11 ms·

FreeBSD 13.2

212 points by bartekrutkowski 3y ago

1letterunixname 3y ago
OpenSSL 1.1.1 is deprecated and loses security patches in under 6 months.
- quectophoton 3y ago
  I'm curious how this will be handled. There's already a `vendor/openssl-3.0` branch in their git repo, but those changes look like way too big to release in just a security patch for 13.2. FreeBSD 14.0 is scheduled for July (2 months before OpenSSL 1.1.1 EOL), so maybe we'll get OpenSSL 3.0 in that release, and then a backport with the OpenSSL upgrade. But the timelines seem too tight, so I'm not too optimistic.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > I'm curious how this will be handled. The same way as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which is supported by the vendor for five years (2025): * https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/openssl https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/openssl Or Debian 11 (bullseye), which has LTS support until 2026: * https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/openssl https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/openssl * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history
gautamcgoel 3y ago
Does anyone here run FreeBSD on the desktop? If so, can you explain why you prefer it to Linux?
- ofalkaed 3y ago
  It is like linux if Canonical never happened, so like linux 20 years ago. The ports system is nice. FreeBSD is my fallback in case Patrick gives in to the changing linux world and I have to abandon Slackware or start learning OS stuff again. Biggest thing to know about it as a desktop, drivers get into the kernel much slower than with linux and some never get in, so like linux was 20 years ago.
  - blackhaz 3y ago
    OMG - this is so true. Home sweet home. A few additional points: - The hard separation between the base OS and user-installed packages that go in /usr/local - you can wipe the /usr/local and get back to the pristine state. Things don't get mixed. - Better documentation, better man pages. Whenever I log in to a Linux distro it feels like things are all in the wrong places. Hardware support is bad though, I wish hardware vendors would open source their drivers.
  - ken666 3y ago
    Have a look at void Linux. I was a long time freebsd user until I really needed some proprietary software (zoom) in the pandemic. Switched to void and it is the same freebsd feeling, but with much better hardware support. And with my beloved ZFS!
    - SSLy 3y ago
      Or, just, arch.
      - chongli 3y ago
        I used Arch for a number of years before switching to a Mac when I went back to school. At some point I may go back to Linux or FreeBSD (I've used both!) but I'll never go back to rolling releases. The whole reason I switched to Mac was that I got tired of things breaking constantly due to the never-ending updates. And if you put things off then you end up getting a whole lot of breakage all at once. No, I would prefer taking things slow and getting tested releases way less often. I have no need to be on the bleeding edge of everything.
        doubled112 3y ago
        This is why I run Debian everywhere. Even my desktops. My hardware is usually a little older anyway, so the latest stable release is good enough. Flatpaks are finally to a point where if I need up to date apps I can just install it from Flathub.
        3y ago
- voytec 3y ago
  Know the system better but as for preference - Linux is better suited for some tasks and I use both - FreeBSD as host with Linux VMs. Switched after 10+ years of using Apple products exclusively. I've recently posted[1] my thoughts on commercial vs. FOSS-driven workstations. One huge downside to FreeBSD on a workstation is the lack of modern WiFi support. Impatiently waiting for WiFi drivers emulated via LinuxKPI[2]. [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/work-tech-i-use-privately/ https://wojteksychut.com/posts/work-tech-i-use-privately/ [2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxKPI https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxKPI
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  Not Linux: Linux feels clunky like a bunch of third party cogs all mashed together. Some with teeth missing some with too many. If it's not SystemMd taking over the whole startup of system services and needing its own DHCP server, it's then down to package manager's. Apt being replaced with snap, snap replaced by flat images. Its divided and with no formality. Someone will create some new thing, I'll get popular, get introduced in to some distro, command others to use it and then end up being abandoned. Linux is now in bed with corporate. The original idea was having a free alternative of unix and/or sort of fight against Microsoft. That's gone. These are not all bad things, but turns the experience of Linux in to a mess. For FreeBSD: It just works, its solid, it bounces back. It has ZFS. Its Unix. The kernel is as whole, its solid. Rock battle tested solid. Packages feel meshed correctly. Documentation is a single source. Its just lovely to use and when you replace Linux for FreeBSD you'll feel a weight off your shoulders as your system will shutdown rather than systemmd displaying "Waiting 5minutes for X to shutdown". Have a great community which isn't divided by distributions.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 2b3a51 3y ago
    I'm glad you like your FreeBSD installation. Just a reminder that a range of Linux distributions available. There is choice.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      I'm aware. If I had to choose one it would be Slackware.
      - 2b3a51 3y ago
        Posting this off Slackware 14.2/xfce4 on an old Thinkpad X220. All good. (Must get round to upgrading to 15.0 sometime)
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I do yes. It's my daily driver. I love it on the desktop. I use it with KDE. What I love is the excellent documentation, stable OS + rolling packages, ZFS on root (snapshots!), the ports collection so you can recompile packages easily with your own settings if needed. Also no attempts to include their own IP like canonical does with snap. The low level of commercial interest is great. There's nothing being replaced just for the sake of it. The biggest problem seems to be wifi drivers with their closed source blob skullduggery making things difficult, but I have no need for wifi on my desktop anyway.
- citrin_ru 3y ago
  I do. The main reason is that I know it better and I feel it is easier to know it well thanks to good documentation and relative simplicity (compare to Linux). First class ZFS support is another reason. While ZFS is available on Linux in distros I would use (OpenSuse or Fedora) it is not available by default and needs to be installed separately. Also use i3 WM and install only apps I use - a typical Linux distro which brings Gnome/KDE/Unity and lots of apps I don't need is a waste of space (on my small SSD). Though I admit that FreeBSD desktop is less user and especially novice user friendly than Linux. Another big reason to prefer Linux is closed source software. Sometimes closed source apps have Linux versions but practically never FreeBSD ones. Linux emulation works for simple apps but setting up something like Skype or Zoom (which requires camera/mic access) is too much of a work even for an experienced FreeBSD user (if possible at all).
  - russnes 3y ago
    I would use FreeBSD myself if it weren't for Void Linux. You get all the extra tools and quality of life from Linux without any bloat, and it has a minimal init system. It's also very convenient to use if you need up to date software since it is a rolling release, but there are some things in FreeBSD which is better like reproducible builds. Kind of like Arch Linux but without the chaos, and the community appears to be growing!
- vermaden 3y ago
  Mostly of those reasons: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ Its simple and logical with lots of useful features that most people do not even know exist. Also in may aspects it makes my life easier - like with ZFS Boot Environments or Rescue subsystem - Ports and Source infrastructure for custom system/packages building. I also like the Community. Here is mine 'desktop' documentation if needed: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/ Regards.
- hestefisk 3y ago
  Yes I do. The main reason is stability and familiarity. Also the lack of systemd.
- klibertp 3y ago
  I don't run it right now (and won't anytime soon) as a desktop. Once I switched to using laptops exclusively, the driver story became too bad to work comfortably. But, I used FreeBSD on a desktop for 5 years, from 2005 to 2010. I really enjoyed using it. The reasons for that are what others already mentioned: simplicity, well-thought-out organization of the system vs. userland vs. 3rd party packages (man hier), excellent documentation always available locally, ports, jails, pf, etc. It was all nice, but the killer feature, for me, was stability. The system simply refused to die, no matter what I threw at it or how I misconfigured it. At the time, Linux was a lot less stable than it is today - it could hang forever, corrupt the filesystem, or restart in the middle of doing something. Especially with proprietary, binary blobs and apps, rare as they were, Linux had a hard time accumulating uptime. On the other hand, FreeBSD worked, always. Well, it had no other choice, given that ACPI wasn't fully implemented and it couldn't suspend/sleep - it was a desktop but also a server for some private stuff, so that was ok. Linux got much better over the years, both in kernel and userland. I have been using Fedora for close to 15 years now, and it works. I won't be going back to FreeBSD on the desktop, unfortunately. However, I'm tempted to try it again on an older laptop that plays the role of a NAS: no GUI, always connected to the router with a cable, always connected to power. I have Fedora running there, but I already use ZFS - it's great - so the switch shouldn't be hard.
  - mnd999 3y ago
    Same, I used to run it a lot, but I went back to it recently and have not really managed to make it work. I'm using sway, and I have hit a whole bunch of issues: * Have to use 14-CURRENT to support my RDNA2 graphics card at all. This was not simple. * Systemd sucks, but on Linux when I start a sway session it co-ordinates all the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr / pipewire / pipewire-media-session (I think). There doesn't seem to be a freebsd equivalent for user level services. Although dbus / consolekit seems to be doing something, I don't understand why or how. * Sound is just broken. My usb headset gives constant loud feedback, by bluetooth dongle spams the dmesg until it eventually gives up and my hda card seems to work in all the mixers but no sound is forthcoming. * Firefox with wayland on just loses the compositor connection almost instantly. Alacratty seems fine though, as is xwayland. * My webcam doesn't work, in firefox it's blank, in chrome the video is corrupted. * I have no idea how to configure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to get created a login with the right permissions etc on tmpfs. I could leave it on zfs of course but apparently that's problematic.
- krylon 3y ago
  The last time I did was around the time PC-BSD became TrueOS, forcing me to reinstall. Running X11 gave me some kind of trouble afterwards, so installed vanilla FreeBSD, which gave me trouble, too. So I installed Debian and haven't looked back. That was on a ThinkPad x220, which supposedly is supported well by the BSD systems, and it did run well with PC-BSD. But I figured I was getting too old for fiddling around all weekend to get it to work, and Debian just worked(tm). Before that, I used FreeBSD on my desktop roughly from 2003 to 2005, mostly because I liked its simplicity and it did feel snappier than GNU/Linux at the time.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  I use exclusively Linux now because of work, but in the past I ran FreeBSD on the desktop because I like tinkering and taking things apart to see how they work, and this is much easier with FreeBSD than any Linux distro I know of. Same reason I prefer emacs to other editors. Want to see how the “grep” command works? Just go to /usr/src/usr.bin/grep and read the source. Modify and reinstall it if you like. On Ubuntu this would be a huge chore of figuring out what package the command comes from, wrestling with apt-get source and dpkg-buildpackage, tweaking your apt settings to not immediately replace your custom-built one with the upstream version, etc.
- gruturo 3y ago
  A coherent userland (not without occasional warts, but without stuff being deliberately, maliciously ignored, broken or replaced to foster someone's agenda). ZFS as a first class citizen, without wondering if Oracle will show up and take the ball away. Jails, although that's not super relevant to the desktop experience. I won't mention systemd, although I truly dislike it (though I have no particular attachment to init scripts, I was quite fond of Solaris' SMF for example). The absence of snap and whatever horrors Canonical keeps pushing is another plus, but I'm in not in a good position to judge its impact as I'm blissfully ignorant of how bad they are, I just stumble in the occasional horror story. Biggest thing I'm missing and wish I had: Docker. Jails may be technically better, but the world went another way and they have no functional ecosystem.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    That seems to be the one advantage separating kernel from user space has provided. At least in my experience, jails may break when the host OS gets updated and the jail isn’t upgraded in lock step. That means having 1+n upgrades for every minor version update. Requiring a docker container to have a user space which matches the kernel kind of defeats the purpose.
    - toast0 3y ago
      This shouldn't normally happen, generally you can run a new kernel with an older userland (the documented upgrade process for the main root is upgrade kernel, reboot, upgrade userland, so at least part of userland needs to still work), and a chroot jail is mostly an independent userland. You may need to ensure the kernel is compiled with backwards compatability if your userland is very far off, and sometimes you see problems with syscall details: 13.0 released with a bug that some ifconfig arguments wouldn't work with a 12.x binary; and I've run into problems with the cpu pinning syscall when the bitmask size increased (this was recently fixed upstream, although I ran into it years ago), etc, so it's not unheard of, but it's fairly rare, in my experience.
  - fullstop 3y ago
    > ZFS as a first class citizen, without wondering if Oracle will show up and take the ball away. Is this still true now that FreeBSD is using the ZoL/OpenZFS tree?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  FreeBSD has - can have - better ZFS support than Linux. Ubuntu comes close, but then you're on Ubuntu...
  - vermaden 3y ago
    Ubuntu has only fraction of what FreeBSD has when it comes to ZFS. Several things that Ubuntu misses: - lack of ZFS Boot Environments - https://is.gd/BECTL https://is.gd/BECTL - https://is.gd/BEADM https://is.gd/BEADM - no bootloader integration - still requires ancient EXT4 or XFS /boot to start system ... and while the version of ZFS is newer on FreeBSD you can always install these packages and have LATEST OpenZFS available: - sysutils/openzfs - sysutils/openzfs-kmod Hope that helps.
- efficax 3y ago
  Ran it for a long time, mostly I liked the simplicity of it over linux, which with systemd + udev etc has become much harder to configure easily just by reading through the files in /etc. The way you configure FreeBSD has been basically the same since 1998, so I haven't had to learn new magic with whatever trend is taking over the linux world. On modern linux, without a browser open to google shit constantly it's a real challenge to make even little quality of life changes. And Linux binary compat on FreeBSD was (maybe still is?) very good. Lately I'm on linux though since I need docker for my job workflow.
chungy 3y ago
I like Wireguard being in base now.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Nice! I’ve been running a WireGuard VPN for a few years now, to which my FreeBSD servers, my Linux machines, my macOS laptop and my phone all connect. I use this VPN for internal traffic between my machines only. Not as a tunnel for Internet destined web client traffic. I have set up my FreeBSD servers and my Linux machines to have sshd listen on the WireGuard address. On my iPhone I connect to the WireGuard server that I run. Then I can ssh to all of my machines. The machine that runs the WireGuard server to which all of the other machines connect, runs FreeBSD :)
- cgeier 3y ago
  Agreed. And with less drama this time around.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    true. kind of a low bar thou
  - favorited 3y ago
    And hopefully fewer buffer overflows as well.
- Gud 3y ago
  Finally!
cyberpunk 3y ago
> The mergemaster(8) utility has been deprecated and will be removed in FreeBSD 14.0 This is a bit of a bummer, though. I did just try to use etcupdate for the 13.2-RELEASE upgrade and it hung forever trying to grep for something in /etc/default/devfs.rules, so I had to fall back on mergemaster again... Oh well, maybe a clean install when 14 is out and it'll behave better. Congrats on the release!
- ZeWaren 3y ago
  I 100% agree that the move to etcupdate should have been documented better. I also ended up in situations when I had to manually fix systems after upgrading.
- voytec 3y ago
  Haven't had issues with etcupdate(8) on 14-CURRENT recently. Earlier each time I'd get "Conflicts remain from previous update, aborting" or some warning about inability to remove non-empty directory followed by "Old directories removed".
- throw0101c 3y ago
  14.0 is pencilled in for July: * https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/schedule/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/schedule/ One can continue using 13.x until 2026: * https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup
- emaste 3y ago
  > I did just try to use etcupdate for the 13.2-RELEASE upgrade and it hung forever trying to grep for something in /etc/default/devfs.rules Would you be willing to submit a bug for the etcupdate issue? Or, just reply here with as much detail as you can recall about how you ran it?
  - cyberpunk 3y ago
    Sure; i will flip back to old be again tonight if i have some time and give it another go. Will file a bug if I can reproduce it.
jmort253 3y ago
I tried FreeBSD on ARM64. I couldn't get the browsers, like Firefox or Epiphany, to load without crashing. I'm not sure if it was something I was doing wrong or if the ARM ecosystem just isn't well supported yet. I was also running in a VM with QEMU. On the surface, FreeBSD sounds cool. I liked that I could boot directly to a console and then run the GUI only if I wanted to. Everything felt more modular. It reminded me of the days before Windows 95 when I could just use DOS to save precious memory and CPU bandwidth. Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else. Maybe it was just because it was running in a VM. Maybe it was because it's ARM. Not sure. I'd love to hear others experiences with FreeBSD on ARM.
- matrix12 3y ago
  Same experience with Browsers. Only Surf never dies.
  - mnd999 3y ago
    Firefox on Sway with wayland enabled seems to lose the compositor connection almost instantly.
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ ah, the memories this + dwn https://dwm.suckless.org/ https://dwm.suckless.org/ then I said to myself "why am I wasting so much time tinkering with stuff that gains me nothing" and moved on in my life
    - anthk 3y ago
      Eh, I disagree. WMaker+Luakit makes my netbook work. Anything else under i686 it's a no-no.
    - Zababa 3y ago
      I had the opposite experience with dwm. I don't like cycling through overlapping windows on the same "desktop", and I don't like taking the time to place windows correctly. With 2 screens, I have 18 "desktops", which is more than enough, and the automatic tiling is exactly what I want. On the other hand when I use GNOME/KDE/Windows I'm always losing lots of time navigating. Also I must have some kind of curse because even with high-end computers I've never had one of those run really smoothly. My current work laptop is on KDE, and when I use a shortcut to open a terminal it takes 200/300ms. I think it also helps that I've never really tinkered with it. I took someone's build that had a few things I wanted, and I think that's it. In contrast, I spend more time on a regular desktop environment setting up shortcuts.
kmbfjr 3y ago
I really enjoy FreeBSD, but it sometimes comes with package bugs that never seem to get fixed. Fortunately they seem to be very edge case issues, like the latest I have found that Postgis on Postgresql is broken.
MrResearcher 3y ago
From https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/cuda.84926/#post-564624 https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/cuda.84926/#post-564624 > That doesn't get us full CUDA support, but we can run OpenCL apps at least (with x11/nvidia-driver, x11/linux-nvidia-libs and the nv-sglrun script from emulators/libc6-shim). And NVENC if you bother to compile it. Why would you want to limit yourself to the operating system that cannot train, say, a pytorch model on your nvidia GPU? We had some success running inference on CPU, which works for as long as the model isn't that large. But that doesn't scale for larger models, where you also want to batch requests and run them all at once on GPU.
- crest 3y ago
  Maybe because you have different requirements and preferences (than running CUDA applications)?
- johnklos 3y ago
  Maybe people don't want to support a vendor locked environment that requires overpriced hardware that loses support quickly.
noncoml 3y ago
Last time I tried FreeBSD, hoping to use it for my NAS server, I stumbled upon this bug: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=173541 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=173541 I didn’t get much confidence to trust it with my data if something as basic as the system load counter is broken for 10 years and engineers think it’s not worth fixing. (Note that the bug is closed as fixed, but it’s not fixed and the problem is still there) Edit: who downvotes this for just linking to a bug in FreeBSD?! :-/

FreeBSD 13.2

1letterunixname 3y ago

OpenSSL 1.1.1 is deprecated and loses security patches in under 6 months.

quectophoton 3y ago
I'm curious how this will be handled. There's already a `vendor/openssl-3.0` branch in their git repo, but those changes look like way too big to release in just a security patch for 13.2. FreeBSD 14.0 is scheduled for July (2 months before OpenSSL 1.1.1 EOL), so maybe we'll get OpenSSL 3.0 in that release, and then a backport with the OpenSSL upgrade. But the timelines seem too tight, so I'm not too optimistic.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > I'm curious how this will be handled. The same way as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which is supported by the vendor for five years (2025): * https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/openssl https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/openssl Or Debian 11 (bullseye), which has LTS support until 2026: * https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/openssl https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/openssl * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history

gautamcgoel 3y ago

Does anyone here run FreeBSD on the desktop? If so, can you explain why you prefer it to Linux?

ofalkaed 3y ago
It is like linux if Canonical never happened, so like linux 20 years ago. The ports system is nice. FreeBSD is my fallback in case Patrick gives in to the changing linux world and I have to abandon Slackware or start learning OS stuff again. Biggest thing to know about it as a desktop, drivers get into the kernel much slower than with linux and some never get in, so like linux was 20 years ago.
- blackhaz 3y ago
  OMG - this is so true. Home sweet home. A few additional points: - The hard separation between the base OS and user-installed packages that go in /usr/local - you can wipe the /usr/local and get back to the pristine state. Things don't get mixed. - Better documentation, better man pages. Whenever I log in to a Linux distro it feels like things are all in the wrong places. Hardware support is bad though, I wish hardware vendors would open source their drivers.
- ken666 3y ago
  Have a look at void Linux. I was a long time freebsd user until I really needed some proprietary software (zoom) in the pandemic. Switched to void and it is the same freebsd feeling, but with much better hardware support. And with my beloved ZFS!
  - SSLy 3y ago
    Or, just, arch.
    - chongli 3y ago
      I used Arch for a number of years before switching to a Mac when I went back to school. At some point I may go back to Linux or FreeBSD (I've used both!) but I'll never go back to rolling releases. The whole reason I switched to Mac was that I got tired of things breaking constantly due to the never-ending updates. And if you put things off then you end up getting a whole lot of breakage all at once. No, I would prefer taking things slow and getting tested releases way less often. I have no need to be on the bleeding edge of everything.
      - doubled112 3y ago
        This is why I run Debian everywhere. Even my desktops. My hardware is usually a little older anyway, so the latest stable release is good enough. Flatpaks are finally to a point where if I need up to date apps I can just install it from Flathub.
      - 3y ago
voytec 3y ago
Know the system better but as for preference - Linux is better suited for some tasks and I use both - FreeBSD as host with Linux VMs. Switched after 10+ years of using Apple products exclusively. I've recently posted[1] my thoughts on commercial vs. FOSS-driven workstations. One huge downside to FreeBSD on a workstation is the lack of modern WiFi support. Impatiently waiting for WiFi drivers emulated via LinuxKPI[2]. [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/work-tech-i-use-privately/ https://wojteksychut.com/posts/work-tech-i-use-privately/ [2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxKPI https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxKPI
doublerabbit 3y ago
Not Linux: Linux feels clunky like a bunch of third party cogs all mashed together. Some with teeth missing some with too many. If it's not SystemMd taking over the whole startup of system services and needing its own DHCP server, it's then down to package manager's. Apt being replaced with snap, snap replaced by flat images. Its divided and with no formality. Someone will create some new thing, I'll get popular, get introduced in to some distro, command others to use it and then end up being abandoned. Linux is now in bed with corporate. The original idea was having a free alternative of unix and/or sort of fight against Microsoft. That's gone. These are not all bad things, but turns the experience of Linux in to a mess. For FreeBSD: It just works, its solid, it bounces back. It has ZFS. Its Unix. The kernel is as whole, its solid. Rock battle tested solid. Packages feel meshed correctly. Documentation is a single source. Its just lovely to use and when you replace Linux for FreeBSD you'll feel a weight off your shoulders as your system will shutdown rather than systemmd displaying "Waiting 5minutes for X to shutdown". Have a great community which isn't divided by distributions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  I'm glad you like your FreeBSD installation. Just a reminder that a range of Linux distributions available. There is choice.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    I'm aware. If I had to choose one it would be Slackware.
    - 2b3a51 3y ago
      Posting this off Slackware 14.2/xfce4 on an old Thinkpad X220. All good. (Must get round to upgrading to 15.0 sometime)
wkat4242 3y ago
I do yes. It's my daily driver. I love it on the desktop. I use it with KDE. What I love is the excellent documentation, stable OS + rolling packages, ZFS on root (snapshots!), the ports collection so you can recompile packages easily with your own settings if needed. Also no attempts to include their own IP like canonical does with snap. The low level of commercial interest is great. There's nothing being replaced just for the sake of it. The biggest problem seems to be wifi drivers with their closed source blob skullduggery making things difficult, but I have no need for wifi on my desktop anyway.
citrin_ru 3y ago
I do. The main reason is that I know it better and I feel it is easier to know it well thanks to good documentation and relative simplicity (compare to Linux). First class ZFS support is another reason. While ZFS is available on Linux in distros I would use (OpenSuse or Fedora) it is not available by default and needs to be installed separately. Also use i3 WM and install only apps I use - a typical Linux distro which brings Gnome/KDE/Unity and lots of apps I don't need is a waste of space (on my small SSD). Though I admit that FreeBSD desktop is less user and especially novice user friendly than Linux. Another big reason to prefer Linux is closed source software. Sometimes closed source apps have Linux versions but practically never FreeBSD ones. Linux emulation works for simple apps but setting up something like Skype or Zoom (which requires camera/mic access) is too much of a work even for an experienced FreeBSD user (if possible at all).
- russnes 3y ago
  I would use FreeBSD myself if it weren't for Void Linux. You get all the extra tools and quality of life from Linux without any bloat, and it has a minimal init system. It's also very convenient to use if you need up to date software since it is a rolling release, but there are some things in FreeBSD which is better like reproducible builds. Kind of like Arch Linux but without the chaos, and the community appears to be growing!
vermaden 3y ago
Mostly of those reasons: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ Its simple and logical with lots of useful features that most people do not even know exist. Also in may aspects it makes my life easier - like with ZFS Boot Environments or Rescue subsystem - Ports and Source infrastructure for custom system/packages building. I also like the Community. Here is mine 'desktop' documentation if needed: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/ Regards.
hestefisk 3y ago
Yes I do. The main reason is stability and familiarity. Also the lack of systemd.
klibertp 3y ago
I don't run it right now (and won't anytime soon) as a desktop. Once I switched to using laptops exclusively, the driver story became too bad to work comfortably. But, I used FreeBSD on a desktop for 5 years, from 2005 to 2010. I really enjoyed using it. The reasons for that are what others already mentioned: simplicity, well-thought-out organization of the system vs. userland vs. 3rd party packages (man hier), excellent documentation always available locally, ports, jails, pf, etc. It was all nice, but the killer feature, for me, was stability. The system simply refused to die, no matter what I threw at it or how I misconfigured it. At the time, Linux was a lot less stable than it is today - it could hang forever, corrupt the filesystem, or restart in the middle of doing something. Especially with proprietary, binary blobs and apps, rare as they were, Linux had a hard time accumulating uptime. On the other hand, FreeBSD worked, always. Well, it had no other choice, given that ACPI wasn't fully implemented and it couldn't suspend/sleep - it was a desktop but also a server for some private stuff, so that was ok. Linux got much better over the years, both in kernel and userland. I have been using Fedora for close to 15 years now, and it works. I won't be going back to FreeBSD on the desktop, unfortunately. However, I'm tempted to try it again on an older laptop that plays the role of a NAS: no GUI, always connected to the router with a cable, always connected to power. I have Fedora running there, but I already use ZFS - it's great - so the switch shouldn't be hard.
- mnd999 3y ago
  Same, I used to run it a lot, but I went back to it recently and have not really managed to make it work. I'm using sway, and I have hit a whole bunch of issues: * Have to use 14-CURRENT to support my RDNA2 graphics card at all. This was not simple. * Systemd sucks, but on Linux when I start a sway session it co-ordinates all the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr / pipewire / pipewire-media-session (I think). There doesn't seem to be a freebsd equivalent for user level services. Although dbus / consolekit seems to be doing something, I don't understand why or how. * Sound is just broken. My usb headset gives constant loud feedback, by bluetooth dongle spams the dmesg until it eventually gives up and my hda card seems to work in all the mixers but no sound is forthcoming. * Firefox with wayland on just loses the compositor connection almost instantly. Alacratty seems fine though, as is xwayland. * My webcam doesn't work, in firefox it's blank, in chrome the video is corrupted. * I have no idea how to configure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to get created a login with the right permissions etc on tmpfs. I could leave it on zfs of course but apparently that's problematic.
krylon 3y ago
The last time I did was around the time PC-BSD became TrueOS, forcing me to reinstall. Running X11 gave me some kind of trouble afterwards, so installed vanilla FreeBSD, which gave me trouble, too. So I installed Debian and haven't looked back. That was on a ThinkPad x220, which supposedly is supported well by the BSD systems, and it did run well with PC-BSD. But I figured I was getting too old for fiddling around all weekend to get it to work, and Debian just worked(tm). Before that, I used FreeBSD on my desktop roughly from 2003 to 2005, mostly because I liked its simplicity and it did feel snappier than GNU/Linux at the time.
School-Cotton 3y ago
I use exclusively Linux now because of work, but in the past I ran FreeBSD on the desktop because I like tinkering and taking things apart to see how they work, and this is much easier with FreeBSD than any Linux distro I know of. Same reason I prefer emacs to other editors. Want to see how the “grep” command works? Just go to /usr/src/usr.bin/grep and read the source. Modify and reinstall it if you like. On Ubuntu this would be a huge chore of figuring out what package the command comes from, wrestling with apt-get source and dpkg-buildpackage, tweaking your apt settings to not immediately replace your custom-built one with the upstream version, etc.
gruturo 3y ago
A coherent userland (not without occasional warts, but without stuff being deliberately, maliciously ignored, broken or replaced to foster someone's agenda). ZFS as a first class citizen, without wondering if Oracle will show up and take the ball away. Jails, although that's not super relevant to the desktop experience. I won't mention systemd, although I truly dislike it (though I have no particular attachment to init scripts, I was quite fond of Solaris' SMF for example). The absence of snap and whatever horrors Canonical keeps pushing is another plus, but I'm in not in a good position to judge its impact as I'm blissfully ignorant of how bad they are, I just stumble in the occasional horror story. Biggest thing I'm missing and wish I had: Docker. Jails may be technically better, but the world went another way and they have no functional ecosystem.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  That seems to be the one advantage separating kernel from user space has provided. At least in my experience, jails may break when the host OS gets updated and the jail isn’t upgraded in lock step. That means having 1+n upgrades for every minor version update. Requiring a docker container to have a user space which matches the kernel kind of defeats the purpose.
  - toast0 3y ago
    This shouldn't normally happen, generally you can run a new kernel with an older userland (the documented upgrade process for the main root is upgrade kernel, reboot, upgrade userland, so at least part of userland needs to still work), and a chroot jail is mostly an independent userland. You may need to ensure the kernel is compiled with backwards compatability if your userland is very far off, and sometimes you see problems with syscall details: 13.0 released with a bug that some ifconfig arguments wouldn't work with a 12.x binary; and I've run into problems with the cpu pinning syscall when the bitmask size increased (this was recently fixed upstream, although I ran into it years ago), etc, so it's not unheard of, but it's fairly rare, in my experience.
- fullstop 3y ago
  > ZFS as a first class citizen, without wondering if Oracle will show up and take the ball away. Is this still true now that FreeBSD is using the ZoL/OpenZFS tree?
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
FreeBSD has - can have - better ZFS support than Linux. Ubuntu comes close, but then you're on Ubuntu...
- vermaden 3y ago
  Ubuntu has only fraction of what FreeBSD has when it comes to ZFS. Several things that Ubuntu misses: - lack of ZFS Boot Environments - https://is.gd/BECTL https://is.gd/BECTL - https://is.gd/BEADM https://is.gd/BEADM - no bootloader integration - still requires ancient EXT4 or XFS /boot to start system ... and while the version of ZFS is newer on FreeBSD you can always install these packages and have LATEST OpenZFS available: - sysutils/openzfs - sysutils/openzfs-kmod Hope that helps.
efficax 3y ago
Ran it for a long time, mostly I liked the simplicity of it over linux, which with systemd + udev etc has become much harder to configure easily just by reading through the files in /etc. The way you configure FreeBSD has been basically the same since 1998, so I haven't had to learn new magic with whatever trend is taking over the linux world. On modern linux, without a browser open to google shit constantly it's a real challenge to make even little quality of life changes. And Linux binary compat on FreeBSD was (maybe still is?) very good. Lately I'm on linux though since I need docker for my job workflow.

chungy 3y ago

I like Wireguard being in base now.

codetrotter 3y ago
Nice! I’ve been running a WireGuard VPN for a few years now, to which my FreeBSD servers, my Linux machines, my macOS laptop and my phone all connect. I use this VPN for internal traffic between my machines only. Not as a tunnel for Internet destined web client traffic. I have set up my FreeBSD servers and my Linux machines to have sshd listen on the WireGuard address. On my iPhone I connect to the WireGuard server that I run. Then I can ssh to all of my machines. The machine that runs the WireGuard server to which all of the other machines connect, runs FreeBSD :)
cgeier 3y ago
Agreed. And with less drama this time around.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  true. kind of a low bar thou
- favorited 3y ago
  And hopefully fewer buffer overflows as well.
Gud 3y ago
Finally!

cyberpunk 3y ago

> The mergemaster(8) utility has been deprecated and will be removed in FreeBSD 14.0 This is a bit of a bummer, though. I did just try to use etcupdate for the 13.2-RELEASE upgrade and it hung forever trying to grep for something in /etc/default/devfs.rules, so I had to fall back on mergemaster again... Oh well, maybe a clean install when 14 is out and it'll behave better. Congrats on the release!

ZeWaren 3y ago
I 100% agree that the move to etcupdate should have been documented better. I also ended up in situations when I had to manually fix systems after upgrading.
voytec 3y ago
Haven't had issues with etcupdate(8) on 14-CURRENT recently. Earlier each time I'd get "Conflicts remain from previous update, aborting" or some warning about inability to remove non-empty directory followed by "Old directories removed".
throw0101c 3y ago
14.0 is pencilled in for July: * https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/schedule/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/schedule/ One can continue using 13.x until 2026: * https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup
emaste 3y ago
> I did just try to use etcupdate for the 13.2-RELEASE upgrade and it hung forever trying to grep for something in /etc/default/devfs.rules Would you be willing to submit a bug for the etcupdate issue? Or, just reply here with as much detail as you can recall about how you ran it?
- cyberpunk 3y ago
  Sure; i will flip back to old be again tonight if i have some time and give it another go. Will file a bug if I can reproduce it.

jmort253 3y ago

I tried FreeBSD on ARM64. I couldn't get the browsers, like Firefox or Epiphany, to load without crashing. I'm not sure if it was something I was doing wrong or if the ARM ecosystem just isn't well supported yet. I was also running in a VM with QEMU. On the surface, FreeBSD sounds cool. I liked that I could boot directly to a console and then run the GUI only if I wanted to. Everything felt more modular. It reminded me of the days before Windows 95 when I could just use DOS to save precious memory and CPU bandwidth. Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else. Maybe it was just because it was running in a VM. Maybe it was because it's ARM. Not sure. I'd love to hear others experiences with FreeBSD on ARM.

matrix12 3y ago
Same experience with Browsers. Only Surf never dies.
- mnd999 3y ago
  Firefox on Sway with wayland enabled seems to lose the compositor connection almost instantly.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ ah, the memories this + dwn https://dwm.suckless.org/ https://dwm.suckless.org/ then I said to myself "why am I wasting so much time tinkering with stuff that gains me nothing" and moved on in my life
  - anthk 3y ago
    Eh, I disagree. WMaker+Luakit makes my netbook work. Anything else under i686 it's a no-no.
  - Zababa 3y ago
    I had the opposite experience with dwm. I don't like cycling through overlapping windows on the same "desktop", and I don't like taking the time to place windows correctly. With 2 screens, I have 18 "desktops", which is more than enough, and the automatic tiling is exactly what I want. On the other hand when I use GNOME/KDE/Windows I'm always losing lots of time navigating. Also I must have some kind of curse because even with high-end computers I've never had one of those run really smoothly. My current work laptop is on KDE, and when I use a shortcut to open a terminal it takes 200/300ms. I think it also helps that I've never really tinkered with it. I took someone's build that had a few things I wanted, and I think that's it. In contrast, I spend more time on a regular desktop environment setting up shortcuts.

kmbfjr 3y ago

I really enjoy FreeBSD, but it sometimes comes with package bugs that never seem to get fixed. Fortunately they seem to be very edge case issues, like the latest I have found that Postgis on Postgresql is broken.

MrResearcher 3y ago

From https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/cuda.84926/#post-564624 https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/cuda.84926/#post-564624 > That doesn't get us full CUDA support, but we can run OpenCL apps at least (with x11/nvidia-driver, x11/linux-nvidia-libs and the nv-sglrun script from emulators/libc6-shim). And NVENC if you bother to compile it. Why would you want to limit yourself to the operating system that cannot train, say, a pytorch model on your nvidia GPU? We had some success running inference on CPU, which works for as long as the model isn't that large. But that doesn't scale for larger models, where you also want to batch requests and run them all at once on GPU.

crest 3y ago
Maybe because you have different requirements and preferences (than running CUDA applications)?
johnklos 3y ago
Maybe people don't want to support a vendor locked environment that requires overpriced hardware that loses support quickly.

noncoml 3y ago

Last time I tried FreeBSD, hoping to use it for my NAS server, I stumbled upon this bug: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=173541 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=173541 I didn’t get much confidence to trust it with my data if something as basic as the system load counter is broken for 10 years and engineers think it’s not worth fixing. (Note that the bug is closed as fixed, but it’s not fixed and the problem is still there) Edit: who downvotes this for just linking to a bug in FreeBSD?! :-/