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PC-BSD Evolves into TrueOS
- advisedwang 10y agoIf anyone else was concerned that they are claiming this without actually being affiliated with PC-BSD, check out http://pcbsd.org/development/moretrueos/ http://pcbsd.org/development/moretrueos/.
- jlgaddis 10y agoYeah, there's a post on the PC-BSD blog [0] also, but it just links to the submitted URL. [0]: https://blog.pcbsd.org/2016/09/pc-bsd-evolves-into-trueos/ https://blog.pcbsd.org/2016/09/pc-bsd-evolves-into-trueos/
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoHire a designer to make Lumina less ugly. Sorry I know that sounds harsh, but it looks very 2005. Make this install on modern laptops. I'm tired of being recommended five year-old Thinkpads. Fix those and I would consider overwriting my Ubuntu installation
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago> it looks very 2005 I have literally no knowledge or opinion about Limina, but kinda with desktop UIs would attempt to be timeless rather than trying to follow the latest style fads.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago> timeless What does that even mean in this context.
- sedachv 10y agoIMO the Xerox Star UI and NeXTSTEP/GNUstep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXHFfc3btCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXHFfc3btCI
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoYou can run a variant of GNUStep today, yet no one does.
- sedachv 10y agoBefore switching to Lubuntu a few years ago, Window Maker was all I ran. LXDE is unobtrusive enough that I don't mind it.
- IncRnd 10y agoAs a registered NS developer, I had a NS Turbo Color. What about NS do you find superior to OS X?
- protomyth 10y agoNot OP but also a NS developer (custom built Pentium), and I must say like the menu system, digital librarian, workspace manager, and eof much better. A separate interface builder was much better, but that's more a developer tool thing. [edit: left side scroll bar also]
- IncRnd 10y agoFor sure I liked the separate IB/PB. Good call! It was faster to develop in NS than in anything else for me. At the time, I loved the digital librarian and menu system. After leaving and going back a few years later the WS seemed a little too dated for me. I use the context menus in BlackBox on my linux box. OS X seems to be my comfort zone now, which tends to color memory. Though I also found the IB/PB split much faster to work with. That's for sure. You've got me fired up. I'm installing 4.2 ent in virtualbox now, which will be the newest version I've used :) Thank you!
- ashitlerferad 10y agoMotif and CDE!
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago> What does that even mean in this context. IMHO: come up with a set of initial will-thought-out UI design choices that follow an internal logic, then evolve thoughtfully (and conservatively) in a way that respects those choices. That has the added bonus of not constantly invalidating people's investment in learning the desktop environment. I would expect a environment that follows that would "look" similar in 2005 and 2015, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.
- walrus01 10y ago> it looks very 2005 I want things to look very 2005 (or even 2001), which is why I use XFCE4 as a desktop environment on xorg / debian, and not a modern "fancy" thing like the latest gnome or KDE.
- gnarbarian 10y agoCheers! I liked gnome 2, I can't stand unity, gnome 3 or the latest KDE. LXDE was too minimalist. XFCE was just right.
- fnj 10y agoI liked GNOME2 also, and I found MATE to be the perfect recreation of it.
- wruza 10y agoXfce was just perfect. Sadly, xfce 4.6 unintroduced manual context-menu in favor of autogenerated one (from cryptic sources). It also introduced many good, but menu changes broke my workflow. I was so disappointed that I left entire Linux/FreeBSD after years of using it. Now I have mac, and it is just great for years.
- rtpg 10y agoI guess the question is whether this thing that follows 2005's style is timeless... I suppose from the reaction of people that it doesn't? Though the only interface that I can qualify as timeless is maybe the PS2/3/4 interface XMB (10+ years and still basically the same).
- stock_toaster 10y agoI think as far as desktops environments go, I imagine the first goal is to make it functional, and only then make it pretty. Hopefully now after recently hitting 1.0, someone spends some time making it a bit nicer looking (nicer being relative of course -- I tend to like simpler desktop designs).
- cm3 10y ago> Hire a designer to make Lumina less ugly. Sorry I know that sounds harsh, but it looks very 2005. I'm not trying to sound harsh and just have to respectfully disagree. I don't use Lumina because I don't use DEs, but the looks of it are just right. It's not a regression like most "styles" these days where it's impossible to know half the time what's an interactive widget, or why suddenly the designers think large empty white spaces and large widgets and titlebars are a feature. If I'm at a desktop, I need a desktop environment, not a tablet experience.
- Gracana 10y agoI don't want it to look like modern stuff, but it could use some tweaking and usability consistency improvements here and there. It's the whole 'papercuts' thing, nothing terrible, just a bunch of small issues (font sizes, click target issues, etc.)
- drewg123 10y agoThe linux drm compat shims should go a long way toward modern laptop support.
- loeg 10y ago> Make this install on modern laptops. I'm tired of being recommended five year-old Thinkpads. This branch does carry the (work-in-progress) i915 driver updates that bring support for modern Intel graphics (Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake).
- cies 10y agoReading behind the link made me learn about Lumina desktop. I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? They seem to be pretty close in goals...
- kitsunesoba 10y agoIf I'm not mistaken one of the big goals of Lumina is to produce a desktop with its roots in BSD, since most (if not all) DEs currently in development got their start on Linux. I imagine the idea is to develop Lumina as part of a single-piece OS, BSD-style, as opposed to the Linux model where everything is developed independently and then glued together to form a distro.
- int_19h 10y agoIt still feels like it'd make more sense to at least fork something existing (or better yet, find a desktop that doesn't mind BSD-specific conditional code inclusion). I mean, the one-base-system mentality doesn't preclude the BSDs from using gcc and/or Clang - even though they weren't developed for BSD specifically, they are clearly the best available choice. I wonder why not Xfce, specifically. Of all the DEs out there, it seems most complete in a sense of being an actual DE, with the usual configurability and stock apps that one would expect (a great file manager, for one). But at the same time, it's not the mammoth that Gnome and KDE are, gets out of the way easily enough, and doesn't demand that applications are aware of its existence beyond following XDG specs.
- digi_owl 10y agoNot sure, but i think XFCE relies on a fair bit of Gnome plumbing, and that pluming in turn is becoming increasingly systemd-centric. Not even sure how well GTK3 plays with BSDs, and XFCE will move to using GTK3 "soon".
- int_19h 10y agoI don't think that's the case, at least not anymore. I'm running Xfce on two systems, one of which is Gentoo (in the default OpenRC configuration, no systemd), and the other is FreeBSD. Neither has Gnome installed - just recently I had to actually install gconf to do something, as a matter of fact, and was surprised that it wasn't there - but they handle Xfce just fine. I believe it used Gnome settings daemon at some point, but it has its own these days.
- godzillabrennus 10y agoThe same excellent team at http://ixsystems.com http://ixsystems.com is behind this. I've not only had a breeze integrating TrueNAS gear into a VMWare environment but I have personally had a FreeNAS mini for years at home and recommend it for many SOHO users who want local storage.
- mikestew 10y agoI'd love to learn more! <Clicks "Learn More" button on main page> "Localhost not found". No, not on an iPhone it won't be. EDIT: ah, good, looks like it got fixed.
- Fuzzwah 10y agoMaybe I'm getting old and my eyes are on the way out, but the readability of this web page can be greatly improved by using the following custom css: article { font-size: 1.4em; line-height: 1.4em; }
- voltagex_ 10y agoIt's not just you: http://imgur.com/a/CfFaS http://imgur.com/a/CfFaS. Fails WCAG AA accessibility for contrast. (even at your increased font size, I think)
- fnj 10y agoGod save us from the insane low-contrast mafia. No, that's not intended as sarcasm.
- type0 10y agoI really despise this trend. People who make such webpages completely disregard the existence of users with bad eyesight and those who still use low contrast TFT displays mostly because they can't afford to buy a fancy new IPS panel or just don't know any better. We all should complain about it, otherwise soon it might get to the point where you only will be able to read some webpages on the newest 40 inch OLED displays.
- walrus01 10y agoHaving not followed the development of PC-BSD for the last 5-6 years, can somebody please explain to my why they felt the need to fork FreeBSD? FreeBSD by itself already has a really tiny market share, and to a certain extent many things are much more easily deployed with better package management on a mainstream Linux platform (Debian stable or CentOS 7). OpenBSD has its own unique niche, but I don't see what great need PCBSD fills that FreeBSD wasn't already doing.
- kev009 10y agoEffectively, TrueOS _is_ FreeBSD, plus the work in progress graphics stack that will eventually land in .org base or ports, plus an installer, plus some opinionated settings (kernel build, /etc, /boot/loader.conf), plus some original software (control panels, lumina DE). This is a valid way to contribute to *NIX -- downstreams that push and pull code to evolve the entire ecosystem.
- boomboomsubban 10y agoIt's less a fork and more of an add-on, PC-BSD (now True-OS) is FreeBSD with a fancy installer and a preconfigured desktop. TrueOS server is FreeBSD with their admin tools installed. Kris Moore, the creator, is a member of the FreeBSD core team, the projects are close.
- ehPReth 10y agoIs there a way to download the ISO hashes over valid HTTPS? I'm not sure how to verify the ISOs I've downloaded
- niftich 10y agoFWIW, this reasonable request can be accommodated without necessarily setting up HTTPS on the download site. The devs could post the checksums on a distinct, 2FA-protected HTTPS site like Twitter, for example [1] [1] https://twitter.com/coreinsiderprog/status/692138547239895041 https://twitter.com/coreinsiderprog/status/69213854723989504...
- mixedCase 10y agoWouldn't it be easier to just setup an automated Let's Encrypt set up and avoid depending on a third party website? In any case, they could also just include the keys somewhere in trueos.org, which does support HTTPS.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoSo, is this a fork, or...? I know they're affiliated with PC-BSD, and I know that PC-BSD is a separate system, but beyond that, I'm lost. It looks like it may be an RHEL/Fedora thing, with PC-BSD being stable and rock-solid, and TrueOS being bleeding edge. But I could be wrong. Also, while Lumina looks kind of nice, if I installed this, my next step would be installing either XFCE (the best full-on DE out there) or i3 (the best tiled WM out there).
- mwfunk 10y agoIt looks like it's the successor to PC-BSD. It's from iXsystems, the developers of PC-BSD.
- akerro 10y agoPC-BSD is no longer a separate system. PC-BSD was merged into TrueOS, probably to save some maintenance powers and save on trademarks. PC-bsd blogs tells you to go to TrueOS page: https://web.pcbsd.org/development/moretrueos/ https://web.pcbsd.org/development/moretrueos/ > PC-BSD being stable and rock-solid, and TrueOS being bleeding edge. But I could be wrong. TrueOS was basically the same as PC-BSD but for servers.
- finid 10y agoPC-BSD to TrueOS is like BackTrack Linux to Kali Linux. An evolved product from the same developers.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jyasmilsyade 10y agoPC-BSD
- jyasmilsyade 10y agoPC-BSD
- abcgggg 10y ago
- matt_fleming 10y agoCan someone explain how this is different from OpenBSD?
- okket 10y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12366140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12366140 (6 days ago, 30 comments)
- corv 10y agoGreat decision unifying PC-BSD under TrueOS. The real innovation lies in SysAdm: A new way to manage your Server, Desktop or Cloud-based system. By exposing an API via encrypted REST or WebSockets, it is now possible to remotely control all aspects of your machine, including management of software, updates, boot environments, users, backups, and more. Truly a flagship FreeBSD "distro".
- eeZi 10y ago> TrueOS® soars above the competition with advanced security features, such as PersonaCrypt and GELI disk level encryption, to keep your important data safe and secure. Has it got kernel/userland ASLR yet?
- urza 10y agoDoes their ZFS implementation supports dataset level encryption?
- AndyMcConachie 10y agoBoth ZFS and ASLR are more interesting for servers than for desktops. I would like ASLR on my desktop OS, but it's a rather high hanging mediocre fruit. WRT to ZFS, I couldn't care less if it existed on my desktop OS.
- binarycrusader 10y ago> Both ZFS and ASLR are more interesting for servers than for desktops. On what basis are these claims made? I'm tired of hearing this excuse trotted out every time someone posts about ZFS or ASLR. ZFS (or a filesystem possessing many of the same characteristics) is absolutely still valuable even on desktops. With consumer storage devices reaching ever loftier maximum capacities, data integrity becomes even more important as the loss of that data can have a profound impact on a person's life. Given the questionable quality of hardware in many consumer devices, having a filesystem that detects corruption as it is happening, and works to ensure that it is corrected automatically when possible, seems like an obvious win. While a typical consumer is unlikely to have a ZFS raid device even if they had ZFS, they would still benefit from all of the other protections it offers. It should be fairly telling that Apple is adopting many of the same technologies ZFS offers in their own consumer filesystem (except, regrettably, checksumming) because they too understand that it does matter. As for ASLR, that's important too because it's yet another mitigation tool to make it less likely that an individual system is compromised. Haven't the past few years of various malware/ransomware announcements been enough? We should consider every practical tool available at our disposal to mitigate such attacks as valuable.
- lifeisstillgood 10y agoHow does this handle turning off Intel ME or the AMD equivalent ? Having a always on PC on my motherboard not under my control does bother me ...
- fnj 10y agoThat has nothing to do with the OS. The Intel ME is nothing more than some tech which can be leveraged/controlled by the BIOS/EFI - or not. There should always be a setting to just turn it off. The hysteria over Intel ME amuses me. The clamor should be for a simple on/off switch to always be present in the BIOS/EFI.
- lifeisstillgood 10y agoBut A) can you trust the switch really turns it off B) there is not yet a switch ... So what do we do now while we wait?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]