10 ms·

Ask HN: Anyone moved to PC-BSD (TrueOS) from macOS?

79 points by deepaksurti 10y ago

What has been your experience and would you recommend it?

OhSoHumble 10y ago
From macOS? Isn't Linux a better comparison? Anyway, I ran it for a few days about two weeks ago. Without Chrome support, I can't have Netflix. Without Netflix, I can't watch cheesy fantasy TV shows while coding. Oh, and there was a bug in libressl that prevented me from using `go get`. Other than that, I thought TrueOS was pretty nifty. I went back to Arch but I might try BSD as a desktop OS again in a few years.
grahamjperrin 10y ago
Yes, I moved. Shortly after I began (AppleSeed) seed testing of pre-release Yosemite I decided that – after decades of happy use of Macs – the mash-up was not for me. An ill-fitting one-size-fits-all approach to the GUI, which was rushed through. July 2014: I planned a three-year transition away from Mac OS X. To the best of my knowledge, Apple's changes to human interface guidelines were not seeded. Instead, the changes were privately preset, published only after Yosemite was released. October 2014: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/524642026261057537 https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/524642026261057537 Two years later, my experience with PC-BSD, expressed when TrueOS Desktop was announced: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/797724086898196481 https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/797724086898196481 "smart direction". Should I recommend TrueOS Desktop to a user of Mac OS X? Not at this time; https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/created_by/grahamperrin https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/created_by/grah... the most troublesome (time-wasting) of which is https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/287 https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/287 – tl;dr the Mac metaphor would be an inappropriate switch off of Wi-Fi when simply switching network location. And https://discourse.trueos.org/t/-/378/18 https://discourse.trueos.org/t/-/378/18 too often I can not get network service without a restart of the operating system. Generally, the majority of my discussion about the software is at https://discourse.trueos.org/users/grahamperrin/activity https://discourse.trueos.org/users/grahamperrin/activity … you might need to scroll down a page to reach discussion of the software (to skip stuff arising from changes to community guidelines that were made without consultation with the community). https://github.com/trueos/trueos-docs/issues/33 https://github.com/trueos/trueos-docs/issues/33 time for change :-)
Cyclenerd 10y ago
If you have not done it yet, install it in a VM. Make your own picture. I did not like it. In my opinion, Ubuntu or Fedora is better for the desktop.
geff82 10y ago
It is very picky on the hardware it supports out of the box. That means you'll get problems with Hardware that came out after Haswell. It works ok on my Lenovo X240 (that I bought brand new in Juli 2016 in a maxed out version at a very good price). But after a short trial I decided to go with Xubuntu as the hardware support is much better and most developer relevant software today runs on Linux without hassles. I love the FreeBSD on my company's server, totally hassle free. But on the desktop, it is for fans, not the general public. But anyway: try it out, get a feel for it.
- 0mp 10y ago
  It's worth mentioning that TrueOS is a rolling-release based on the FreeBSD bleeding-edge CURRENT branch. As a result the hardware support is still better than in the supported FreeBSD releases (10.3 and 11.0).
- floatboth 10y ago
  IIRC TrueOS actually integrates https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics so integrated graphics after Haswell should work.
- PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
  Xubuntu user here. Very nice, lightweight distro. Highly recommended for any developers
  - luckydude 10y ago
    Me too. Light enough that I don't notice it but mainstream enough that stuff just works.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  > FreeBSD ... on the desktop However: the questioner wanted to know about TrueOS, not about FreeBSD. The desktop with TrueOS is significantly different to the desktop with FreeBSD. There is extra desktop stuff that comes in the box with TrueOS. And the desktop stuff is done somewhat differently. With some FreeBSD-derived operating systems such as GhostBSD one gets "flavours" of the operating system according to the desktop environment, like "GhostBSD MATE" and "GhostBSD XFCE". With TrueOS, there aren't such multiple "flavours". Rather, PCDM allows one to select from multiple desktop environments at login time, and the desktop environments are available side by side in a single "flavour" of the "desktop" operating system. TrueOS is in fact "flavoured" as "desktop" versus "server", rather than as "MATE" versus "XFCE" versus whatever. There are a number of "TrueOS-own" tools that are added to those desktops, as well, including (for examples) the Life Preserver, the PC-BSD Control Panel, AppCafe, and the System Updater.
nec4b 10y ago
I went from windows machine to PC-BSD 10.3 about 2 years ago and then to TrueOS. At first I really liked it, specifically ZFS integration. I consider ZFS a hidden gem of data storage. After the second update troubles began. Every time there was a new system update, some software was quietly removed from the system. If I reinstalled it by hand again, usually something broke. I guess it wasn't compatible with the newer version od the OS. After a couple of updates most of the software I liked and considered important didn't work. Also in general most of the software in the appcafe is a version or two behind the current version available for other systems. On PC-BSD I used KDE which I found very useful. On TrueOS i'm using Lumina which simply isn't there yet. I'm currently looking for way to migrate back to Windows while keeping ZFS around.
- baldfat 10y ago
  Can I ask why you wouldn't see Linux as your next home? (Trying just to have a conversation and nothing negative on anything in your remarks) 1. I also LOVE KDE (But mostly use a tile window manager i3) 2. I tried liking BTRFS (Similar to ZFS for my non-server systems and just went back to my old file system) I feel my 2 copies and one off site is a better system for desktop. I use OpenSUSE and never had a problem I couldn't figure out. 3. You can use ZFS on Linux
  - nec4b 10y ago
    I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a small NAS/FreeBSD server for storage and just install Windows on the main PC as it has always worked pretty well for me and other household memebers are more used to it as well. I will also give OpenSuse a try in a VM to see how it works.
    - onli 10y ago
      Just a +1 for trying out Linux here. Sounds like you'd really like it. ZFS is native by now, https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable, though I'm not 100% sure about the current state of the FS in the linux world. Last I read was Ubuntu integrating it by default.
TurboHaskal 10y ago
It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit
- nicky0 10y ago
  The wonderful world of Unix.
  - sdegutis 10y ago
    Dunno why you're downvoted, you have a totally valid point. Trying to shoe-horn a hacker-friendly OS into a layman-friendly desktop/laptop experience is going to be painful. Extremely fun and satisfying, sure. (Well, sometimes.) But there will be pain.
- dijit 10y ago
  Echoing this sentiment. FreeBSD idled heavy on my Thinkpad X201s, but OpenBSD was much better, longer battery and all the hardware worked basically flawlessly (except X11 tweaks for the middle mouse button thing, which is not exclusive to BSD). Also wifi being handled by "ifconfig" is super nice.
- dromenkoning 10y ago
  This way a malicious user with physical access to your machine can easily get around your locked desktop by switching to tty1. It would be better to fork the xinit proces to the background and exit the tty after: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit & && exit
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - yebyen 10y ago
    xinit & && exit I don't mean to ask a silly question, but what exactly is this meant to do? (What might it do that plain old `xinit & exit` doesn't do?) && is a binary op meant to execute the following command if the return code of the preceding command is success (0) & is another shell builtin that sends the command preceding it to the background, and lets the shell continue with whatever comes next... So, at first I read your edit and thought "Oh, this will exit the shell unless X can't be started" ... but exit should be running before X ever gets around to returning, no? I just read the man page for my favorite shell, and it says the return code for `&` is always 0. So it's clear that `& &&` will work, but I don't see anything suggesting it will do anything that `&` alone won't do. Just want to know if you know something I don't, and I figure there's no better place to learn a new shell thing than on a HN thread about BSD OS.
floatboth 10y ago
I moved to stock FreeBSD, I know how to configure Xorg :) But TrueOS is nice if you want an out of the box desktop.
drewg123 10y ago
I moved to PC-BSD and then TrueOS from Linux. (and kind of MacOS, I was using my Mac as my primary workstation for while). The reason I chose PC-BSD over vanilla FreeBSD (or Ubuntu) was its integrated ZFS / beadm system, which creates ZFS snapshots at update time that are integrated with the boot loader. That means you can roll back if an upgrade fails, or breaks a crucial piece of software. There is less reason to do this now, as FreeBSD current now has decent beadm and zfs boot support baked in as of a few months ago. The things that I hate compared to MacOS and Linux: - No support for U2F in Chromium. In fact, if you have set up a security key, simply getting the U2F prompt will crash. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451248 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451248 - Chromium version historically lags Chrome on supported platforms by weeks or months (though, as of today, I have chromium-56.0.2924.87_1, which is pretty recent). - No support for Google Hangouts (or other video conf. systems) - "Complex" Linux commercial binary software (like Chrome, slack desktop client, my kid's Kerbal Space Program) does not work with the Linux API support. To work around these things, I've actually installed a bhyve VM running ubuntu for Linux apps (and gone through the pain of routing pulse audio via a network socket so that sound works). With PCI-passthru, I can actually pass a USB controller into the Linux VM, so U2F and a video camera for conf. calls works. For KSP, Wine works reasonably well on the Windows binary. If I had it to do over again, I might just reverse things, and run Ubuntu for my desktop, and pass the disk controllers through to FreeBSD and run my FreeBSD stuff in a VM.
- piffey 10y ago
  WebRTC-based video conferencing like appear.in or hubl.in don't work either?
  - drewg123 10y ago
    I'm talking about corporate stuff with plugins, like MS Lync, WebX, Bluejeans.
tombert 10y ago
About four years ago I moved all of my personal computers away from proprietary operating systems, with most of my laptops running Linux, and one running PC-BSD. PC-BSD is very good, but there are some weird quirks compared to Linux. For example, I have still never really figured out how to get my screen-brightness to adjust properly, and none of my laptops' integrated WiFi seem to work out of the box with any BSD. The latter problem I have been able to solve by cheap USB wifi dongle, and the the former I just haven't solved since this laptop doesn't need a particularly good battery anyway. However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git). I also have come to really appreciate the ports system, especially after I started doing a lot of stuff with video processing (specifically FFMpeg). Being able to have freshly compiled packages, whilst still having them managed by a package manage (which happily resolves compile-time dependencies), is incredibly useful, and makes it kind of hard to go back to Linux (though I hear Gentoo might be up my alley). Overall, the transition isn't terribly hard, but I wouldn't recommend it if you don't want to get down in the weeds of the system. I enjoy that stuff, and I suspect most of the HN audience does too, so I recommend trying it out.
- gh02t 10y ago
  > However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git). Agreed, this is an amazing feature, as are jails to keep things compartmentalized. I hate having to clutter my FreeBSD home server root install with a billion dependencies for the various services it hosts, so I use jails as lightweight VMs to partition it into different service groups. It also makes it easy to back up and move jails whenever I upgrade because things are contained on ZFS subvols. For people who don't know, snapshots are also well supported on Linux, and not just in ZFS. I use it with BTRFS on my main workstation and it's saved me a few times. There is a great tool called Snapper (by the SUSE people, but it works on other distros - I use it on Arch) that automates managing snapshots and can even e.g. hook into your package manager to automatically snapshot before an upgrade. It's like Windows System Restore Points done right. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Snapper
badsock 10y ago
Not what you asked, but a couple of years ago I moved from Linux to FreeBSD on the desktop. With computers you can either learn how computers work, or use tools that try to hide how computers work so you don't have to. For example, you can configure a network interface by hand - it's a few lines of configuration - but, you need to know how networking works at a basic level (e.g. vocabulary like SSID, subnet masks, etc.). The alternative is what Windows/macOS/Linux do, which is wheelbarrow code into GUI wizards and daemons that try to automate everything. That's either good or terrible, depending on who you are. It's good in that often you can click a bunch of buttons and it will "just work". It's terrible in that if anything goes wrong, not only are you dealing with the complexities of the actual problem, you also have to guess around what the hand-holding code is doing on your behalf, and half the time it will fight you or not let you do the things you need to. Worse is that bugs are proportional to the lines of code, so the likelihood of it mostly working but sometimes not (randomly at times) is many times higher, because the amount of code involved (including that of all the different subsystems talking to each other) is many times larger than the code that actually does the job. I sat down and learned how LAN networking works about 17 years ago. It took a few hours of reading and messing around. The dividends have been huge: I just paste network configuration from one rc.conf to another, and if anything goes wrong the language that the computer reports the error in is the same language that I speak, so the solution tend to be obvious. Also, nothing in terms of how I use tcp/ip or ethernet has changed in all that time, and I doubt it will 17 years from now either. Learn it once and you're done. How many different ways to configure networks have Windows/macOS/Linux had in that time? The reason I left Linux is due to all the code that was supposed to "make things easier", but for someone who knows how things work, actually makes life harder. For a long time I could ignore all of it on Linux - the old low-level stuff still worked - but then they started messing with that (systemd was the last straw) and I had to get out. FreeBSD was a wonderful escape - it looks like complexity to people who don't know how computers work, but to me it's absolute simplicity. Computers are important - if you're in this field it's worth taking the time to understand the tools that you depend on.
- keithpeter 10y ago
  Have a look at Slackware. You might like it.
morganvachon 10y ago
My experience is that you're not going to get as cohesive a desktop computing experience in any BSD as you do in macOS. However, if you're annoyed with all the little gotchas of the Mac environment but you want to stay on BSD, TrueOS is a great place to start. Going further down the rabbit hole, if you are willing to forego an easy OOTB experience and want to really get your hands dirty, give OpenBSD a go. I've found its installation process to be the fastest and easiest of any BSD, and it gives you a bare bones foundation to build into whatever you want. For desktop use it does require some tweaking, but it's minor stuff and you end up with a rock-solid OS that gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Some of my go-to resources for setting up a proper OpenBSD desktop: https://sivers.org/openbsd https://sivers.org/openbsd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223351 (ymmv, I use Xfce instead of Lumina) https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/openbsd-as-a-linux-desktop-replacement/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/openbsd-as-a-linu...
arca_vorago 10y ago
I started my real computing journey with FreeBSD, and there are lots of things to love about the BSDs ecosystem (despite how firmly superior I think GPLv3 licensing is), but honestly I haven't been keeping up with them. I do remember that the underdog I have been rooting for is DragonFlyBSD, which has taken some novel approaches to the network stack and filesystem, etc. It used to be, freebsd on desktop, openbsd/netbsd on devices, Solaris on the servers. These days though I think you might be in for a bit of a shock in the differences between the mach kernel Macos and current BSD land, especially depending on your use case. Can you elaborate on why you are considering this, and what your normal use is like?
itsautomatisch 10y ago
I don't think TrueOS is worth running day-to-day right now because of the constant changes and tweaks between versions, but I think OpenBSD and FreeBSD both work great, though the latter requires some work out of the box. OpenBSD folks are very much into dogfooding so they have better laptop support, including power management.

79 points by deepaksurti 10y ago

What has been your experience and would you recommend it?

From macOS? Isn't Linux a better comparison? Anyway, I ran it for a few days about two weeks ago. Without Chrome support, I can't have Netflix. Without Netflix, I can't watch cheesy fantasy TV shows while coding. Oh, and there was a bug in libressl that prevented me from using `go get`. Other than that, I thought TrueOS was pretty nifty. I went back to Arch but I might try BSD as a desktop OS again in a few years.

grahamjperrin 10y ago

Yes, I moved. Shortly after I began (AppleSeed) seed testing of pre-release Yosemite I decided that – after decades of happy use of Macs – the mash-up was not for me. An ill-fitting one-size-fits-all approach to the GUI, which was rushed through. July 2014: I planned a three-year transition away from Mac OS X. To the best of my knowledge, Apple's changes to human interface guidelines were not seeded. Instead, the changes were privately preset, published only after Yosemite was released. October 2014: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/524642026261057537 https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/524642026261057537 Two years later, my experience with PC-BSD, expressed when TrueOS Desktop was announced: https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/797724086898196481 https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/797724086898196481 "smart direction". Should I recommend TrueOS Desktop to a user of Mac OS X? Not at this time; https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/created_by/grahamperrin https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/created_by/grah... the most troublesome (time-wasting) of which is https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/287 https://github.com/trueos/trueos-core/issues/287 – tl;dr the Mac metaphor would be an inappropriate switch off of Wi-Fi when simply switching network location. And https://discourse.trueos.org/t/-/378/18 https://discourse.trueos.org/t/-/378/18 too often I can not get network service without a restart of the operating system. Generally, the majority of my discussion about the software is at https://discourse.trueos.org/users/grahamperrin/activity https://discourse.trueos.org/users/grahamperrin/activity … you might need to scroll down a page to reach discussion of the software (to skip stuff arising from changes to community guidelines that were made without consultation with the community). https://github.com/trueos/trueos-docs/issues/33 https://github.com/trueos/trueos-docs/issues/33 time for change :-)

Cyclenerd 10y ago

If you have not done it yet, install it in a VM. Make your own picture. I did not like it. In my opinion, Ubuntu or Fedora is better for the desktop.

geff82 10y ago

It is very picky on the hardware it supports out of the box. That means you'll get problems with Hardware that came out after Haswell. It works ok on my Lenovo X240 (that I bought brand new in Juli 2016 in a maxed out version at a very good price). But after a short trial I decided to go with Xubuntu as the hardware support is much better and most developer relevant software today runs on Linux without hassles. I love the FreeBSD on my company's server, totally hassle free. But on the desktop, it is for fans, not the general public. But anyway: try it out, get a feel for it.

0mp 10y ago
It's worth mentioning that TrueOS is a rolling-release based on the FreeBSD bleeding-edge CURRENT branch. As a result the hardware support is still better than in the supported FreeBSD releases (10.3 and 11.0).
floatboth 10y ago
IIRC TrueOS actually integrates https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics so integrated graphics after Haswell should work.
PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
Xubuntu user here. Very nice, lightweight distro. Highly recommended for any developers
- luckydude 10y ago
  Me too. Light enough that I don't notice it but mainstream enough that stuff just works.
JdeBP 10y ago
> FreeBSD ... on the desktop However: the questioner wanted to know about TrueOS, not about FreeBSD. The desktop with TrueOS is significantly different to the desktop with FreeBSD. There is extra desktop stuff that comes in the box with TrueOS. And the desktop stuff is done somewhat differently. With some FreeBSD-derived operating systems such as GhostBSD one gets "flavours" of the operating system according to the desktop environment, like "GhostBSD MATE" and "GhostBSD XFCE". With TrueOS, there aren't such multiple "flavours". Rather, PCDM allows one to select from multiple desktop environments at login time, and the desktop environments are available side by side in a single "flavour" of the "desktop" operating system. TrueOS is in fact "flavoured" as "desktop" versus "server", rather than as "MATE" versus "XFCE" versus whatever. There are a number of "TrueOS-own" tools that are added to those desktops, as well, including (for examples) the Life Preserver, the PC-BSD Control Panel, AppCafe, and the System Updater.

nec4b 10y ago

I went from windows machine to PC-BSD 10.3 about 2 years ago and then to TrueOS. At first I really liked it, specifically ZFS integration. I consider ZFS a hidden gem of data storage. After the second update troubles began. Every time there was a new system update, some software was quietly removed from the system. If I reinstalled it by hand again, usually something broke. I guess it wasn't compatible with the newer version od the OS. After a couple of updates most of the software I liked and considered important didn't work. Also in general most of the software in the appcafe is a version or two behind the current version available for other systems. On PC-BSD I used KDE which I found very useful. On TrueOS i'm using Lumina which simply isn't there yet. I'm currently looking for way to migrate back to Windows while keeping ZFS around.

baldfat 10y ago
Can I ask why you wouldn't see Linux as your next home? (Trying just to have a conversation and nothing negative on anything in your remarks) 1. I also LOVE KDE (But mostly use a tile window manager i3) 2. I tried liking BTRFS (Similar to ZFS for my non-server systems and just went back to my old file system) I feel my 2 copies and one off site is a better system for desktop. I use OpenSUSE and never had a problem I couldn't figure out. 3. You can use ZFS on Linux
- nec4b 10y ago
  I chose PC-BSD because i had a bad data loss and wanted something more reliable. ZFS on FreeBSD is very mature and stable and PC-BSD provided nice desktop integration. For stuff I couldn't do on PC-BSD I used Windows virtual machine. I don't have anything against Linux. But last I read, ZFS on Linux is not native and integrated into the system as well as on PC-BSD. I was thinking more along the line of building a small NAS/FreeBSD server for storage and just install Windows on the main PC as it has always worked pretty well for me and other household memebers are more used to it as well. I will also give OpenSuse a try in a VM to see how it works.
  - onli 10y ago
    Just a +1 for trying out Linux here. Sounds like you'd really like it. ZFS is native by now, https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable, though I'm not 100% sure about the current state of the FS in the linux world. Last I read was Ubuntu integrating it by default.

TurboHaskal 10y ago

It's awful. The only desktop BSD I can recommend is OpenBSD. All you need after a fresh installation is: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit

nicky0 10y ago
The wonderful world of Unix.
- sdegutis 10y ago
  Dunno why you're downvoted, you have a totally valid point. Trying to shoe-horn a hacker-friendly OS into a layman-friendly desktop/laptop experience is going to be painful. Extremely fun and satisfying, sure. (Well, sometimes.) But there will be pain.
dijit 10y ago
Echoing this sentiment. FreeBSD idled heavy on my Thinkpad X201s, but OpenBSD was much better, longer battery and all the hardware worked basically flawlessly (except X11 tweaks for the middle mouse button thing, which is not exclusive to BSD). Also wifi being handled by "ifconfig" is super nice.
dromenkoning 10y ago
This way a malicious user with physical access to your machine can easily get around your locked desktop by switching to tty1. It would be better to fork the xinit proces to the background and exit the tty after: echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit & && exit
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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- yebyen 10y ago
  xinit & && exit I don't mean to ask a silly question, but what exactly is this meant to do? (What might it do that plain old `xinit & exit` doesn't do?) && is a binary op meant to execute the following command if the return code of the preceding command is success (0) & is another shell builtin that sends the command preceding it to the background, and lets the shell continue with whatever comes next... So, at first I read your edit and thought "Oh, this will exit the shell unless X can't be started" ... but exit should be running before X ever gets around to returning, no? I just read the man page for my favorite shell, and it says the return code for `&` is always 0. So it's clear that `& &&` will work, but I don't see anything suggesting it will do anything that `&` alone won't do. Just want to know if you know something I don't, and I figure there's no better place to learn a new shell thing than on a HN thread about BSD OS.

floatboth 10y ago

I moved to stock FreeBSD, I know how to configure Xorg :) But TrueOS is nice if you want an out of the box desktop.

drewg123 10y ago

I moved to PC-BSD and then TrueOS from Linux. (and kind of MacOS, I was using my Mac as my primary workstation for while). The reason I chose PC-BSD over vanilla FreeBSD (or Ubuntu) was its integrated ZFS / beadm system, which creates ZFS snapshots at update time that are integrated with the boot loader. That means you can roll back if an upgrade fails, or breaks a crucial piece of software. There is less reason to do this now, as FreeBSD current now has decent beadm and zfs boot support baked in as of a few months ago. The things that I hate compared to MacOS and Linux: - No support for U2F in Chromium. In fact, if you have set up a security key, simply getting the U2F prompt will crash. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451248 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451248 - Chromium version historically lags Chrome on supported platforms by weeks or months (though, as of today, I have chromium-56.0.2924.87_1, which is pretty recent). - No support for Google Hangouts (or other video conf. systems) - "Complex" Linux commercial binary software (like Chrome, slack desktop client, my kid's Kerbal Space Program) does not work with the Linux API support. To work around these things, I've actually installed a bhyve VM running ubuntu for Linux apps (and gone through the pain of routing pulse audio via a network socket so that sound works). With PCI-passthru, I can actually pass a USB controller into the Linux VM, so U2F and a video camera for conf. calls works. For KSP, Wine works reasonably well on the Windows binary. If I had it to do over again, I might just reverse things, and run Ubuntu for my desktop, and pass the disk controllers through to FreeBSD and run my FreeBSD stuff in a VM.

piffey 10y ago
WebRTC-based video conferencing like appear.in or hubl.in don't work either?
- drewg123 10y ago
  I'm talking about corporate stuff with plugins, like MS Lync, WebX, Bluejeans.

tombert 10y ago

About four years ago I moved all of my personal computers away from proprietary operating systems, with most of my laptops running Linux, and one running PC-BSD. PC-BSD is very good, but there are some weird quirks compared to Linux. For example, I have still never really figured out how to get my screen-brightness to adjust properly, and none of my laptops' integrated WiFi seem to work out of the box with any BSD. The latter problem I have been able to solve by cheap USB wifi dongle, and the the former I just haven't solved since this laptop doesn't need a particularly good battery anyway. However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git). I also have come to really appreciate the ports system, especially after I started doing a lot of stuff with video processing (specifically FFMpeg). Being able to have freshly compiled packages, whilst still having them managed by a package manage (which happily resolves compile-time dependencies), is incredibly useful, and makes it kind of hard to go back to Linux (though I hear Gentoo might be up my alley). Overall, the transition isn't terribly hard, but I wouldn't recommend it if you don't want to get down in the weeds of the system. I enjoy that stuff, and I suspect most of the HN audience does too, so I recommend trying it out.

gh02t 10y ago
> However, there are some nice perks to having a system that runs on ZFS. Due to its frequently-snapshotting nature, it's much easier to do risky stuff without having to worry about nuking the whole system, since you can always revert to the previous snapshot (kind of like Git). Agreed, this is an amazing feature, as are jails to keep things compartmentalized. I hate having to clutter my FreeBSD home server root install with a billion dependencies for the various services it hosts, so I use jails as lightweight VMs to partition it into different service groups. It also makes it easy to back up and move jails whenever I upgrade because things are contained on ZFS subvols. For people who don't know, snapshots are also well supported on Linux, and not just in ZFS. I use it with BTRFS on my main workstation and it's saved me a few times. There is a great tool called Snapper (by the SUSE people, but it works on other distros - I use it on Arch) that automates managing snapshots and can even e.g. hook into your package manager to automatically snapshot before an upgrade. It's like Windows System Restore Points done right. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Snapper

badsock 10y ago

Not what you asked, but a couple of years ago I moved from Linux to FreeBSD on the desktop. With computers you can either learn how computers work, or use tools that try to hide how computers work so you don't have to. For example, you can configure a network interface by hand - it's a few lines of configuration - but, you need to know how networking works at a basic level (e.g. vocabulary like SSID, subnet masks, etc.). The alternative is what Windows/macOS/Linux do, which is wheelbarrow code into GUI wizards and daemons that try to automate everything. That's either good or terrible, depending on who you are. It's good in that often you can click a bunch of buttons and it will "just work". It's terrible in that if anything goes wrong, not only are you dealing with the complexities of the actual problem, you also have to guess around what the hand-holding code is doing on your behalf, and half the time it will fight you or not let you do the things you need to. Worse is that bugs are proportional to the lines of code, so the likelihood of it mostly working but sometimes not (randomly at times) is many times higher, because the amount of code involved (including that of all the different subsystems talking to each other) is many times larger than the code that actually does the job. I sat down and learned how LAN networking works about 17 years ago. It took a few hours of reading and messing around. The dividends have been huge: I just paste network configuration from one rc.conf to another, and if anything goes wrong the language that the computer reports the error in is the same language that I speak, so the solution tend to be obvious. Also, nothing in terms of how I use tcp/ip or ethernet has changed in all that time, and I doubt it will 17 years from now either. Learn it once and you're done. How many different ways to configure networks have Windows/macOS/Linux had in that time? The reason I left Linux is due to all the code that was supposed to "make things easier", but for someone who knows how things work, actually makes life harder. For a long time I could ignore all of it on Linux - the old low-level stuff still worked - but then they started messing with that (systemd was the last straw) and I had to get out. FreeBSD was a wonderful escape - it looks like complexity to people who don't know how computers work, but to me it's absolute simplicity. Computers are important - if you're in this field it's worth taking the time to understand the tools that you depend on.

keithpeter 10y ago
Have a look at Slackware. You might like it.

morganvachon 10y ago

My experience is that you're not going to get as cohesive a desktop computing experience in any BSD as you do in macOS. However, if you're annoyed with all the little gotchas of the Mac environment but you want to stay on BSD, TrueOS is a great place to start. Going further down the rabbit hole, if you are willing to forego an easy OOTB experience and want to really get your hands dirty, give OpenBSD a go. I've found its installation process to be the fastest and easiest of any BSD, and it gives you a bare bones foundation to build into whatever you want. For desktop use it does require some tweaking, but it's minor stuff and you end up with a rock-solid OS that gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Some of my go-to resources for setting up a proper OpenBSD desktop: https://sivers.org/openbsd https://sivers.org/openbsd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223351 (ymmv, I use Xfce instead of Lumina) https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/openbsd-as-a-linux-desktop-replacement/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/openbsd-as-a-linu...

arca_vorago 10y ago

I started my real computing journey with FreeBSD, and there are lots of things to love about the BSDs ecosystem (despite how firmly superior I think GPLv3 licensing is), but honestly I haven't been keeping up with them. I do remember that the underdog I have been rooting for is DragonFlyBSD, which has taken some novel approaches to the network stack and filesystem, etc. It used to be, freebsd on desktop, openbsd/netbsd on devices, Solaris on the servers. These days though I think you might be in for a bit of a shock in the differences between the mach kernel Macos and current BSD land, especially depending on your use case. Can you elaborate on why you are considering this, and what your normal use is like?

itsautomatisch 10y ago

I don't think TrueOS is worth running day-to-day right now because of the constant changes and tweaks between versions, but I think OpenBSD and FreeBSD both work great, though the latter requires some work out of the box. OpenBSD folks are very much into dogfooding so they have better laptop support, including power management.