[HN Gopher] FreeBSD 11.4
___________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD 11.4
Author : tosh
Score : 192 points
Date : 2020-06-16 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freebsd.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freebsd.org)
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Recently, a certain unmentionable trend in Linux system software
| makes me really want to try FreeBSD again.
|
| What's the state of the art for unprivileged containers? I'm very
| keen on containers that look very similar to the host OS as they
| make excellent environments for teaching pupils about the OS,
| especially if the container host can fake them into being "root"
| in their container.
| colordrops wrote:
| BSD threads are similar to PHP threads. Most comments are
| speaking judgementally about the overall quality of the product
| rather than the post itself, though in the case of BSD the
| judgment is overwhelmingly positive rather than negative.
| incanus77 wrote:
| FreeBSD is a tremendous project. I've used it since the 4.x days,
| first for work (web/mail/database hosting, at the time) and then
| for personal projects.
|
| I have a 2000-era desktop PC as a personal server that I had left
| collect dust until very recently after switching to Macs for
| daily work long ago. It was running 6.1 and I hadn't booted it in
| a few months shy of _ten years_. I booted it right up, and in an
| afternoon proceeded to, in small stages, update it to the latest
| 12.1 release, which I am running with great stability now,
| including live repartitioning and better use of the available
| disk space after going into single-user admin mode. "Recent"
| improvements that I've been appreciating have been a smaller/more
| dense console font, easier wireless configuration (it has an
| Atheros-based PCI wifi card), and easier and more clear package
| and ports management. AND it still runs fast.
| hpkuarg wrote:
| An in-place upgrade from 6.1 to 12.1 without major issues? That
| is indeed tremendously impressive.
| AbacusAvenger wrote:
| > The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version
| 5.18.4.1.19.12.3.
|
| Is that... actually the version number? I thought KDE just used a
| 3-part version number (major.minor.maintenance or something).
| cbhl wrote:
| The last three parts are probably a date in yy.m.d format.
|
| Package names only get longer as you add more layers of
| maintainers. (For example, package-XubuntuY or
| package+YYYYmmdd-n was common on Ubuntu, who needed their
| versions to fit "between" given Debian versions.)
| Johnnynator wrote:
| KDE releases numbers can be 4 part. The first 3 are for
| scheduled releases and the 4th one is for unscheduled one. E.h.
| 5.18.4 was released without having the version number in the
| source code updated, so 5.18.4.1 was released right after with
| that fixed. Otherwise FreeBSD has both the Plasma and the
| Application version number in their meta package. 5.18.4.1 is
| Plasma and 19.12.3 are applications.
| andimm wrote:
| I am no expert at all but maybe the desktop environment is a
| combination of KDE Plasma 5.18.4 and KDE Applications 19.12
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation
| zokier wrote:
| This seems like a good place to ask. I saw this comment[1] few
| weeks back
|
| > This is one of the superior aspects of FreeBSD: no parsing of
| human-readable strings to get back machine-readable information
| about the process table. It's available directly in machine-
| readable form via sysctl().
|
| And started wondering how deep does that go in (Free)BSD? Is all
| info available in neat strucured format programmatically, or are
| there other places where you'd need to do Linux-like parsing of
| special files? Is there some good reading material of this aspect
| of the system?
|
| I hope this isn't too inflammatory Linux vs BSD question, I did
| not intend value judgement on either approach.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425867
| toast0 wrote:
| As a long time user, this feels like something that's true but
| not. The userland tools to dump kernel information (ps,
| ifconfig, etc) get back binary data from the kernel, not human
| readable strings, so it's true, but other programs that might
| need that information would often be expected to call the same
| tools and then parse the human readable forms until the recent
| inclusion of libxo can provide machine readable outputs. libxo
| was added in FreeBSD 11.0, and I'm not sure how far it's been
| implemented; when I was still managing a large fleet of FreeBSD
| machines, we had a bunch of 10.x, so it didn't makes sense to
| update our scripts to use libxo.
| trasz wrote:
| I think this comes from the different development model.
| Passing machine-readable stuff instead of parsing strings is
| convenient, but requires cooperation between parties, usually
| the kernel and the userspace. In FreeBSD it's trivial: I can
| change the kernel, userspace, and documentation all in a single
| commit. In Linux it's much more involved - you never know which
| userspace version is going to interface with whatever you've
| tinkered with; people who put together distributions are
| separate from actual developers of various parts etc.
| 2trill2spill wrote:
| After a year of trying Ubuntu as my at home dev machine, I'm
| going back to FreeBSD. FreeBSD is much more of a pain during
| initial setup, but then it just works. Where as my laptop with
| Ubuntu has the most finicky Wifi and freezes way too often, and I
| didnt have these problems with FreeBSD on the same hardware.
| nucleardog wrote:
| I love FreeBSD. Been using it in a server context for going on
| 20 years now.
|
| Trying to use it on a desktop takes me back to, well, trying to
| use Linux on the desktop 20 years ago.
|
| Recently started shopping different distros because I'm not
| comfortable with the direction Ubuntu is going and rather than
| upgrade my 18.04 when it's EOL'd, I'm looking at just hopping
| to something else for my work laptop.
|
| Took hours to get X working with my laptop's graphics card
| (though most resources I found online said it wouldn't work at
| all, so that was a nice bonus). Not "get accelerated graphics
| working" just "get X to start".
|
| Spent another couple hours screwing around trying to get the
| trackpad working. And not just "get it working to my liking"
| but get it working at all. Turns out it's entirely not
| supported as a lot of modern laptops uses a I2C connection
| rather than USB/PS2/etc, and there's just no driver support for
| that. Never did get that resolved.
|
| A lot of desktop apps that I use are either unavailable or
| require a lot of dicking around to use at all. There is no
| Slack desktop client. You cannot run Docker natively, and
| instead I ended up setting up a Debian guest OS under bhyve,
| which harkens back to how Docker is run on Windows/OSX and all
| the caveats that entails.
|
| You'll pry my FreeBSD servers from my cold dead hands, but it's
| certainly not my go-to for a desktop OS.
| andoriyu wrote:
| I don't know what century you've tried freebsd, but trackpad
| works nearly otb and otb in new xorg. Accelerated graphics
| works fine with intel (YMMV depending on the chip), nvidia
| (if you install driver from nvidia and not opensource one),
| amd.
|
| > There is no Slack desktop client.
|
| There is no Slack desktop client for any platform. It's just
| a web browser. You can make "desktop client" yourself.
|
| > You cannot run Docker natively, and instead I ended up
| setting up a Debian guest OS under bhyve, which harkens back
| to how Docker is run on Windows/OSX and all the caveats that
| entails.
|
| Actually, this setup works MUCH better than Docker on Mac.
| Which is good enough for developer. Looking at 3 laptops
| right now: mac, windows and freebsd. Docker user experience
| goes linux (non-rhel based) > linux (rhel based ) > windows >
| freebsd > mac.
|
| That being said, FreeBSD isn't "Oh, I will try running
| freebsd on this machine", FreeBSD is "I'm buying this
| specific machine because it runs FreeBSD". I use it both on
| my desktop and laptop.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've had some success with running Linux binaries with the
| Linux emulation layer, that could possibly work for the Slack
| client? It tends to fall down with things that are native
| binaries mixed with shell scripts though, like I recently
| tried to run Steam and gave up, because I hit my (very low)
| limit of munging other people's shell scripts; they were
| calling a program and FreeBSD has the program, but the output
| is different, and the arguments are different, and I wasn't
| sure that I'd be able to run the thing I wanted to anyway, so
| I cut my losses early. It turns out, the thing I wanted to do
| doesn't (easily?) work on Linux Steam anyway, so I made a
| good choice. :)
| zepearl wrote:
| Not related to the post itself nor to FreeBSD:
|
| I personally feel sad when people state (indirectly) that Linux
| is NOK because their Ubuntu didn't work well :(
|
| Ubuntu is probably the only Linux distro which I hate => I
| admit that it's a bit a mixed situation (Ubuntu seems to be a
| kind of "lighthouse" for the Linux world), but in the end I
| personally think that it's a pity that it acts as
| representative of the Linux distros.
|
| I'm currently using Gentoo & Mint & Arch (depends on the
| usage), and in the past I liked as well at least Fedora and
| CentOS (not using them since a long time), but I never liked
| Ubuntu.
| zelly wrote:
| The freezing is not an Ubuntu problem it's a GNOME problem.
| 2trill2spill wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up, is there a straight forward work
| around? Or don't use GNOME?
| skibbityboop wrote:
| Any docs to this effect? I'm curious to check them out
| because I've had flawless wifi under GNOME across various
| work laptops since at least 2010. Maybe it's Ubuntu+GNOME
| specific, haven't run Ubuntu, but it certainly doesn't seem
| to be GNOME.
|
| Ah, on re-read of the OP comment, it's "wifi issues and
| freezing", two different problems they had. Have never seen
| either from GNOME though.
| zelly wrote:
| Wifi in Linux distros is not handled by the DE. It's
| usually systemd-networkd and wpa_supplicant.
|
| GNOME is very slow. The UI and animations are implemented
| in JavaScript. KDE Plasma isn't much better though. You
| should try using a tiling window manager.
| forinti wrote:
| I tried NomadBSD in order to use RDP, but I couldn't get an
| earlier version of Remmina or xfreerdp.
|
| It might be my lack of experience with BSD, but I got the
| impression that it is very hard to get a previous version of a
| package with BSD.
|
| edit: corrected the name NomadBSD
| 2trill2spill wrote:
| I've never heard of MonadBSD, but installing a previous
| version of a package is straight forward on FreeBSD. Just
| specify the version when you use pkg or use portdowngrade.
| jabirali wrote:
| Do you mean NomadBSD? Hearing MonadBSD and thinking about
| Haskell, I suddenly got really curious, but couldn't find
| anything on Google...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Hearing MonadBSD and thinking about Haskell, I suddenly
| got really curious, but couldn't find anything on Google...
|
| That _would_ be a fun name for the BSD answer to nixos...
| forinti wrote:
| My bad, it was NomadBSD.
| loudmax wrote:
| If you decide you need Linux due to drivers or whatever, I'd
| recommend giving Arch a try. Arch has a reputation of having a
| learning curve, but it's no worse than the FreeBSD and like the
| BSDs it has excellent documentation. In my experience, Arch has
| been very stable with few surprises, especially if you avoid
| unnecessarily complicated software like GNOME. I can't say the
| same for Ubuntu or Fedora.
|
| If you're able to get your drivers and all working with FreeBSD
| then good for you! FreeBSD is awesome and I'm always happy to
| come across it.
| na85 wrote:
| Do you actually get working wifi, suspend/resume and acceptable
| battery life under BSD?
|
| Last time I tried (open)BSD, none of those things worked
| acceptably. The recommended way to connect to wifi was to
| manually edit wpa_supplicant.conf and battery life was a solid
| hour less than under linux.
|
| I feel like BSD is a great "laptop OS" if you're the kind of
| user that leaves their thinkpad plugged in all the time,
| essentially using it as a small-form factor desktop.
|
| Maybe it's better nowadays.
| 0ld wrote:
| > Last time I tried (open)BSD
|
| Sorry, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD are very different operating
| systems, it's not just "different distros" like in the Linux
| world
|
| Whatever you tried in OpenBSD has most likely no relation to
| FreeBSD
|
| Speaking of the things you mentioned, I personally would
| expect suspend/resume to just work out of the box in the
| latest OpenBSD, but not necessary in FreeBSD (it was never a
| priority for the developers).
|
| You also don't need wpa_supplicant in OpenBSD (unlike
| FreeBSD), ifconfig should be enough in most cases.
|
| For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning,
| as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on
| mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least
| 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and
| comparable to Linux in FreeBSD
| na85 wrote:
| >For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some
| tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but
| generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to
| reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in
| OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD
|
| Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop.
|
| I have a small pcengines apu2 running openbsd but I don't
| enjoy tinkering with it. I find it cumbersome and unwieldy.
| The documentation seems to be mostly "complete" but it's
| definitely geared at someone who already has an in-depth
| understanding of openbsd, and lots of fundamentals are left
| unsaid, which makes it difficult to learn what the "proper"
| way to do something is. I end up with a patchwork of hacks
| and it's very unsatisfying.
|
| It took me quite a long time to figure out how to get
| wireguard working on that box, for instance, whereas on
| linux and mac it "just works" pretty much out of the box.
| trasz wrote:
| Suspend/resume is definitely a priority for everyone who
| uses FreeBSD on their laptop, which is - judging by various
| FreeBSD conferences - increasingly popular.
|
| Editing wpa_supplicant.conf is rather user-unfriendly, but
| it's literally a four line copy/paste followed by adjusting
| two lines of config file; I suppose nobody could be
| bothered.
| toast0 wrote:
| Do you need to edit wpa_supplicant.conf ? I recall just
| doing ifconfig ssid XXXX pass YYYY for wpa?
| trasz wrote:
| I'm not sure; I edit wpa_supplicant.conf, because I want
| the change to be persistant across reboots. Nothing like
| doing kernel development directly on your laptop; keeps
| you focused ;-)
| anthk wrote:
| /etc/hostname.if under OpenBSD
|
| lladr random
|
| join foo wpakey bar
|
| dhcp
|
| inet6 autoconf
| tedunangst wrote:
| I've never edited or even had a wpa_supplicant.conf file
| under openbsd.
| andoriyu wrote:
| This is my life with FreeBSD:
|
| > wifi
|
| WiFI is working, but not `802.11n/ac`, so you're limited to
| `802.11g` which sucks, but I use it with ucb-c dongle, so not
| much of an issue for me. I don't use any GUIs for WiFi
| because I use the same 3 networks.
|
| > suspend/resume Yeah, just like linux it doesn't support
| fancy states that windows does, but suspend to ram works.
| Works perfect with laptop lid, but you do need to change a
| sysctl thingy.
|
| > Battery life
|
| I can go entire work day on a single charge for my x1 carbon
| (gen 6). I know that because I forgot to plug it in multiple
| times.
|
| I'm sure OpenBSD has it worse tho.
| 2trill2spill wrote:
| Suspend and Resume was the hard one, battery life is solid,
| although I haven't done a direct comparison with Linux. Wifi
| was easy but not as easy as Linux to setup. On Linux wifi
| worked out of the box but I would lose wifi a couple times a
| day. While on FreeBSD I had to edit a few config files to get
| wifi working but I dont lose wifi every day. To get the
| Suspend and Resume to work I had to use the drm-next-kmod
| port.
| anthk wrote:
| OpenBSD handles WPA2 thru ifconfig just fine.
|
| ifconfig $IFACE join $ESSID wpakey $PASS
| laumars wrote:
| BSD isn't like Linux where it's the roughly the same kernel
| and user land but a different distribution of packages.
| OpenBSD and FreeBSD are entirely different operating systems
| albeit with a shared lineage.
| stiray wrote:
| I will just use this oportunity to thank FreeBSD team (from
| kernel to ports maintainers) for their work on project and give
| my thanks in advance for anyone who joins it.
|
| It was magnificent server for last 10+ years and I have never
| trembled before doing a major upgrade.
|
| If you dont hear this enough: please keep on working your great
| work, maybe you are not the most used OS, but you have all my
| love <3 <3 <3
| waynesonfire wrote:
| it's comments like this that make we want to take the dive.
| thanks for not only supporting the freebsd team but encouraging
| potential future users.
|
| though with that said, i will say that k8s is taking over the
| world and bsds are going to be left in the dust for my use-
| case, non-(appliance, embedded, IoT) applications.
| toast0 wrote:
| We've been hearing FreeBSD is dying since before it's been
| the year of linux on the desktop.
|
| Is FreeBSD ever going to be hip and trendy? Probably not,
| it's not 1994 anymore. But, I don't need a hip amd trendy OS,
| I need an OS that provides a stable base for me to work upon
| and supports enough hardware that I can chose decent parts.
| As a bonus, I've found it easy enough to muck with the
| internals when it has benefited me or my employer.
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's hard to believe it's been so long since "It is now
| official. Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying" was
| originally written.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I'm not questioning whether FreeBSD is hip or trendy. Not
| sure why you're bringing that up.
|
| I'd pick up FreeBSD in a heartbeat if I knew that the
| investment in learning the platform would help me be
| productive in production. But like you said, it's not 1994
| anymore and modern deployment and maintenance of an
| application stack is docker and k8s. A trend where the OS
| is abstracted away as much as possible. So why invest in
| FreeBSD? Okay, so maybe it's a nice OS for appliances;
| though so is Linux and I can continue to leverage my
| knowledge.
|
| At home I run an appliance and thought I'd deploy FreeBSD
| on it to run my storage server. I was really excited to
| deploy ZFS, the BSD killer app. The justification for this
| getting more difficult to make since ZFS on Linux is
| production ready.
|
| I want to use FreeBSD. I don't care that it's not
| mainstream. The unfortunate issue is that it's falling
| behind in my use-case, by a lot and that's a bummer.
| stiray wrote:
| I have submitted multiple bugs for ZoL, from prohibiting
| boot of zfs as root (for the sake of boot beeing faster
| (?) they are not doing zpool import -a(f) but rather rely
| on cache file which is... crazy). Also the .zfs/snapshot
| still doesnt work. Both are vital issues and still not
| beeing fixed.
|
| Boot on Linux laptop now looks like:
|
| - power on
|
| - wait for recovery shell
|
| - `zpool import -a`
|
| - `exit`
|
| In all my years I have never observed this on FreeBSD
| and... as I have said, I expect from FreeBSD to be rock
| solid and it never dissapointed.
|
| ZoL? I wouldn't be running it on my linux servers for a
| while. The basic mistakes that they are doing are not
| something that apriciate from file system that is meant
| to be as reliable as possible.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| > Also the .zfs/snapshot still doesnt work.
|
| What do you mean by this? I'm using ZoL and snapshots
| seem to be working fine.
| stiray wrote:
| zfs has a feature where you can `cd` to hidden .zfs
| folder (you wont see it by `ls`, imagine it like /procfs
| but hidden) on root of zfs filesystem (if you have
| tank/whatever mounted to /whatever this would be
| /whatever/.zfs) with some interesting content: within
| .zfs/snapshot you will get a list of snapshots for that
| filesystem with materialized state (!!!) of fs when the
| snapshot was taken. Imagine (instead of rollback the
| snapshot), just copying the original file(s) from there,
| with content from the time when snapshot was created.
|
| This is imho, the killer feature of zfs, maybe matching
| only by VMS or DragonflyBSD hammer filesystems. They
| were/are both better at it (`undo`!) but zfs comes
| closely.
|
| And it is broken for months now.
| znpy wrote:
| > And it is broken for months now.
|
| This guy speaks without knowing.
|
| I just tried going in my .zfs/snapshot on my CentOS 7
| system running kernel 3.10 and ZoL 0.8.3 and it's
| working. I can list snapshots and cat file off a
| snapshot.
| [deleted]
| stiray wrote:
| After 10+ years of using zfs, I just "might" know
| something... ;) While your 1 year old versions just
| "might" not prove anything.
| iotku wrote:
| I haven't noticed that issue on Proxmox (been using zfs
| with it for approx. 6 months). Currently on zfs 0.8.4
| (and I've done that previously).
|
| Are you using a distro supplied zfs (potentially old) or
| rolling something more bleeding edge?
| stiray wrote:
| Just for any case, I would really love to solve this, I
| accept the fact that it is connected with upgrading the
| modules but this just is no reason for breaking backward
| compatibility.
|
| root> zpool --version
|
| zfs-0.8.4-1
|
| zfs-kmod-0.8.4-1
|
| root> ll /.zfs/snapshot
|
| total 0
|
| drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 2 jun 15 08:48 ./
|
| drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 jun 10 07:53 ../
|
| root> cat /etc/yum.repos.d/zfs.repo
|
| [zfs]
|
| name=ZFS on Linux for Fedora $releasever
|
| baseurl=http://download.zfsonlinux.org/fedora/$releasever
| /$basearch/
|
| enabled=1
|
| metadata_expire=7d
|
| gpgcheck=1
|
| gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
|
| [zfs-source]
|
| name=ZFS on Linux for Fedora $releasever - Source baseurl
| =http://download.zfsonlinux.org/fedora/$releasever/SRPMS/
|
| enabled=0
|
| gpgcheck=1
|
| gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
|
| But nevermind, this is something that was working since
| zfs as root was brought into FreeBSD (and we are talking
| about FreeBSD not ZoL), never had issues about it.
| [deleted]
| tomxor wrote:
| > .zfs/snapshot still doesnt work
|
| I've been using this as a server backup solution for over
| a year, I assure you zol snapshots work, including access
| via the .zfs directory.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > they are not doing zpool import -a(f)
|
| That's an initramfs bug; the initramfs scripts are not
| actually supplied by the ZoL project. You should file a
| bug report against your distro's initramfs package.
| trasz wrote:
| That's part of the problem. From the user point of view
| it doesn't matter if the bug is due to initramfs, or the
| kernel, or ZoL, or whatever else. What matters is it
| doesn't work. With FreeBSD development model it's easier
| to get it to work, since it doesn't need to go through so
| many separate groups of people.
| stiray wrote:
| I am on fedora with added zol repository and fedora 30
| doesn't supply any zfs modules or initramfs scripts. I
| had to do my scripts to verify that the modules are
| included and don't break my boot process. And it worked
| like a charm... for a while.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I'm not questioning whether FreeBSD is hip or trendy.
|
| > A trend where the OS is abstracted away as much as
| possible.
|
| It seems like you're asking about following trends.
| trasz wrote:
| Thing is, FreeBSD is quite good at outliving various
| fads. Or adapting them, if they turn out to live long
| enough.
| cpach wrote:
| FWIW, I think you have a good point here. I really like
| that FreeBSD has a focus on quality, that the base is one
| whole coherent system and that the documentation is very
| good. But as you point out, it does seem like they have a
| hard time keeping up with the world outside.
| stiray wrote:
| I see it as a huge issue that the whole world has point
| on marketing which is horrible wrong. The last two
| projects I was working on, both are doing mission
| critical task (for obvious reasons I can't name them or
| what they are doing):
|
| one is really piece of s __*, full of beginner mistakes,
| lasigna /spaghetti/ravioli mixed in horrible way, done in
| java, wasting resources like olympic games. But with
| polished webui, full of colors, nice icons etc.
|
| Second one, c++, with kernel module for linux, driver for
| windows, really nice and clean code (I was surprised).
| Not really nice webui but it did do the job well. Passed
| the benchmarks with flying colors, almost once faster
| than the first project.
|
| At the end: the first one was a bestseller. There is no
| technical reason to be better selling, they both were
| doing the same task, from technical perspective, the
| second one was far better. Benchmarks, way of doing its
| work. Just far better. But the worse product with better
| "colors" won.
|
| Marketing, marketing, marketing. The pestilence of our
| time and probably the Dark Ages of technology. I doubt I
| will see the Renaissance.
| nix23 wrote:
| Yes that works for 'end user software' but in the long
| run NOT for Operating-
| systems/Database/Filesystem/Network/Hardware...they need
| to be rock-solid, everything on top is your problem.
| stiray wrote:
| Both of those are doing quite complex tasks for sysadmins
| (probably it should be guessable what they are doing)
| that NEED to work. There is no excuse for them to fail.
| They need to be rock solid, "Operating-
| systems/Database/Filesystem/Network/Hardware" can fail,
| those should not (words like "criminal liability" comes
| to mind).
| truncate wrote:
| I agree with wanting an stable OS and FreeBSD definitely
| is, and having read some Linux and FreeBSD code few years
| ago, FreeBSD was lot cleaner.
|
| Having said that, we use OS to run things. I feel FreeBSD
| is lacking there, and despite being incredible, that
| incredibility seems less attractive. Its hard enough to
| write things that work correctly in different Linux
| environments, I'm not sure how much more work would it be
| in FreeBSD land (hardware drivers, software outside Portage
| repo, and support) -- specially considering a lot of
| software is written with Linux (or Win/macOS depending what
| we are talking about) support first in mind, and anything
| else is more or less a "checklist" thing.
|
| So from a user perspective, it comes down to -- do I want
| to spend time tackling software/configuration issues that
| I'm very likely have if I run this on FreeBSD vs. should I
| run in a slightly less cleaner OS that just works 99.99% of
| the time.
| stiray wrote:
| You might check this:
| https://www.bsdstore.ru/en/articles/cbsd_k8s_part1.html
|
| I have nothing against linux.
|
| But for mission critical tasks I will choose FreeBSD. I have
| seen too many times linux distributions (Linus is sane -
| distributions decisions on the other hand are making me
| scratch my head just too often) pulling "Crazy Ivan" and I
| really dislike it.
|
| For FreeBSD I know I wont encounter any nasty suprises and I
| consider it paramount. And once you encounter some jewels
| like setfib (https://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/1/SETFIB/)
| you just fall in love <3
| [deleted]
| blueblob wrote:
| Hasn't FreeBSD 12 been out for a while now? This is just a LTS
| release?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Correct; FreeBSD 11 has continued having minor versions well
| after 12 dropped.
| loeg wrote:
| It seems like we're close to due for 13.0, honestly, although I
| don't pay much attention to our release schedule.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Looks like a nice release. I'd be curious to hear from people who
| are using FreeBSD on the server, their stories of how it works
| out especially vis-a-vis working with newer developers who may
| lack depth in their Unix background.
| 12bits wrote:
| FreeBSD is a delight to run, I use an old AMD build to host Plex,
| PiHole and some other services in bhyve VMs. Keep a copy of
| Absolute FreeBSD around for physical reference just like the 90s.
| aduitsis wrote:
| I think the idea of having a long term support release for 5
| years was great [1].
|
| FreeBSD 11 has been around for some years now, getting an update
| to which 11.3-RELEASE can be upgraded with minimal hassle is a
| major plus for FreeBSD.
|
| ([1] edit: referring to
| https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe...)
| cperciva wrote:
| We've effectively had 5 year support cycles since FreeBSD 6 --
| we just never advertised it as such.
| aduitsis wrote:
| Quite right, thanks for correcting me. But I've been using
| FreeBSD since ~2001 and hadn't quite noticed, so the
| announcement did really help out :)
| sedatk wrote:
| If anyone else is wondering like me who Bruce Evans is:
|
| > Bruce Evans <bde@FreeBSD.org> > Bruce is the Style Police-
| Meister. When you do a commit that could have been done better,
| Bruce will be there to tell you. Be thankful that someone is.
| Bruce is also very knowledgeable on the various standards
| applicable to FreeBSD.
|
| https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committ...
| fipar wrote:
| Seems he had an approach to reviews worthy of emulation:
|
| "Code reviews from Bruce came in three flavours, "mild",
| "brucified" and "brucifiction", but they were never personal:
| It was always only about the code, the mistakes, the sloppy
| thinking, the missing historical context, the ambiguous
| standards - and the style(9) transgressions."
|
| Source:
| https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contrib...
| loeg wrote:
| I wouldn't suggest emulating it. His approach to review was
| to exhaustively detail every perceived bug in any particular
| file when someone touched that file. Preexisting issues
| unrelated to the change. Style warts unrelated to the change.
| Subjective opinions unrelated to the change. In his emails,
| every one of these was a "bug."
|
| There is some value in suggesting adjacent areas for future
| work, if authors have time and interest, but BDE went well
| beyond that.
|
| I think Bruce should be admired for his demonstrated desire
| to improve FreeBSD, and for his great attention to detail.
| But I would not like anyone to emulate his code review
| emails.
| jasone wrote:
| Bruce's reviews were singularly masterful. He consistently
| condensed valuable layers of meaning into terse prose in a
| way that I have never experienced otherwise. As I would
| uncover these layers during repeated readings, I would
| develop the unshakable feeling that even as brilliant as
| Bruce was, he must have put great care and effort into his
| writing.
| huslage wrote:
| Do you know of a good example?
| markjdb wrote:
| Also mentioned here: https://lwn.net/Articles/808733/
| [deleted]
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| He is the author of bcc, as86 and ld86.
|
| Write K&R C and compile to 16-bit for 8086 or 3086.
|
| https://github.com/lkundrak/dev86
|
| In the early days of Linux, bcc was used in building the
| kernel.
|
| bcc used to be required for ELKS.
|
| bcc is still used today, e.g., in compiling VirtualBox.
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200427081559/https://www.virtua...
| vmsp wrote:
| It's a shame the popular VPS providers, like Linode and
| DigitalOcean, don't support easy installations of FreeBSD (and
| other BSDs). Does anyone know of trustworthy hosting solutions
| that make things easy?
| trasz wrote:
| How about AWS? Creating FreeBSD instance is trivially easy.
| vogon_laureate wrote:
| I've got several FreeBSD droplets on Digital Ocean.
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-...
| octotoad wrote:
| DO has supported FreeBSD for years now.
| dijit wrote:
| Used FreeBSD on Vultr for nearly 5 years at this point.
|
| It works, they used to have issues with DHCP services, but that
| would have been linux too. It seems to be resolved now.
| zepearl wrote:
| I changed the OS of my NAS a few weeks ago (from "Gentoo Linux"
| to "Linux Mint") to FreeBSD (mainly to have a "better ZFS" - I
| read only later that apparently both Linux & BSD ZFS are being
| merged?) and the installation and configuration has been very
| smooth (currently up and stable with e.g. Xfce, gkrellm => just a
| simple NAS).
|
| I miss only the "nmon" utility but apparently it's possible to
| "port" almost any Linux program automatically to FreeBSD Linux
| apps => I might have a look at that.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Sad that it does not ship with Gnome 3.36, one of the best
| releases of Gnome ever.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| well it would be strange if software got worse with new
| releases.
| axaxs wrote:
| Someone wasn't around for the Gnome 2 to 3 switch, it sounds
| like.
| loeg wrote:
| Gnome 3 set back "the year of Linux on the desktop" by ten
| years. It's still less usable in 2020 than Gnome 2 was in
| 2005.
| dijit wrote:
| Frankly, given how GNOME has been developing itself I think it
| would be a detriment to FreeBSD to bend itself to support it.
|
| You might disagree, but not every software deserves support,
| they're not playing nice to non-systemd enabled and non-linux
| operating systems.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Actually Gentoo lets you use Gnome 3 without needing to
| install SystemTurd^H^H^H^HD.
| gen3 wrote:
| OpenBSD is the BSD that supports Gnome
|
| FreeBSD is the BSD that supports KDE
|
| or thats how it's been explained to me. So if you want Gnome
| you should try OpenBSD.
| nix23 wrote:
| >or thats how it's been explained to me
|
| FreeBSD supports KDE, Gnome, i3 and and and.... OpenBSD or
| FreeBSD don't have a preferred DE, next time check for your
| self and don't believe in 'explanation's' from some douche-
| bag.
| gen3 wrote:
| I tried to install KDE onto OpenBSD and was greeted with a
| wildly out of date install; while they might not have a DE
| specifically sponsored on their website, it's self evident
| which DE is preferred by the people that maintain and use
| the OS.
|
| Gnome is updated to 3.36.3.1, while KDE is on the stale
| 3.5.10 in OpenBSD
|
| In FreeBSD Gnome is updated to 3.28.2, while KDE is on
| 5.19.0.20.04.2
|
| The Gnome on FreeBSD is 2 years stale, and KDE on OpenBSD
| is about 12.
| anthk wrote:
| If any, the best DE for OpenBSD is XFCE, and the most
| liked WM is CWM and FVWM by inertia.
| nix23 wrote:
| Yes and? Both are very well maintained, but to be honest,
| use something more *nix style on all BDS's like xfce4
| lxde i3
| loeg wrote:
| Painting with a very broad brush there.
| [deleted]
| centimeter wrote:
| During quarantine I decided to set up some networking equipment
| with FreeBSD whereas historically I'd have used Linux. Wow! What
| an improvement! Everything is so much cleaner, easier, faster to
| set up. I don't have to screw around as much to make it boot and
| install on headless hardware. I can boot off a ZFS root volume.
| Networking is simple and clear to configure. Documentation is
| great. I don't think I'll use Linux again in the future when
| setting up a server, if I can avoid it.
| efxhoy wrote:
| What kind of networking equipment? I'm thinking of ditching
| pfsense and going bare freebsd or pfsense for my home router
| box and a few more anecdotes of similar projects would be nice
| to hear.
| zomg wrote:
| i don't use freebsd regularly these days but i happily donate to
| the foundation each year. keep up the great work!
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