In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop 487
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying — at least I've said it many times — that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'"
Performance gets eaten by old software (Score:4, Interesting)
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And, those are the real situations where you need the performance you allegedly get by using BSD. Honestly, for most day to day purposes eeking a few extra performance percentages out of a box is not all that big of a deal. Most computers are more than powerful enough to do most of what we want them too most of the time. This is true even in server class installs except at the most cutting edge.
When I really need the most performance out of a box (HPC, high end servers, etc) I'm going to spend the money
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If you're concerned with being up to date, you use ports which are rarely much out of date. Except maybe for some of the less popular ones.
And really, you should be rolling your own as you can optimize them for use with more modern processors.
Re:Performance gets eaten by old software (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, it works well for chumps like Facebook and the the NY Stock Exchange, but no one is using it for serious . . . um, wait . . . nevermind.
Sorry, but it's not worth the time (Score:4, Informative)
Are you really suggesting that the time I spend will "come back in spades?"
Sorry, but as a longtime FreeBSD user and having wasted days of my life getting the graphics card to work and then tuning every last parameter, I'll take Ubuntu or Fedora on my desktop, thanks.
Sorry, but it's not worth the time and whatever "spades" you're getting paid pack in are 99% emotional, not physical.
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It is one thing to look at somebody else's work product and be impressed. It's an entirely different thing to look at your own and decide that, yea verily, that was a nearly optimal way to spend your time. (The major difference is that you usually have a much better idea of how much time and frustration you spent than what someone else spent.) Unless your objective is making computers run fast or maintaining the OS, time spent tweaking things at a low level -- which FreeBSD requires -- is probably not wo
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I was expecting this one: https://www.xkcd.com/963/ [xkcd.com]
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You must not have been very good if you had that much trouble. I started using FreeBSD over a decade ago and I never had that much trouble getting my graphics cards to work. Some of them weren't supported at all, so I just used the VESA, but once I started buying with FreeBSD in mind I never had that kind of trouble either.
If you're taking that much time and effort to tune a video card you're never going to get the time back, and it doesn't matter what OS you use, in my experience FreeBSD doesn't take any m
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Ever heard of Gentoo [gentoo.org]? It's quite a bit easier to use than your BSD ports system.
That's bull. Ports are turnkey, dead simple to use.
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Yeah, that's exactly what I was wondering. I actually RTFA'd to see if the author had any sort of real statistics, but he really doesn't; the one thing that's presented as any sort of evidence is Netcraft's list [netcraft.com] of most reliable hosting companies for February, which is pretty meaningless. Sure, the top three are running FreeBSD, but every other company on the list is running Linux (besides nu
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Unless the Linux admin needs PPS or ZFS. Speaking as someone who had to implement PPS in Linux, there have been many times where I wished I could just use FreeBSD. I couldn't because there were board support packages for Linux that weren't close to being available for any of the BSDs.
Benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)
These benchmarks [phoronix.com] say that Linux is usually faster than any BSD flavor.
As for stability, I can't find any definite stats on this. Personally, haven't seen a Linux crash since 1997, and that's a pretty damn long time.
Re:Sorry, but it's not worth the time (Score:4, Insightful)
One time we installed NetBSD on an old laptop. It ran ok so long as you kept the power supply in the office freezer. Otherwise it would start to smoke. No graphics card or wifi, but that's to be expected. And USB devices were pretty hit and miss.
I'm sure BSD (in general) has probably come a long way since then, but I really don't care to find out. Installing a strange new OS doesn't give me satisfaction anymore. I haven't even booted into Linux for a couple years. And I've gotten too lazy to bother with Windows and their crazy DRM schemes. At the risk of sounding like an fanboy, Apple really did something right when they bought NeXTStep. OS X is perfectly positioned at the intersection of power vs convenience. It would be very hard to give up. I'm not exactly thrilled with iOS creeping in, but I suppose if they screw OS X up I can always just install an old version.
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At least it's not Unity or GNOME Shell. Like any other *NIX multiple DE's can be installed as well. I keep a lightweight WindowMaker session configured.
Re:Sorry, but it's not worth the time (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, as an experienced FreeBSD user, it's not likely you would have made this post in the first place. How long have you actually been running FreeBSD anyway?
Yet another example of the helpful attitude of the FreeBSD community.
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If you've got any real experience (like a week of use...) with FreeBSD, you know that FreeBSD is dead simple to use, has amazing documentation, and a very helpful user community. However, you literally can't install your first port without discovering that system tuning is automatic/done at compile time. Xorg is also the same between Linux and FreeBSD, again something that any real experience would teach.
No longtime BSD user would have made any mistakes as the thread starter did with wasting hours tweaking the graphics card or the system. In fact, not even a week old newbie would make those mistakes. The thread starter poster revealed himself as a clueless, FUD-spreading troll.
I've got nine years experience with FreeBSD. I started at 4.7 and I stopped at 8.0. Maybe something radical has changed, but last time I looked, dead simple would be an outright lie. Documentation may be amazing, once you understand it. The handbook is ok. The rest, not so much. As for the user community. Have you read the posts from that community on this thread? Read your own post. If you are an example of a helpful community, I'd hate to see what you consider rude and obnoxious.
Gnome 2 and KDE 3 (Score:3)
I dual boot my Linux desktop, and spend a lot of time in FreeBSD (I used PC-BSD, which installs pretty easily). These days, one of its advantages is that you can still have a KDE3 or Gnome2 desktop - worth it indeed!
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"These days, one of its advantages is that you can still have a KDE3 or Gnome2 desktop - worth it indeed!"
There are plenty of other desktop options which are lighter and faster than either of those. Not worth it to me.
m-( (Score:4, Insightful)
We switched our last servers from FreeBSD to Linux about 10 years ago because FreeBSD had crappy SMP support. Seriously, why does something like this get posted to
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These stories get posted so that people have threads where they can say "Netcraft confirms: FreeBSD is dead" ... and have it be remotely on topic.
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I'd mark you troll if I hadn't already posted in this particular thread. It's been 10 years, there has been substantial work on SMP in the interim. I did take a quick look to see if there were any comparisons of the two and couldn't find any that were even remotely recent. The most recent being FreeBSD 5 and 6 against a Linux kernel 2.6+, which is hardly recent enough to consider current.
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Not to be mean but I do have wonder about this statement. "Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics."
What if you spend that extra time to also tune the Linux box. I am not a BSD hater but last time I checked Linux had better support for SMP and in my experience it has been very stable and performs
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Wow -- not a BSD user, but isn't basically every non-netbook computer (and some of those) sold these days multiprocessor?
Re:m-( (Score:4, Informative)
Re:m-( (Score:5, Informative)
Could you elaborate?
I have an AMD 1090T (6 cores @ 3.2 GHz) that I've run FreeBSD 8.2 and Debian 7 on. I run Povray 3.7 [povray.org], which is multi-threaded (compared to the prior version which was not), on this machine and was testing out OSes. Using the latest gcc version for each OS (4.6), it turns out running on FreeBSD is about 15% faster than on Debian running the standard benchmark:
FreeBSD 8.2, gcc 4.6, -march=barcelona
Render Time:
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 2 seconds (2.390 seconds)
using 9 thread(s) with 2.763 CPU-seconds total
Radiosity Time: No radiosity
Trace Time: 0 hours 3 minutes 10 seconds (190.466 seconds)
using 6 thread(s) with 1113.568 CPU-seconds total
Debian 7.0, gcc 4.6.1, -march=barcelona
Render Time:
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 2 seconds (2.277 seconds)
using 9 thread(s) with 2.648 CPU-seconds total
Radiosity Time: No radiosity
Trace Time: 0 hours 3 minutes 38 seconds (218.326 seconds)
using 6 thread(s) with 1277.363 CPU-seconds total
Hardware Failure Mitigates OS Stability (Score:3)
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Does that mean Windows 2000 Server is better than Linux or FreeBSD? No! It means that anecdotes like these aren't helpful at all.
Re:Hardware Failure Mitigates OS Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Three Year Old Server, is time to retire the hardware, and replace it with new equipment.
2) Same box for 10 years, sounds like disaster waiting to happen (Hardware wise), and I surely wouldn't want anything mission critical on it.
3) Ten year old box is a PIV era machine, with perhaps 3.6 GB ram, my current laptop has more power and ram and could run that machine in the background in a VM.
4) A single UPS failure shouldn't break mission critical server, as they would have dual power supplies and run on independent Power circuits, with generator backup.
However after reading #1 and #2 you realize that this is a theme that is building. THAT is why people don't believe these types of trolls.
It's the software (Score:2)
FreeBSD ports just aren't as comprehensive as Debian's repository.
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If you want current software, run unstable.
Hostile community (Score:2, Interesting)
The FreeBSD community takes a "blame the user" stance that is going to alienate most desktop users, who want to use the machine to get something done and don't want to be held up by snafus that may take days to fix.
Much of BSD's documentation is wrong or vague, many things are still broken within the OS and especially in the parts a desktop user would use, and when there is a problem, there's nowhere to go for a clear, quick solution.
A friend of mine installed FreeBSD on some older hardware and couldn't get
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Who has the time? (Score:2)
When I have a list of 200+ servers and VMs that I'm responsible for, as well as the applications that run on them, who has time to tune each server? While a nice idea, it's simply not practical at the scale most large businesses run at.
We used to use FreeBSD on some servers, but they all quickly became dead ends, as OS patches and upgrades were painful and time consuming. Now we're a SLES house.
Use Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)
If you want your Operating System tuned and customized to your hardware can't you just use Gentoo Linux? Then you won't lose the benefits of the better support that Linux has.
more stability? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Every OS is as stable as the user.
Also, if you apply updates you need to restart those services. If X.org gets updated then you might as well restart you computer. (FYI: X.org runs below all the GUI stuff). I think Windows and Linux are about as stable as an OS. I run windows at home, Linux at work. So I do experience both. All crashes and reboots I had so far I could relate to: "updates on critical parts" or "hardware problems".
I do have to say that hardware problems are usually easier to diagnose in Linux
Re:more stability? (Score:4, Funny)
Every OS is as stable as the user.
So, you are saying that Free BSD is not very stable? Because every FreeBSD user I have ever met has been among the most unstable people I know.
2012 (Score:2)
2012: The year of the FreeBSD desktop? Hurry while we still have time before the Mayan calender and the asteroids and Nibiru hit!
A tale of three tries (Score:2)
Frankly, I've tried using FreeBSD three times in my life and gave up each time. It's just too bleeding involved to get it up and running to your expectations especially when there's a Debian installation that I can have up and running to perfection in about an hour.
From memory, the stumbling block was inevitably drivers, and often when you couldn't get your NIC working, it decidedly becomes a chore. I refuse to even try to recollect the veritable nightmares that I experienced trying to get my graphics card
Hurr durr? (Score:2)
Very well done, editors.
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Once you've ridden the learning curve and spent some time actually getting to know the innards, you may decide you'd be better off running FreeBSD on the next set of Web servers, SMTP relays, or application servers you build.
I guess even the submitters don't RTFA.
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You would have found it if you read the title: "In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop" :-D
You mean the title of the stub? That's not the title of TFA:
"Why aren't you using FreeBSD?
FreeBSD is a free, fast, stable, feature-rich operating system. If you've never looked into it before, you should."
Granted you have to read the first paragraph to see that he's writing about servers, but surely that's not too much to ask for a story submission. At no point through the entire article does the author mention BSD on a desktop computer. Only servers.
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In fact, at the end of the article, in the concluding paragraph, the last line of serious content is:
Once you've ridden the learning curve and spent some time actually getting to know the innards, you may decide you'd be better off running FreeBSD on the next set of Web servers, SMTP relays, or application servers you build
Not in a single place does the article advocate that any variant of BSD is appropriate for the desktop, save Apple's.
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Not in a single place does the article advocate that any variant of BSD is appropriate for the desktop, even Apple's.
FTFY. The article does not comment on desktop OS's at all, save that the author uses Linux on the desktop.
I'm going to be generous and assume that this was a genuine mistake.
apt-get install freebsd (Score:2)
I thought it was pretty easy to install both server and desktop. http://noone.org/talks/kfreebsd/kfreebsd-fosdem.html [noone.org]
People don't want to watch kernel compiling (Score:2)
"Here I sit, watching a freshly installed FreeBSD box run through cvsup on all ports, to be closely followed by a new kernel compilation. As the output flies by in the xterm, I find myself wondering why I don't run into more FreeBSD in the world."
There's your answer right there. Perhaps people want more from their OS than to sit watching a kernel compilation."
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Pretty much. I used to love FreeBSD. I really did. I built a server into an old Dell full-tower back before the turn of the century and ran a (admittedly useless) server off of my mindspring dial-up to learn it.
Now, though, I work for a small company wearing way too many hats, including being responsible for maintaining (but not purchasing) a few dozen rag-tag machines running the gamut of age and architecture. 'make buildworld' et al are just too damned involved and time-consuming nowadays.
I hate ubuntu wi
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FreeBSD vs Linux -- 1994 edition (Score:2)
I remember the first time I looked into FreeBSD. It was back in 1994 and I needed to run some Unix variant on my 386 and it came down to FreeBSD or Linux. At the time, FreeBSD seemed to be significantly farther along than Linux... but in a completely unusable way, to me. I was a rank newbie to Unix that had just learned how to exit 'vi' without powering down the computer. FreeBSD had almost no documentation and certainly none for somebody like me.
Linux, on the other hand, had the Linux Documentation Pro
Time equals money (Score:2)
I've installed BSD systems a number of times. They've always required more effort than a Linux box to get configured for what I want.
Sure BSD is a cool thing. To some people MS-DOS 6.11 was a great thing, too. You'd be surprised how many systems in the world are still running MS-DOS (a lot of point of sale systems). Just because something is cool or can be made to work doesn't mean it's the best for any particular use.
You could use a Porsche 911 as a dump truck, but why? You could make a pickup truck i
Theory vs Reality (Score:2)
In theory, I prefer FreeBSD. I have been running it as my primary server OS for 16 years. I have 30+ VMs running it right now. At the time they were easy to spin up an configure for my friends for whom I provide hosting.
In reality, the nearly constant state of screwed up dependencies in the ports tree makes it pretty much impossible to keep those 30 systems up to date without serious amounts of manual prodding. Keeping PHP up to date alone has drained my will to keep running FreeBSD.
At my job I maintain se
Linux isn't untweakable (Score:2)
It's even easier and faster, since you can just tweak the stuff that matters. Install something sane, perhaps debian-testing, ditch the background daemons you don't need, compile your own kernel (way easier than with FreeBSD), and compile any app that you really really care about. Done, easy, and you still get fast/easy access to the gigantic Debian software collection.
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FreeBSD has you editing a makefile with minimal documentation.
No, it has you editing the kernel description file with lots of documentation. Here is the GENERIC kernel config for x86-64 [freebsd.org]. If you want to compile a custom kernel, copy that file and modify it. You'll find a comment on every single line explaining what it does, and a longer comment above every section. Linux's menuconfig requires more keystrokes to remove options than editing that file in a text editor.
Since when... (Score:3)
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Maybe some people don't want to spend hours tweaking their system so it works. If I cannot install your OS, and run youtube movies out of the box, then it's no good on the desktop.
Also, most complains above here are in the "hardware/driver support" section.
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Same reason as Gentoo is not as popular.. (Score:2)
.... Because a rolling release, build-it-yourself based software package model is too big of a hassle (ports tree, I'm looking at you).
I've been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years. I ran FreeBSD on the desktop for many years, but I switched to running Ubuntu Linux 4 years ago on my desktop because "apt-get install foo" and "apt-get update" are about 10x simpler and faster than doing the same things using the FreeBSD ports tree, and I don't have time to deal with broken dependancies, unfetchable files, e
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I'd like to add that some facets of FreeBSD's problem are really Unix problems (that includes Linux).
For instance, is ports building relied on some sort of modern exception-handling mechanism, then we could have a system that automagically transversed upwards the edges of the graph starting from where the build tool threw the exception, instead of a system that simply signals that it borked.
Anyway, for me I think FreeBSD, since it separates the package database from the potential tools, offers a much better
Performance? Really? (Score:2)
Let's take a look at the Top500.
Both FreeBSD and Linux are free in all senses of the word. Licensing and costs are not barriers to using either one or swapping one for the other. One does not spend over a hundred million dollars on a system and chuck any old OS on it. One wants to squeeze the highest amount of performance (number crunching and data flinging over the interconnects) as one can. All things being equal, one selects for speed. One could argue that if Windows had an edge, it would have more
observations don't match claims (Score:2)
I've been running my home servers (web, mail, dialup, other) on Debian since before Debian got to version 1.0. I've run it on single processors and with SMP. I've run it on x86 and on Alpha.
I've never had stability or performance problems due to the software.
Is it possible that FreeBSD is more stable? I'll grant that it's possible, but... "the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics"? Really? No, I cannot see how. I do no
Obvious flaw (Score:2)
FTFS:
Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics.
Big deal. Yes, your machine might run slightly faster, but the simple fact is that computers spend a lot of their time idling these days (as they should). The whole point of computers is to value people time over machine time, and that means it's probably not worth the time to really tune your OS.
Same story on stability: For desktops, stability is nice, but you aren't generally trying for really long uptimes.
The title is inaccurate (Score:2)
The article talks about servers, not desktops.
Did anyone bother to read the author's own comment (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Funny)
Sir, this is /. I have NEVER read an article.
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Damn - you're right. I wondered what all that text was above the comments. I assumed it was an ad, or a Terminal session or something....
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, since when does Slashdot link to articles?
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Informative)
TFA only makes a passing mention of OS X, and doesn't acknowledge its presence on servers at all. TFA is really little more than an advertisement for FreeBSD over Linux, saying "Look! It's more stable and has better features!" while completely missing the point that Linux is stable enough for use and also has ample useful features of its own.
Linux is used more than BSD because there are more available distros, meeting diverse needs without any configuration necessary. Professional support is more readily available, and in my limited experience, even hardware support is somewhat better.
Personally, I think Apple servers don't have much market share because they're so damned expensive, and there's not much in the way of specialization.
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, you can get the "Mac Pro Server"(Oh Boy! you can by a rack shelf and then put two of them on it, for up to 4 whole sockets in 12Us! The bitchin' Radeon HD 5770(whose mini displayport and DVI outputs aren't compatible with my KVM gear) totally takes my mind off the fact that xserves would have done 24 sockets in the same space. Dual PSUs aren't an option; but does your shitbox dell server have bluetooth or S/P-DIF audio? Thought not...) or a "Mac Mini Server"(a server that supports up to 8GB of RAM, fuck yeah! Wait, you mean that "apple remote control" is the name of an attractive IR remote, not a LoM card? Shit, no wonder is seemed so cheap.)
For many people's desktop requirements, the fact that Apple refuses to make a sucky-but-wildly-inexpensive tower isn't actually a huge deal. The server market is a whole lot less forgiving of deviations from reasonable form factors and common redundancy and management features...
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You're missing the difference between a server and a component of a datacenter.
Apple's server offerings, going all the way back, have been targeted at offering a smaller organization looking for something easy to use and familiar for their small to mid sized operation. We're talking schools here with maybe several hundred students, small to medium businesses with less than say, 100 employees, that sort of thing. These types of customers typically don't even own an equipment rack, and if they do it's popul
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:5, Interesting)
So true...For me, FreeBSD adoption went like this: Debian eventually became huge stagnant swamp. To get out of it, you had to run unstable. A big mess ensued. Enter Ubuntu, the revenge, the promise. Poor documentation. Installation breakage. 6 months later, upgrade wreckage. Fsck this, I thought.
I have installed FreeBSD once. Ports may take longer, but they are much more current then Debian ever was, and than the current Linux I use, Mandriva. You have to wait for the Package Masters...Also, with ports I have a much more fine-grained control. But let's get this out of the way: you can install packages in FreeBSD, and you do binary upgrades. There are lots of tools to handle ports. With today's speeds and RAMs, it's no big deal compiling ports. Only huge software, such as Java may take many hours (use the weekend or get the binaries and that's that..) FreeBSD takes some tweaking - because all you get is a Unix with no assumptions about what color the user favors, or which icons... -, but it's not a problem for the advanced Linux user (if you're a n00b, then there's PC-BSD, which actually should be the first approach to BSDs for the user workstation these days).
I look at today's Linux and I don't regret my choice. What's the sane choice? Fedora is an experimental platform for Red Hat. That means, from time to time, they'll make you their guinea pigs...Debian can't even be considered secure (no less than twice they had their servers hacked), and who cares about dinossaurs, anyway? Ubuntu's the new Debian. Ubuntu shoves their choices down your throat and continues the Debian tradition of delivering broken software (the new GUI, etc.) and infighting. And Ubuntu is a fantasy. The only reason it exists is because there's a money-loosing millionaire backing it up. The fantasy island one day will blow up in the fanboys' face. Mandriva I find agreeable, but they don't offer many packages, and they have too few commercial partners (so why pay?) Other distros aren't even worth mentioning.
I've used expensive proprietary mathematical software for Linux on FreeBSD, using their Linux binary layer, after the Linux upgrade destroyed library compatibility (they pride themselves in having unstable ABIs).
Linux are a mess. Each one is different, full of stupid little quirks. Libraries differ in place, version, even names. FreeBSD is just as good for the desktop. The system is sane, advances by increments, has documentation, and man pages that are actually worth reading. It's a system where decisions are not made on political bases, but technical. The noise level is much lower. One of the reasons Linux makes much more headlines (besides the PR department from Big Iron, that is) is the constant noise and turmoil. BSDs are not like that...6 months later, you learn they added a cool feature. "Thou shall not fight about bikesheds."
Linux development might get more resources. But, of course it does! Linux was part of a strategy to kill Sun Microsystems and Solaris.
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:5, Interesting)
I read TFA when it was on OSNews, and it's a waste of space. I was expecting some actual points, but it seemed to boil down to 'I haven't rebooted this machine for three years! FreeBSD is therefore awesome!' When someone talks about uptime, it's a clear sign that they are an idiot: uptime is irrelevant, downtime is important. You can achieve good uptime by failing to install security updates, but it's far better to spend a minute rebooting than to spend a day cleaning up and reinstalling after a machine is compromised.
I have these reasons for using FreeBSD on the desktop:
I don't want to have to spend ages configuring stuff, or learning how to configure stuff. With FreeBSD, the stuff I learned ten years ago is still relevant. I only need to learn new things when there is new functionality. Contrast this with Linux where userspace tools change more often than Paris fashions. Just as you've learned one, it's deprecated, and then replaced by something else.
APIs are well designed and stable. A couple of years ago, I wrote some code for getting the battery status on a variety of platforms. On NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD it was a few sysctls and worked on every architecture. On Linux, the interfaces were subtly different on every architecture, but there was a 300KB library that abstracted this for you. The code to invoke this library was more complex than the entire *BSD implementations combined.
Sound Just Works. FreeBSD has low-latency sound mixing in the kernel and has a really amazing implementation of the OSS 4 APIs. Multiple applications can just open /dev/dsp, issue a couple of ioctls() to select the sample rate and so on, and away it goes. I installed FreeBSD on a NAS / Media Center box a few weeks ago. 5.1 sound output in VLC just worked[1], and I can ssh into the machine and run another music player with the display exported to my laptop without needing to close the VLC that has the sound device open to play audio from DVDs, or configure some userspace sound daemon. The kernel just does what a kernel is supposed to do: abstract the details of the underlying system (including the fact that multiple unrelated processes are running) from userspace apps. This was what made me switch from Linux to FreeBSD in the 4.x days - multiple apps playing sound at once was easy. Apparently, three sound daemons later, it's almost easy in Linux, in a hacky kind of way, as long as PulseAudio doesn't hate you as much as it apparently hates most people...
ZFS. Seriously, if you haven't used it then you don't know how awesome it is. Creating new filesystems is as easy as creating new directories. Transparent compression, deduplication, and free snapshots are amazing. Even better is the integration with the ezjail tool, which clones a base system install and creates a jail. This is great if you want to run some untrusted code, or just set up a test environment - it takes a few seconds to create a new, isolated environment where you can test things, break things, and then destroy it when you're done. I've only used it on the most recent FreeBSD machine I've installed, and after a day I started missing it on systems where I wasn't using it. There are some places where it could be better integrated, for example apt-clone on Nexenta took a snapshot, installed a bunch of packages, and then reverted the filesystem if any of them failed - I don't know of any FreeBSD equivalent yet, but hopefully pkg-ng will introduce one.
Capsicum. The first security framework I've seen that is actually well designed. It's in -CURRENT, not sure if it will make it into 9.0, but should into 9.1 if it doesn't. Most of the standard userland tools are being modified to use it, and things like Chromium have already had Capsicum integrated - a tiny diff to do fine-grained sandboxing. An increasing number of ports are getting Capsicum support too, so expect to see your favourite desktop applications start to run with the absolute minimum required privilege soon.
[1] I spent a couple of hours looking for documentation on how to configure it. Then I decided to actually test it, found that it worked already, and felt quite silly.
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A few points:
The locking of /dev/dsp is mostly ancient history at this point, even on Linux, where sound (finally) got the attention it needs. And now it actually handles multiple sounds cards (moving the sound around and stuff like that), which is nice if you are using an usb-headset and speakers, depending on the situation.
I use schroot for the usecase you use ezjail for, and from your short note it looks mostly equivalent. I tend to use either a btrfs or lvm backend.
As for creating new filesystems, I
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Interesting)
I use schroot for the usecase you use ezjail for, and from your short note it looks mostly equivalent. I tend to use either a btrfs or lvm backend.
Chroot is just filesystem isolation. It was never intended for security purposes, and can be trivially breached. Jails provide real OS and memory isolation, dedicated addresses, and even dedicated network devices and stacks. It's more analogous to Solaris Containers and Linux LXC.
Having an integrated filesystem and volume manager affords certain capabilities that LVM cannot do. Without looking deeply at the implemented capabilities, BtrFS should be comparable to ZFS. The reason for multiple filesystems is to allow independent management of each. One with primarily text files could have compression enabled. One with important data could specify multiple duplicates, which makes sure those files are stored on multiple zvols in case one fails. If nothing else, it allows you to maintain independent snapshot strategies for different directories.
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Interesting)
The locking of /dev/dsp is mostly ancient history at this point, even on Linux, where sound (finally) got the attention it needs
And yet I still regularly hear complaints from Linux users about sound-related problems.
I use schroot for the usecase you use ezjail for, and from your short note it looks mostly equivalent. I tend to use either a btrfs or lvm backend.
schroot uses chroot. Jail does a lot more than chroot - each jail contains an independent set of users, so things can run as root inside a jail without being able to escape.
As for creating new filesystems, I find that mostly a bother; what I want is just one filesystem to handle it all
I want my backups to be compressed and deduplicated. I want my hone directory to have some extra redundancy. I want my ports tree to be compressed but not deduplicated. I don't want setuid or execute flags to work on every part of the hierarchy.
The reason you want one filesystem is because you use a system where creating a new one that does what you want is expensive. Adding a new zfs filesystem is a single command and takes a few seconds (99% of which is the time taken to type the command, not the time for it to execute). Before using ZFS, I was in the same situation - I'd given up creating different filesystems for different parts of the tree. With the system I've set up to use ZFS, I currently have 24 ZFS filesystems mounted. There is no reason not to create more, and (since snapshots happen on a filesystem granularity) some very good reasons for creating new ones.
Snapshots are useful though (and supported by LVM and btrfs).
LVM snapshots are much more heavyweight than ZFS ones (which cost about as much as creating a hard link to create). I doubt you'd set up a cron job to take daily or hourly snapshots with LVM, but I wouldn't even think twice about doing that with the ZFS filesystem I use for storing backups.
Not sure about btrfs, but last I heard it wasn't even close to being production ready and, because it still uses the old SunOS-derived layering, doesn't fix the RAID-5 write hole or address half of the other things that ZFS does. Like many other Linux things, it's a superficial copy of something else, missing the parts that made the original interesting.
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:4, Interesting)
ZFS. Seriously, if you haven't used it then you [...]
The problem is that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS in stable builds is extremely out of date. FreeBSD currently supports ZFS v15 (current closed-source is v33), which means you're missing a lot of the features. No triple-parity RAID, no deduplication, no encryption, no snapshot diffs, etc.
The good news is that FreeBSD 9.0 will bring this up to v28, the version used in the last release of OpenSolaris. My home file server is running OpenSolaris with a ZFS v28 storage pool, and I'm planning on trying to migrate to FreeBSD 9.0 as soon as it's out (RC2 should be out any day now, so close...)
Of course, the downside to all this is that ZFS is now effectively closed-source, and I'm not sure if we'll ever get anything newer than v28, unless it forks...
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The problem is that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS in stable builds is extremely out of date. FreeBSD currently supports ZFS v15 (current closed-source is v33), which means you're missing a lot of the features. No triple-parity RAID, no deduplication, no encryption, no snapshot diffs, etc.
As you say, FreeBSD 9 (currently in release candidate phase) supports ZFS v28. I'm using the RC now, and deduplication seems to work pretty nicely. I've got a compressed deduplicated volume that I use for Time Machine backups from a couple of Macs. Compression is saving about 25% of the space, and deduplication another 10% (I expect this to increase, because Time Machine creates a new copy of every file even if only one block changes).
Of course, the downside to all this is that ZFS is now effectively closed-source, and I'm not sure if we'll ever get anything newer than v28, unless it forks...
iXSystems sells ZFS-based storage appliances running FreeBSD. They've
Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:5, Interesting)
The important part isn't how FreeBSD's ZFS compares with Solaris's; it's how it compares to available Linux filesystems. You're not getting triple parity or dedup support there either. The ZFS v15 is still miles ahead of any stable Linux FS for many applications. Block checksums is the feature I miss most on Linux, with good snapshot support being a close second. v15 may not have the latest snapshot diffs, but it's still better than how Linux's snapshots require LVM to work, and even then are very hackish to use.
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And you get the benefit of one of the best GUI's in the desktop world, to boot.
The desktop looks like AOL's client software from the late 90's. Best GUI is debatable.
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Yeah.... not quite.
There are BSD user-space tools. The kernel is a combination of the BSD kernel, Mach and various other bits.
It's BSD-flavoured, but it's not BSD. Look up Darwin for more info.
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No, It shouldn't. If they had a freeBSD kernel, then yes. They have a Mach microkernel based one with elements of FreeBSD 4 something ( Free BSD is currently on 8.2 going on 9 soon). Yes, the common BSD tools and environment are there, but not used in anyway by the fancy Gui. And try upgrading or replacing those. DarwinPorts and Fink both elect to create separate repositories of the same tools. Just as you can call OpenBSD OpenBSD instead of NetBSD, OSX is Sufficiently diverged from FreeBSD to be something
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MacOS X is a skyscraper in the same way a house is a skyscraper. Yes, they use some of the same parts, and use similar (sometimes the same) stuff for similar functionality, but the similarities end there.
MacOS (or as I call it) Frankenstein's OS, is a hodgepodge of at least three distinct operating systems, plus Apples own work.
Unlike Frankenstein's monster, however, Frankenstein's OS, doesn't lurch around, it's actually rather good and functional, especially after the X.2 or X.3 update when they put thread
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MacOS X is a skyscraper in the same way a house is a skyscraper.
Perhaps you haven't had your coffee yet.
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I often get modded down for posting this (probably partly b/c I post it too often), but . . .
Apple's hardware is tops, but OSX is a lesser-BSD and it would be the best of all possible worlds if a user could replace it (easily and completely) with a real one (FreeBSD, PC-BSD, or Desktop BSD).
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I'm sure I'm opening myself up for an onslaught here, but I thought all their OSX-based stuff was basically just a very elaborate FreeBSD distro.
You were mistaken. OS X's kernel is a combination of some Mach-derived code modified by Apple, some BSD-derived code modified by Apple, some Sun-written code modified by Apple, and some Apple-written code. Its libc (or libSystem) is a combination of some mostly-FreeBSD-derived code modified to varying degrees by Apple and some Apple-written code. The rest of the UN*X userland is a combination of BSD-derived code, GNU code, other upstream code, and Apple-written code. (In some places it goes with GNU cod
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Re:Shouldn't Apples count? (Score:5, Informative)
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If you use Chrome then it presumably would, as Flash is built in to Chrome.
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I assume they still don't have it. Wake me up when that happens and I will use FreeBSD on the desktop.
Your assumption is wrong. A simple search on the internet would have shown you that Flash works on FreeBSD, and it works for a while now (both 32 and 64bit). I've used it with Firefox and with Opera.
See the handbook [freebsd.org].
So, um... wake up lazy!
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They've had it for years, there's at least two different ways of doing it. The easiest way is just using Wine and the Windows version of Firefox. The other way is to just use the Linux version of Flash. And really, it's only necessary because of incompetent web developers anyways.
These sorts of FUD posts about a largely unimportant feature that isn't native, is really not conducive to a decent discussion.
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