6 ms·

> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far s

by anon3_ 11y ago

> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs. Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no concept they have of "Handbook", in the sense FreeBSD has. It's so adhoc, they're healthy, but they're in denial about how hard they make it for new people. By the time you've taken to time to learn Debian's dev warts, you're apart of the convent and no longer care about fixing the onboarding problems. But to be fair. I have day to day gripes with FreeBSD just because we're short on the manpower Linux distributions have in excess: On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I do my 90% of daily routines simpler and better on FreeBSD. If only Google / Mozilla (with all the resources they have) gave someone who could work to fix this stuff.

weland 11y ago
I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to connect to a wifi network? ifconfig <interface> <ESSID> <passphrase>. If you need some other fancy flags for those 0.1% of hotspots in the world, you can do those, too (also through ifconfig) but it's that simple. In contrast, after everyone agreed that wpa_supplicant is probably what happened after Stalin's ethereal spirit had mad sex with Hitler's ethereal spirit and their ethereal baby was incarnated, what did we do to alleviate things in Linux land? Why, we wrote NetworkManager, of course! Conservatively, 90% of today's deployments of NetworkManager exist because no one can figure out how to set up wireless without it, and we put up with its crap because wicd is waiting for us at the other end. Better yet, this is all nicely documented in the manpage. If you search for "wireless" in ifconfig's manpage, you find out all you need to know. Just for fun, compare that to man networkmanager. > On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I haven't had crashing things on OpenBSD, but yeah, a bunch of things don't work. Fortunately, they're things I don't use. If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora, but at least it doesn't hopelessly break every six months. There are Linux-only things that I sometimes need because at some point between 2003 and 2013, "portable" ended up meaning "we can probably work if you have bash in a non-standard location but that's about it" (eh, Yocto?) for which a cheap VPS is more than enough. When it breaks, I don't have to spend days trying to find out exactly what part of PolicyKit broke or where my devices are mounted this week -- I just wipe everything and reinstall.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you? What sort of hardware are you running? What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD?
  - weland 11y ago
    > What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you? The sort of things that you mentioned -- Skype, Dropbox. I also can't use OpenBSD for PCB layout (Eagle doesn't run on it; don't know about Kicad, but I have very little experience with it), but I don't really mind, because I have access to a licensed installation of Altium at work. > What sort of hardware are you running? Nothing special. It's a fairly high horsepower i7 box with 16 GB of RAM. The only component that didn't play nice with OpenBSD was the nVidia graphics card. I just bought a reasonable ATI card and it works fine. > What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD? I haven't used the browser plugin ever since youtube-dl came out, not even on systems where it's well-(ish)-supported. But if you need it in the browser, I think you're pretty much out of luck.
- bad_user 11y ago
  While I don't disagree that wpa_supplicant has been spawned from hell, I find it strange that the existence and popularity of NetworkManager is given as a clue for why {Net|Free|Open}BSD is better. You know, connecting to a WPA protected Wifi network is not the only problem users have. For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration is available of course (e.g. if you think connecting to a Wifi network is problematic, try connecting to a L2TP over IPSec VPN). There's also the issue that the simplicity exposed in your example is a little misleading. Will the system persist that command and re-execute it on boot? Will it remember my previously used Wifi networks and connect automatically should I want that? How can I view the available Wifi networks in range? Being able to connect to a Wifi network using a simple ifconfig command is great, but the notion that your 80% of use-cases is the same as everybody else's 80% is misguided at best. > If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora And therein lies my problem with your entire comment. It's not that I disagree with your usage patterns, but I disagree with your assertions in light of these usage patterns. So you're saying that xBSD is simpler / better, yet you can't use it on your laptop, as it lacks things you need. Well, no shit.
ank_the_elder 11y ago
I've used the crux linux distro (https://crux.nu https://crux.nu) because it has a similar, BSD-like package manager, it's very clean and has a great community.
- weland 11y ago
  I've been playing around with Void Linux recently (http://www.voidlinux.eu/ http://www.voidlinux.eu/). Unfortunately, even there, it's hard to escape a lot of the baroque nonsense of the Linux userland, and I eventually caved in.
mavhc 11y ago
I used FreeBSD for a while because it had ZFS, and found Ports confusing and fragile. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but the handbook wasn't much use: "here's 4 different ways to do it, we're not saying which is a good idea". Every upgrade took ages, required reading a load of documents, and broke something. There didn't seem to be an equivalent of Debian's Stable, everything was apparently the latest release.
- justwannasing 11y ago
  That's what the mailing list and the forum is for where you'd most likely told to just use 'portmaster' which is the easiest. Not that the others aren't easy, too, but it keeps tabs on dependencies for you but its best to pick one method and stick to it.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I have OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Red Hat 6 (government wanted some software run and guess who gets the $) running in my server room. Red Hat seems to be fine with yum, and I haven't had a problem yet. FreeBSD's pkg (pkg-ng technically) is ok, but I keep running into problems on upgrading because someone split a pkg or renamed it. I search but don't find a simple solution. I haven't had any problem on the OpenBSD side, but that could be because every 6 months do an upgrade with the new release. Patches are a bit harder on OpenBSD unless freebsd-update does something weird. the whole src thing in the freebsd-update bit me.
- egwynn 11y ago
  I also was frustrated with how poorly the handbook explained ports/packages. But now that I understand how they work, I feel like it’s an elegant system that works well. I just wish it didn’t take so much trial and error to figure it out.
justwannasing 11y ago
To be fair, chromium crashing is due to the increased complexity of chromium and nothing to do with FreeBSD as the maintainers have noted in their comments. They have found it increasingly difficult over the past couple of years to keep up with it though more manpower would help I'm sure. But such issues are fixed within a couple of weeks or days. the issue you speak of has to do with javascript in GMail and settings and how chromium interacts with that; not chromium directly. I don't have the issue with Firefox, and never had any issue using the latest hardware, and I don't think the lack of Skype is FreeBSD's fault either but I forget.

by anon3_ 11y ago

weland 11y ago

I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to connect to a wifi network? ifconfig <interface> <ESSID> <passphrase>. If you need some other fancy flags for those 0.1% of hotspots in the world, you can do those, too (also through ifconfig) but it's that simple. In contrast, after everyone agreed that wpa_supplicant is probably what happened after Stalin's ethereal spirit had mad sex with Hitler's ethereal spirit and their ethereal baby was incarnated, what did we do to alleviate things in Linux land? Why, we wrote NetworkManager, of course! Conservatively, 90% of today's deployments of NetworkManager exist because no one can figure out how to set up wireless without it, and we put up with its crap because wicd is waiting for us at the other end. Better yet, this is all nicely documented in the manpage. If you search for "wireless" in ifconfig's manpage, you find out all you need to know. Just for fun, compare that to man networkmanager. > On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I haven't had crashing things on OpenBSD, but yeah, a bunch of things don't work. Fortunately, they're things I don't use. If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora, but at least it doesn't hopelessly break every six months. There are Linux-only things that I sometimes need because at some point between 2003 and 2013, "portable" ended up meaning "we can probably work if you have bash in a non-standard location but that's about it" (eh, Yocto?) for which a cheap VPS is more than enough. When it breaks, I don't have to spend days trying to find out exactly what part of PolicyKit broke or where my devices are mounted this week -- I just wipe everything and reinstall.

anon3_ 11y ago
What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you? What sort of hardware are you running? What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD?
- weland 11y ago
  > What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you? The sort of things that you mentioned -- Skype, Dropbox. I also can't use OpenBSD for PCB layout (Eagle doesn't run on it; don't know about Kicad, but I have very little experience with it), but I don't really mind, because I have access to a licensed installation of Altium at work. > What sort of hardware are you running? Nothing special. It's a fairly high horsepower i7 box with 16 GB of RAM. The only component that didn't play nice with OpenBSD was the nVidia graphics card. I just bought a reasonable ATI card and it works fine. > What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD? I haven't used the browser plugin ever since youtube-dl came out, not even on systems where it's well-(ish)-supported. But if you need it in the browser, I think you're pretty much out of luck.
bad_user 11y ago
While I don't disagree that wpa_supplicant has been spawned from hell, I find it strange that the existence and popularity of NetworkManager is given as a clue for why {Net|Free|Open}BSD is better. You know, connecting to a WPA protected Wifi network is not the only problem users have. For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration is available of course (e.g. if you think connecting to a Wifi network is problematic, try connecting to a L2TP over IPSec VPN). There's also the issue that the simplicity exposed in your example is a little misleading. Will the system persist that command and re-execute it on boot? Will it remember my previously used Wifi networks and connect automatically should I want that? How can I view the available Wifi networks in range? Being able to connect to a Wifi network using a simple ifconfig command is great, but the notion that your 80% of use-cases is the same as everybody else's 80% is misguided at best. > If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora And therein lies my problem with your entire comment. It's not that I disagree with your usage patterns, but I disagree with your assertions in light of these usage patterns. So you're saying that xBSD is simpler / better, yet you can't use it on your laptop, as it lacks things you need. Well, no shit.

ank_the_elder 11y ago

I've used the crux linux distro (https://crux.nu https://crux.nu) because it has a similar, BSD-like package manager, it's very clean and has a great community.

weland 11y ago
I've been playing around with Void Linux recently (http://www.voidlinux.eu/ http://www.voidlinux.eu/). Unfortunately, even there, it's hard to escape a lot of the baroque nonsense of the Linux userland, and I eventually caved in.

mavhc 11y ago

I used FreeBSD for a while because it had ZFS, and found Ports confusing and fragile. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but the handbook wasn't much use: "here's 4 different ways to do it, we're not saying which is a good idea". Every upgrade took ages, required reading a load of documents, and broke something. There didn't seem to be an equivalent of Debian's Stable, everything was apparently the latest release.

justwannasing 11y ago
That's what the mailing list and the forum is for where you'd most likely told to just use 'portmaster' which is the easiest. Not that the others aren't easy, too, but it keeps tabs on dependencies for you but its best to pick one method and stick to it.
protomyth 11y ago
I have OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Red Hat 6 (government wanted some software run and guess who gets the $) running in my server room. Red Hat seems to be fine with yum, and I haven't had a problem yet. FreeBSD's pkg (pkg-ng technically) is ok, but I keep running into problems on upgrading because someone split a pkg or renamed it. I search but don't find a simple solution. I haven't had any problem on the OpenBSD side, but that could be because every 6 months do an upgrade with the new release. Patches are a bit harder on OpenBSD unless freebsd-update does something weird. the whole src thing in the freebsd-update bit me.
egwynn 11y ago
I also was frustrated with how poorly the handbook explained ports/packages. But now that I understand how they work, I feel like it’s an elegant system that works well. I just wish it didn’t take so much trial and error to figure it out.

justwannasing 11y ago

To be fair, chromium crashing is due to the increased complexity of chromium and nothing to do with FreeBSD as the maintainers have noted in their comments. They have found it increasingly difficult over the past couple of years to keep up with it though more manpower would help I'm sure. But such issues are fixed within a couple of weeks or days. the issue you speak of has to do with javascript in GMail and settings and how chromium interacts with that; not chromium directly. I don't have the issue with Firefox, and never had any issue using the latest hardware, and I don't think the lack of Skype is FreeBSD's fault either but I forget.