FreeBSD, and submitting patches.
3. Users who wish to keep an eye on things, use the current source for reference purposes, or make the occasional comment or code contribution.
FreeBSD-CURRENT should not be considered a fast-track to getting new features before the next release as pre-release features are not yet fully tested and most likely contain bugs. It is not a quick way of getting bug fixes as any given commit is just as likely to introduce new bugs as to fix existing ones. FreeBSD-CURRENT is not in any way “officially supported”.
I thought PC-BSD was a nice, easily-set-up systemd-free desktop OS with ZFS. I've used it on older systems and it was pretty nice. No way would I use it for anything important if it's going to be tracking Current, though, and have to deal with the headache of extra bugs and instability. Even FreeBSD doesn't recommend it unless you're a tester or contributor.
Am I missing something? What are the benefits of this move? Will the TrueOS team be able to provide support for the inevitable bugs that come up and annoy users?
is more like it. Making the OS track FreeBSD -CURRENT sounds like a phenomenal way to get everybody sane to install it NOT EVER.
The BSD-based operating system with an overly-high opinion of itself.
Apart from being an utterly uninspired naff name, its already been done - OSF/1 (Alpha unix) was renamed to Tru64 by compaq which did precisely zip for its sales or penetration. Product names get changed when the people managing them can't think of anything else better to do to promote it.
PC-BSD user here (for home computing) and fully agree w/ you. In fact, my recent experience has been abysmal, after I had loved using the OS for months
A bit of background here. My system had previously been updated (on a rolling basis) to 10.2, and had the latest Lumina - I think 0.7 or 0.8. I had left the country for some weeks, when 10.3 was out, so when I returned, I tried upgrading to 10.3. It went upto the CLI login, and stopped. I found nothing online that would revive it, and so decided to reinstall it from a 10.0 DVD, which I had received 2 years ago. It wiped my system - I thought that being ZFS, it would have kept everything and just updated the parts necessary. Oh, well!
So I ended up reinstalling PC-BSD, and then did the updates, but that went up to 10.2. Which would be fine, except that it doesn't recognize the PC-BSD update server anymore, and so I'm stuck w/ really old versions of both Chromium and Firefox. Gmail won't work w/ the Thunderbird version that they have, even though I previously used Gmail seamlessly w/ the last Thunderbird. And I can't even get Lumina. It's so frustrating - I've downloaded 'TrueOS' on an USB and will try installing from scratch this weekend - see if it's any different. This time, I was careful not to put any data in my PC-BSD installation (I do have my old data backed up on a separate external drive)
On a different note, I also have a SteamOS download, so I'm now also considering replacing PC-BSD w/ SteamOS. Only thing I need to know - does it support me doing normal computing stuff like Ubuntu would, or is it only possible to play Steam games? I've stopped using Windows for things like shopping or banking, and had been using PC-BSD, but w/ my system being forced back to something old, I have to look at the alternatives. If SteamOS works for that, I'd use it, given how PC-BSD has fallen off. Otherwise, I was waiting for PC-BSD 11 w/ a SteamOS jail where I could have played my Steam game
Back to VioI8's comment, it's true - Tru64 had been used before - it was the stupid renaming by Compaq of Digital UNIX, which they could have just called Compaq Unix or OSF/1. In the TrueOS page re: this announcement
Many are very familiar with the name PC-BSD® and may be wondering why we changed the name. Although it's a household name for so many, the developers realized this was a time for a new name that would better convey our message. Lead developer Kris Moore had this to say: "We've already been using TrueOS® for the server side of PC-BSD®, and it made sense to unify the names. PC-BSD® doesn't reflect server or embedded well. TrueOS® Desktop/Server/Embedded can be real products, avoids some of the alphabet soup, and gives us a more catchy name." One important lesson learned from going to conferences is that people can have a hard time remembering the acronym that makes up our name, which is not a good place to start with marketing a product. We're confident the TrueOS® name will allow people to quickly identify the project. Subsequently, we will be able to convey our brand message in a better and more unified way.
WTF? PC-BSD at least tells us that this is a BSD distro specially designed for desktops/laptops and fine-tuned for ease of use. TrueOS doesn't even tell us whether it's UNIX - it's like they're running away from any perception that they may be UNIX, or trying to make people think that they're a Linux distro when they're not.
And speaking of TrueOS, their own heritage is really bizarre. The team claims that they took PC-BSD w/ all the improvements, stripped out the
What might really help with adoption of PC-BSD or TrueOS would be a small hardware manufacturer taking a similar approach to Apple and selling hardware that 100% works and is supported for the OS. I'd love to run a BSD OS again but I do most everything on a laptop and I need good battery life and suspend / resume to work without constant fiddling.
Hell it wouldn't take much to surpass Linux usability if you focused on a few models. Even running Linux I had to map custom keys to xrandr scripts to get brightness control working on my current laptop.