First FreeBSD 11.0 rc lands

Daemon-wranglers, draw your pentagrams; crash test dummies, strap on the helmet: the FreeBSD project has announced the first release candidate in its version 11.0 cycle is available for download. As well as the usual installation images, there are virtual machine FreeBSD 11.0 images for AMD and i386; Amazon EC2 images and …

[asdf]

Gee I wonder if 11.0 will finally allow FreeBSD to work in seamless mode in Virtualbox (doesn't last I tried). Suspend and resume (when not in VM) not being borked for most hardware would be nice as well (not that it matters really until it gets a native Steam client with good game support in oh FreeBSD 20 or so). Works brilliant at work on servers I suppose. Because I am in full poop flinging mode I absolutely loathe how systemd was implemented but FreeBSD shows some of the reason why it was.

[asdf]

>Works brilliant at work on servers I suppose

OpenBSD is still better for many enterprise roles especially internet facing servers (better security, more pure UNIX). Plus its better for a home browser VM (X forwarding through ssh). Admittedly having ZFS does give FreeBSD a big edge in NAS and fileserver roles though. Horses for course I suppose.

[asdf]

Since I am on a roll. FreeBSD is also more scalable and tends to have better performance than OpenBSD but usually less than DragonFly and significantly less than Linux. It does have more software than the other BSDs but again less than Linux. Also Solaris tends to be better in many of FreeBSDs enterprise roles if FOSS is not mandatory. I wish FreeBSD/PC-BSD where ready for the desktop at home which really should be the sweet spot they are shooting for to give a viable alternative to what Red Hat is doing to Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

If by ready for the desktop at work as well adding play-time roles, I don't think you'll ever see any system other than Microsoft or its ilk. There will be a mainstream corporate "desktop" and if you want it to run at home just as it does at work, you're choices are down to budget and budget (corporate-alike budget and play-time budget) in that box format. I don't care if you call it time-sharing/the-Cloud, plain-ole-desktop-gamer-deluxe, or more than likely kiosk's everywhere to operate your personal device anytime-anyhow.

When I set out on a quest to step back into the shadows, dump Windows, there were tick-marks galore by not a thing to do with gaming or other home roles for my machines. Not even compatibility with Microsoft Office. That's for the tablets and laptop. My idea of playing is decidedly odd, there's all I need in 11.0. And some interesting work coming along as well.

[FrankAlphaXII]

I ditched Linux two years ago on my Unixlike desktops for PC-BSD and moved my servers over to FreeBSD. And Red Hat had nothing to do with it. For my use cases the BSDs work better than Linux did without some of the common linux annoyances, plus in my experience both Free and PC-BSD possess a much more civil community without a pathological opression complex and outright hostility toward people trying to use their software that still runs rampant.

Parts of the Linux community also seem to me like they would rather bicker over pointless bullshit like init systems instead of fixing long standing but difficult issues like FOSS GPU drivers STILL sucking, file systems, an antique display server, and the like. Just because Systemd is the cool kids pet hate now doesn't mean any of tbat shit magically went away.

[MacroRodent]

Drivers

instead of fixing long standing but difficult issues like FOSS GPU drivers STILL sucking,

Doesn't the blame here belong more to information-hiding hardware vendors?

(If I were the Great Dictator, I would prohibit the sale of any computing-related hardware, unless full programming information is made available for at most nominal cost, and without NDA restrictions.)

[asdf]

>If by ready for the desktop at work as well adding play-time roles, I don't think you'll ever see any system other than Microsoft or its ilk.

By its ilk do you mean Linux and Mac OS X also because both of those platforms support a decent amount of games through Steam without having to fsck with and pray with Wine. Windows is a no go with the direction its going privacy wise even as an occasional boot partition for me.

>Parts of the Linux community also seem to me like they would rather bicker over pointless bullshit like init systems instead of fixing long standing but difficult issues like FOSS GPU drivers STILL sucking, file systems, an antique display server, and the like. Just because Systemd is the cool kids pet hate now doesn't mean any of tbat shit magically went away.

Yes I agree Linux has lots of warts and I pick out systemd mostly because it shows the direction RH is almost single-handedly yanking Linux (not mention shoving a bunch of shit into PID 1 is a lot more serious than bitching about just init scripts). FreeBSD has a lot more worts for anything but server usage. I ran a PC-BSD desktop for some time and sorry its not there yet. The software update system alone is real shit on it. Hell even Debian's gotten that right for a few decades now. Will say though I agree whole heartedly the community tends to be a lot better and buys much more into the UNIX philosophy. Guess its quickly becoming an either or proposition (only all around ready for prime time at home desktops are all hairball OSes including increasingly Linux).

[asdf]

not to nitpick but

> instead of fixing long standing but difficult issues like FOSS GPU drivers STILL sucking

Are they really better on BSD? Granted Linux has more developer resources but most of those work for companies with agendas.

>file systems,

ZFS is great for many use cases but requiring up to 8 gig of memory for a FS to run reliably in a VM is horse shit.

>an antique display server

Shared by BSD and trust me what RH has planned for a replacement is F-35 replacement quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I daresay that Qubes OS is what you want for your browsing...

[asdf]

problem with Qubes

Qubes OS is bare metal only (doesn't run in VM) which also means no Steam or basically anything else hardware intensive due to everything running in full VMs. Not to mention that recent Xen security vulnerability showed just how fragile Qubes security can be (though to be fair this can happen to any of the VM solutions). My current solution is to run LMDE (no systemd as init system for now, woot) which gives me Steam and then for web browsing run Midori (only full featured browser fast enough) on QEMU/KVM virtual machine running OpenBSD and simply forward X over ssh host to guest (X security extension on because is an untrusted app running on the main Linux X). If you copy over your gtk3 theme to the guest you get the bonus of the app looking native to LMDE (no cut and paste to other apps due to X security extension which is good) and no having to putz with SPICE (except for console) or VNC guest X resolutions and crap.

[enerider]

Recently had a play with FreeBSD 10.3 - the radeon driver seemed to spool up fine for the R9 270 I presently use.

freebsd-update handles the OS-level updates, while pkg handles the application updates.

freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.3-RELEASE <- download release upgrade bits, confirm changes

freebsd-update install <- install the kernel changes for the above, reboot, run again to install the rest of the OS updates.

The package management "pkg" utility is much like apt-get to use.

Display server is still Xorg - I don't really see that changing in a hurry.

ZFS in a VM? Beyond testing things, why would you do this? o_O (ZFS requiring gobs of RAM to run has been a ZFS thing since ever - not just limited to VMs!)

[asdf]

OMG Fsck Captchas and Fsck Cloudflare

Lost initial post so this will be brief.

>The package management "pkg" utility is much like apt-get to use.

Yep shot was intended at PC-BSD and its flaky as PBI system and update GUI that is as likely to hose your system as upgrade or get stuck where it can never apply an update but bitch about it constantly.

>ZFS in a VM? Beyond testing things, why would you do this?

PC-BSD and Solaris 11 both basically require ZFS. FreeBSD (minus ZFS) is better for a VM but is an assload of work to setup a decent desktop and still doesn't support seamless mode in Virtualbox last I checked.

[asdf]

Re: OMG Fsck Captchas and Fsck Cloudflare

>and still doesn't support seamless mode in Virtualbox last I checked.

Forgot to mention neither does PC-BSD but Solaris actually does (funny that with both Solaris and VBox being Oracle projects). Of course Solaris 11 using ZFS still requires 2 gig memory very minimum for the VM and Firefox on Solaris is currently stuck on version 31 badly out of date so its not a good VM browsing solution even on Windows. Plus it is a b*tch to get your computer to hibernate with a Solaris VM running. Because I have to use RHEL 6 at work anyway I just use that as web browsing VM for my windows machine at work. Pretty funky still being on a 2.6 kernel (yes I know lots of backports but still) but being able to run Firefox 45 lol.