back to article GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

The first new version of GhostBSD in over a year is here. If you want to try FreeBSD, Linux's most credible rival and competitor in the FOSS OS marketplace, there's no easier way. GhostBSD, now at version 23.10.1 based on FreeBSD 13.2, has been around since 2010. Although the project has gone through some changes in that time …

  1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

    I tried GhostBSD before and found some issues with my T430. That said, Windows 10 wouldn't install on it either, had to reset the BIOS altogether to get anything sane happening. Maybe time I put GhostBSD back on it and start using it as a daily use machine again I think.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > I tried GhostBSD before and found some issues with my T430.

      Yes, I had some problems with last year's version, but this update is much smoother and worked really nicely. I couldn't really find anything to criticize, in fact. But don't worry, I will go back and have a harder look. ;-)

      1. coredump

        I've been running FreeBSD servers for years, but I think the last time I ran a graphical desktop on FreeBSD was probably back in 5.x or 6.x days, with Xorg and likely Fvwm at the time.

        Recently I've been toying with the idea of of revisiting it, and my plan was FreeBSD 13.2 or 14.0 when it releases, with Xorg and XFCE since the latter has been on my Debian daily driver.

        Now I may just try GhostBSD first, so cheers for the ideas, Liam!

      2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

        The reason I took off GhostBSD was that closing or opening the lid would cause a crash. So I reinstalled Ubuntu - same thing. Thinking it had become hardwarily unreliable, I set it aside. Someone suggested resetting the BIOS - wasn't sure what good it would do, but it cured Ubuntu, so now I just need to try GBSD again.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          [Author here]

          > closing or opening the lid would cause a crash.

          So that is a problem with suspend/resume. That means it's an ACPI issue, and step #1 with those is to update your firmware.

          Do that before anything else.

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            A lid open/close hang or crash isn't necessarily a suspend/resume problem. I have Win10 on a Thinkpad T480s with the screen power action set to "None", and it still frequently hangs hard if the lid is closed and opened. There's some Thinkpad BIOS or screen-switch bug that's triggered just by the screen switch even if the OS is set to ignore it. Could be ACPI, could be telling the video driver to switch outputs... who knows.

            I haven't tried updating the Thinkpad BIOS because I've had bad luck with Lenovo's BIOS updater in the past, bricking one machine. That one was fortunately still under warranty but I'm not eager to try it again. (Flashing the BIOS is a PC industry failure. There are too many irrecoverable failure modes. Machines should ship with two copies of the firmware and a hardware selection switch; it wouldn't add much to the cost.)

            1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

              "I haven't tried updating the Thinkpad BIOS because I've had bad luck with Lenovo's BIOS updater in the past, bricking one machine."

              FYI, I've probably done that 1000's of times across a wide range of models and never had it brick a laptop. I think you were either really, really unlucky or there was some underlying fault neither the hardware or whatever OS you were running the updater on. Ditto with HPs and Dells.

              In realty, as a field engineer of many years, it's always been company policy to flash the BIOS/firmware whenever a system board is being replaced under warranty, whether that be server[*], desktop, laptop, printer etc. (ditto for other firmware[**] on the system). I've had exactly one that has bricked in 20+ years and that was a building power outage during the update process.

              [*] But always check, when it's a server. The users may have a requirement for a specific BIOS revision although that's pretty rare these days.

              [**] eg, Intel ME and AMD equivalent, laptop webcams, NVMe SSDs, laptop batteries(!!) etc.

              1. 43300 Silver badge

                Likewise, and so far as I recall we've only ever had one machine (a laptop) bricked by a BIOS update - fortunately still under warranty so they replaced the motherboard. Must have done it hundreds or thousands of times - mostly Dell machines: desktops, laptops and servers.

  2. Hans 1

    BSD is for experts, if you work with crayons, stick to Windows, if you want something serious, go macos, it has BSD userland.

    1. R Soul Silver badge

      This.

      IMO it's the wisest thing anyone has or will post on El Reg.

      1. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

        Is it balls. It's childish nonsense.

        1. JamesTGrant Bronze badge

          Childish Nonsense Balls? A great name for a dog -‘CBalls’ for short.

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > if you want something serious, go macos, it has BSD userland.

      Yes and no.

      I am typing on macOS right now, but TBH, I like it a little bit less with every release. It's getting more and more closed and locked-down. Soon it will go Arm-only and then the Hackintosh world will end.

      And that is a key problem: Macs remain fairly expensive. All mine are 2nd hand and all but one were free or cheap, but the Arm kit is much less amenable to ripping the back or bottom off and upgrading it with cheap used off-the-shelf bits: maxing out the RAM with 2nd hand DIMMs and cheapo 3rd party SSD and HDD.

      That era's gone and it's one reason I don't like the MacBooks of the last decade or so. No upgradability.

      I like macOS: it's a good OS and it's easy.

      But the thing is that I *also* like cheap COTS hardware.

      That's where Linux comes in, but the big-name Linuxes are _also_ getting increasingly locked-down: harder to modify and infested with huge complicated fancy tools replacing the era of simple little Unix tools.

      But for that, FreeBSD is here, and so I am interested in stuff that makes FreeBSD easy.

      1. Handy Plough

        > It's getting more and more closed and locked-down

        I see this time and again. And it's bollocks. I expect better from you, Liam. The feeling of being 'locked-down', as I'm sure you know, is largely down to SIP. This can very easily be disabled, but I wouldn't recommend it. Frankly, KEXTs are a terrible idea, no software should mess with the network stack or the kernel, and the /bin and /sbin should be treated as sacrosanct by the OS if needs be. And yes, developers should absolutely sign their code. Apple should make it easier for developers to do this, but by the same token, forcing it is a good thing.

        1. that one in the corner Silver badge

          >> It's getting more and more closed and locked-down. Soon it will go Arm-only ... Arm kit is much less amenable to ripping the back or bottom off and upgrading it with cheap used off-the-shelf bits: maxing out the RAM with 2nd hand DIMMs and cheapo 3rd party SSD and HDD.

          > The feeling of being 'locked-down', as I'm sure you know, is largely down to SIP. This can very easily be disabled, but I wouldn't recommend it. Frankly, KEXTs are a terrible idea

          Anyone else getting whiplash from the sudden change of direction in this reply to Liam's comment?

          1. wolfetone Silver badge

            "Anyone else getting whiplash from the sudden change of direction in this reply to Liam's comment?"

            I'm on the phone to InjuryLawyers4U as I type this.

        2. Jamie Jones Silver badge
          Facepalm

          > "I see this time and again. And it's bollocks. "

          ... You then go on to explain how it is more and more locked-down.

          1. Cloudseer

            Software developers are restricted in the features they can add to apps because of app review, default interpreters like Python are no longer included, incrementally more features are linked to subscriptions and Apple IDs, Safari addons must be distributed via the store.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            When people say locked down, the inference is it's locked by the manufactures and you can't get the "key" to unlock it.

            If you can run an administrative command to disable something then it's not locked down. It just has a security feature enabled by default.

            1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

              That's semantics - in your example, some would say it's locked down by default, but you have the (many) keys needed to open it.

              Still, that's not what's happening here. It is indeed being locked down, just see Liams reply below this one...

        3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          [Author here]

          > The feeling of being 'locked-down', as I'm sure you know, is largely down to SIP.

          What on Earth?

          I don't give a monkey's about SIP.

          I do care that I keep my files on an HDD but my OS on an SSD, but I am not allowed to symlink the folders in my home directory to folders on another volume. They are _special_ folders that can't be moved or renamed.

          I do care that the new Music app can't stream BBC radio stations any more, and it expects me to sign in to Apple Music although I don't want to buy anything.

          I do care that the Settings app from macOS 13 on has been rewritten in Swift and it's clunkier than before. I care because a columnar layout works better on a phone or tablet but I am using a resolutely landscape Mac and it doesn't work well on this. Options that were top-level are now buried.

          I do care that the Finder defaults to tabs, which breaks drag-and-drop.

          I do care that my boot drive is now APFS and split into container volumes, and that means Disk Utility can't resize it. So I had to go and _buy_ Carbon Copy Cloner, clone the boot drive to another physical disk, then clone it back again, just so I could shrink the now-defragmented result.

          I do care that I can't freely select preferred apps, or "always open with", because that option has disappeared from the Finder's open dialog for unknown files.

          I do care that my 100% working perfectly serviceable Mac mini is down to a single current browser and I'll have to hackintosh it just to keep an OS with a current browsers soon.

          I do care that my perfectly serviceable copy of Office wouldn't install because it's too old, and had to be auto-updated which has disabled it. I liked my old 32-bit version, dammit.

          > I expect better from you, Liam.

          I could say that I expect Reg commenters to actually find out what someone is talking about and base their conclusions on that, rather than projecting, but I know perfectly well that's ludicrously unrealistic.

          None of these things are anything to do with SIP.

          Don't assume. When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            "Don't assume. When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME."

            Or, in this case, not "ME", ie "you", just "U", ie the poster :-)

            I invariably find that aphorism to not work since the person doing the assuming is normally the only one actually shown to be an ass :-)

            1. 43300 Silver badge

              It's nearly as bad as 'There's no 'I' in Team'.

              To which the best response (although not at work) is 'no, but there is a 'U' in ....'

              1. PRR Silver badge

                > nearly as bad as 'There's no 'I' in Team'.

                But there is: I in team-gif

                1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
                  Coffee/keyboard

                  Ooooh, that's GOOD! I've never seen or noticed that before. I'll keep that one tucked away in a corner of my mind for a rainy day :-)

          2. chrisdl

            > I do care that the new Music app can't stream BBC radio stations any more

            Isn't that the BBC's doing, in the same way that the "streams" on RadioPlayer now redirect to the BBC Sounds app? If you want BBC radio on the Mac Music app, you can find them here

            http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/other.asp

            and then File > Open Stream URL in Music, paste and listen.

          3. Hans 1
            Devil

            May I add:

            They removed the root drive shortcut from Finder favourites, no clear way I found to get it back except Go -> Go to Folder -> / - annoying or open / in Terminal.app.

            Every macos release consistently breaks music recording/editing software.

            May I remove:

            Tabbed Finder does not break drag and drop, it just takes some patience of yours to allow it to figure out you really want to drag and drop to the other tab - you have to hold the file over the tab for a few seconds.

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          > no software should mess with the network stack or the kernel

          Well damn. Pity about people who need to run specialised proxy or firewall setups then.

          Or people wanting to add macOS support for hardware, which generally means writing kexts.

      2. chivo243 Silver badge

        Free or little cost Apple is the way to go! I May have spent 2500quatloos in total on Apple gear in 25 years… personally, I’ve never owned any new Apple gear. I bought two M1 Mac minis for the missus and the kid. Got them on sale too.

        1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          I have 5 Macs of various vintages, never paid Apple anything and never paid more than about €25 for any of them. The latest one is a 2012 MBP unibody that I got for free, just had to add my own (spare) SSD and memory.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Very difficult to do that on much beyond that year :-S

      3. Hans 1
        Devil

        Fair point, nothing to add, except my Apple rant - soldering RAM and SSD is a crime, since at least 1995, if not sooner!

        1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
          Windows

          RAM and SSD

          I absolutely agree, where the RAM and SSD are on separate chips.

          However, pretty much the one and only thing Apple have done of which I approve in the last couple of decades is to move the RAM onto the CPU package itself. Conceptually, even more problematic than soldering it to the motherboard, but that really is where the memory belongs, now that we have the transistor count to do it. Me, I'd love a system with both RAM and SSD on the CPU package - I wonder if Qualcomm will oblige?

          GJC

          1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

            Re: RAM and SSD

            I see where you're coming from, but SSD has a limited lifespan. There has to be a fallback. I can perhaps see the advantage of a small amount of SLC, but the system mustn't be landfill once the SLC fails.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        If I could sort out games compatibility in BSD I would jump like a shot for the home PC. I had a MacPro G5 quad for a while, most assuredly second hand. That spent most of it's time as a box to learn BSD; though I could never get it to boot with more than 4GB of RAM installed. The system theoretically could take 16, not that MacOS of the day could really made use of it either. That machine had the very odd pre-boot environment (Forth based?), a whole novelty in it's own right.

        When the PSU died the reality of trying to keep such unsustainable hardware going kicked in and I never went back; with Manjaro living on the AMD boxen for the majority of the time.

        Vassal I can build myself of course. Anything lacking sources becomes reliant voodoo command line rituals and deep system knowledge to try and run Steam for Linux through compatibility hacks. A tad beyond me at the moment.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
          Devil

          "If I could sort out games compatibility in BSD I would jump like a shot for the home PC."

          There are guides out there to getting Steam running on FreeBSD, but they look like too much of a faff to me and I've not really been a gamer since Doom and Duke Nuke'em 3D days :-)

          The Steam guides I've seen and the FreeBSD Forum posts on the topic rarely ever seem to be newbie friendly and make lots of assumptions about how much effort the user is prepared to put in and research just to be able to follow the guide.

          I suspect that's because it's primarily developed as a server OS and the fact I can use it as my daily desktop is just happy happenstance :-)

          There's enough working emulators to satisfy my occasional escapades in retro gaming like FS-UAE (Amiga), MAME, and of course ports of Doom and Duke :-)

    3. bazza Silver badge

      >if you want something serious, go macos, it has BSD userland.

      Hi, I'd like a server please. Nothing too serious you understand, just a small, common or garden server.

      1. Hans 1

        Minix is a better server than Windows, in any sense I can think of, of course, minix will never beat linux and linux will never beat BSD.

        1. sabroni Silver badge
          Facepalm

          And the Spectrum is better than the Amiga!

    4. Bill Gray

      > BSD is for experts

      I've tried a few variants of BSDs over the years and always ran into problems (I'm almost entirely a Linux user and have never gotten along well with Macs). I tried GhostBSD a couple of years back, and... it Just Worked. I think I could install it for my aged mother (who runs Xubuntu) and she'd not notice the difference much (she mostly just runs Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libre Office anyway).

      I tried it out of curiosity and because I write software that I need to compile and test on a variety of OSes. I've not tried this latest version yet, but am looking forward to doing so.

      Of course, my anecdote is not data. The machines on which I run GhostBSD have wired Internet access and generic, somewhat elderly hardware. Neither your experience nor mine can be generalized all that far. Many people actually like Windows... seems weird to me, but de gustibus non disputandum est (and such preferences really do come down to taste).

      1. JamesTGrant Bronze badge
        Coat

        I used to be pert…

        I’ll get my coat and see myself out

    5. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      BSD is for experts

      Look Mum, I'm an expert!

      Personally I frequently end up cursing whenever I have to use Linux because they've buggered about with most of the traditional Unix commands. It's really a matter of what you're used to(*), not "X is for experts, Y is for idiots". Given that I've used Unix since 1980 and BSD variants since 1984, FreeBSD is a comfortable fit for me. YMWV.

      (*) As in actual real world tests that showed the best editor is, gasp, the one you're used to!

      1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
        Pirate

        Buggering about with commands

        I set up a new Linux box recently, only to discover that ifconfig, which I've used for perhaps, I dunno, 30 years, had disappeared. I got quite grumpy.

        GJC

        1. sabroni Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: which I've used for perhaps, I dunno, 30 years, had disappeared

          Technology is changing you say?!?!

          Fuck! Time to get out of this business.....

        2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

          Re: Buggering about with commands

          Apparently, ifconfig et. al. has been on the deprecated list since about 2012. It's only recently that the main distros have started not installing it by default.

          It's probably still in the repositories in a package probably called something like "net-tools", but how much longer this will be the case is a moor point.

          I've been using networking on UNIX it seems forever (and still do for my job), and I miss it so much I go out of my way to install it and several other tools on Linux wherever I can. I also turn Vim into strict vi compatibility mode, and disable coloured "ls" output, because I find that these get in the way of my way of working,

          I still want "pg" (System 5 pager) because of muscle-memory, but I can't even get that to build from the last Linux sources any more. Might go back to the tuhs archive to get the source before it got 'Linux-ized'.

          1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

            Re: Buggering about with commands

            and disable coloured "ls" output

            Ditto. The colours are chosen for the currently fashionable light text on dark background terminal colour scheme, whereas I use black text on a white background just like the ASR 33s God gave us in the beginning. Bright yellow on white is not legible.

    6. Rich 2 Silver badge

      No it isn’t

      “BSD is for experts”

      No more than Linux is. It’s MUCH simpler to configure (/etc is a fraction of the complexity of Linux’s attempt), it doesn’t use hideous bloated lumps of crud like …well anything that Poetering deficates out which pretty much ALL current Linux’s use at least some of…, and it’s just stable, trustworthy, and it works. It doesn’t change how it works on a monthly basis - how many audio subsystems has Linux burned through over the years? It doesn’t use opaque blobs like device manager (or whatever the thing is called - actually isn’t that yet another Poetering turd?)

      There is a learning curve - of course. But again, no more than Linux, and probably less

      1. Tim99 Silver badge

        Re: No it isn’t

        Probably as a result of “what you learn first is what you tend to like", I prefer BSD derived systems. In retirement my daily drive is an iMac - For play Raspberry Pi’s.

        1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

          Re: No it isn’t

          I dunno. I learnt VMS first and hated Ultrix; then I loved Ultrix and hated System V; then I learnt System V and... well it, was okay, and SVR4 was better than SVR3. Then Linux distracted me and actually I kinda liked it from the outset, but hated BSD when I happened upon it a couple of years later in spite of my former love of Ultrix. Now I love FreeBSD. I still have a fondness for VMS, tho', and never liked MVS (does anyone?)

          1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

            Re: No it isn’t

            MVS requires a mainframe mindset. If you can't use 3270 type mainframe terminals, you're almost certainly not going to get on with MVS.

            In my stint at IBM as a UNIX/AIX specialists in the early '90s, I nearly threw the keyboard through the screen of a 3278 several times, which was all I had to use for the first few months of working there. Eventual reconciled to it, but still had to use MYTE, x3270 and HCON for access to RETAIN, Ehone and NOSS/PROFS, even when I had AIX available on my desk.

            1. Julian Bradfield

              Re: No it isn’t

              I grew up on MVS, as filtered and made manageable by Cambridge Computer Lab. If other old farts haven't yet noticed, you can now sign up to IBM Zxplore, and get to learn the real thing on real z/OS systems! Of course, these days, you can do it under Linux if you don't want to use proper MVS.

            2. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

              Re: No it isn’t

              I don't mind 3270 terminals; their interfaces while a bit inflexible in some ways are often well-organised, and they have nice keyboards. One of my earliest projects was faffing about with 3270 over SDLC so our Unix minis could access MVS from VT220 terminals, including having to write screen-scrapers as some people objected to having to login twice. It was admittedly quite a steep learning curve.

              PROFS wasn't so bad; or more to the point, CMS wasn't so bad as it felt much more like a tinkerer's OS than MVS/TSO.

              I've occasionally fired up MVS using Hercules to see if I still don't like it. I found it a bit more interesting outside of a production environment but I'm still glad I don't have to use it.

              1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

                Re: No it isn’t

                On a modern IBM mainframe, of course, you'd be using zOS, not MVS, technically. But while many features have been added someone used to, say, TSO and ISPF under MVS would not be surprised by the same under zOS. (Or CICS under zOS, or IMS, or what have you.)

                I have a certain affection for zOS and its various environments, just as I have for i (formerly OS/400). I wouldn't claim that they're enjoyable to use, exactly, but as an interactive user I've always found something satisfying about filling out various things on the screen and then whacking an AID key. And as a developer, those environments are weird enough to provide a lot of challenges (particularly if you don't use them frequently) while being powerful enough to not be completely frustrating.

                "How do I update this CICS test program again? Oh yes, open another c3270 terminal session to TSO and go into ISPF. Find the PDS and open the member in the editor, change some lines, submit the screen, save and exit the editor. Find the PDS with the JCL to compile the thing and submit it. Check messages to see when that finishes. Go back to the CICS session and submit the associated transaction. Wait, I need to do a CPMT NEWCOPY first to get CICS to reload the program..."

                It's ergodic, like a role-playing game where you're a programmer trying to figure out an alien OS.

                1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

                  Re: No it isn’t

                  I never quite got my hands that dirty, and remember the time I thought submitting JCL was kinda free, leaving my manager wondering why the department's bill was so big that month. It's always fun using things infrequently enough that, while you know you once knew what you were doing, it's suddenly become a new adventure all over again. I remember watching a cow-orker doing things on MVS & ISPF, thinking how quaint it was that she referred to lines as "cards" and had to type SUBMIT to make it do stuff, yet in the seconds it took her to check the log/messages/whatevs it'd been done.

                  I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to... well, everything, really, so I still call zOS (or is it z/OS? I'm too lazy to check) MVS in much the same way that I refused to add the "Open" prefix to VMS: it just seemed so superfluous. And yeah, with MVS I admit I'd probably be insisting "it's MVT really" if I'd encountered it earlier.

                  I've never used AS/400 but saw plenty in the wild (and slightly singed my hand on one) and I appreciate its place in a diverse computing environment; I think something has been lost when nearly everything is Windows or a Unix-like.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: No it isn’t

          "Probably as a result of “what you learn first is what you tend to like","

          While is no doubt true, I think the main difference is that if you go from one BSD to another, there's likely to be the same directory structure and same basic tools there. Linux has a number of different, diverging pedigrees so only really seems familiar if you stick to derivations of the same pedigree. Jump across the evolutionary branches instead of up or down, and it can feel like a different world!

    7. ChoHag Silver badge
      Devil

      That is the elitist attitude that has turned linux into what it now is.

      Linux used to be for *hackers*, before it lost its way, for whom BSD is and always was well suited.

      Closest to a beastie →.

      Can we get a "New Paris" to go next to the penguin?

    8. Mockup1974

      Real experts use Illumos.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Real experts write their own OS.

        1. Rich 2 Silver badge

          …with dip switches and a 7 seg display on a panel with a “write” button

          1. Zolko Silver badge

            Real experts write their own OS

            Real experts don't need an OS, they write their software directly to the bare metal

  3. Pete Sdev
    Go

    Nice

    Used to have PC-BSD on my main machine at home before changing to Mint.

    Might well check it out, I still miss the tidyness and stability of BSD sometimes. FreeBSD is still my preferred Server-OS.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Nice

      I like BSD, but honestly if I put it on a VM I'd probably boot it once a year. I just don't have the time for playing around with it. I mostly use my personal machine for things like paying bills and doing my tax returns, and the occasional web browsing and games.

      If I find time to get back into more academic work, or contributing to OSS, it might be a different story.

  4. bazza Silver badge

    From the article,

    >There aren't many other FreeBSD distros around.

    I thought that was kinda a founding point of the FreeBSD community, that there wouldn't be a vast proliferation.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Indeed, and apart from the idea of a FreeBSD desktop version, there isn't really any need. The setup tools are fine and haven't needed to change in decades. Yes, it may take a bit of time to understand it all, and sizing disks used to be a challenge for the unitiated, but once it's done, it's done. Installing security updates is a doddle, ports were never hard and always reliable but packages are faster.

      On the right hardware it's also a fine desktop – it will usually run on any hardware but some functionality (multimedia, video modes, etc.) might be limited.

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        The best thing about it is the consistency of it, the problem with linux is all the different ways of doing things and all the different shite that is needed to do it all. Especially for learner users following web guides. Some say choice is good, and of course it is. But just like cars have the pedals and the steering wheel generally providing a consistent UI, it would really help learners if there wasn't a hundred package managers and every online tutorial has a different one.

        If you are proficient with various flavours of linux and scoffing at this, you may be suffering "the curse of knowledge". Put yourself in the position of learners and don't give me any of this supercilious "read it on the man page" shite.

        1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

          UNIX has never really been consistent since the beginning. Just look at how you use "dd" for an example.

          BSD did make an attempt to standardize on flag and argument handling in various tools, but they built on top of the Edition 7 command set, which is why it feels different from System V derived systems which did their own cleanup sometime before System III.

          Linux tried to be all things to all people, and used the GNU toolset (mainly because the tools were mostly from the ground up re-writes to avoid copyright claims) plus other contributed tools that people think are part of GNU, but are in fact completely separate projects, tried to be a bit like System V, a bit like BSD, and in some cases nothing like either of them.

          1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

            IIRC dd's differentness was due to it being influenced by the JCL statement of the same name; ISTR more of a joke than a homage, but deliberate nonetheless.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
          Joke

          "Put yourself in the position of learners and don't give me any of this supercilious "read it on the man page" shite."

          Does Linux still have man pages? I thought they migrated to various and incompatible versions of hypertext Info pages :-)

    2. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      The BSDs don't have distros, full stop.

      A Linux distro is the kernel plus whatever user space programs the distro maker decides are right. The BSDs are both kernel and a well defined user space. If you want other stuff you install packages yourself.

    3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > I thought that was kinda a founding point of the FreeBSD community

      Not really, no. The commenters saying you are correct are also betraying their own lack of knowledge, FWIW.

      Off the top of my head and without thinking hard, I can name the following *current* distros of FreeBSD:

      * GhostBSD -- locally-installed graphical desktop with choice of Linux desktops;

      * Hello System -- locally-installed graphical desktop with in-house macOS-like desktop built from Qt;

      * Nomad BSD -- bootable live USB graphical desktop;

      * Midnight BSD -- graphical desktop with an enlarged package database and different setup tools;

      * TrueNAS Core -- web-managed run-from-SSD NAS fileserver and hypervisor;

      * XigmaNAS -- web-managed run-from-live-USB NAS fileserver.

      Former distros, now discontinued:

      * FuryBSD -- locally-installed graphical desktop. Discontinued but was the basis of the Hello System;

      * TrueOS, formerly PC-BSD -- the original easy-to-install graphical desktop distro, with its own desktop and packaging tools;

      * FreeNAS, FOSS progenitor of both TrueNAS and XigmaNAS.

      So to the commenters saying that there are no "distributions" of FreeBSD, there are ten of them.

      I may well have missed a few of course.

      Your move, chaps.

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        So to the commenters saying that there are no "distributions" of FreeBSD, there are ten of them.

        I may well have missed a few of course.

        Your move, chaps.

        As Bill Clinton said, it depends what you mean by …

        The key point about Linux distros seems to me that the user space code is entirely at the whim of the distro provider. FreeBSD provides a base system with a fixed set of user space programs that are Posix compliant. The FreeBSD "distros" you talk about are layered products on top of that core and all have the same core system including compiler and package manager, just like my machines all have FreeBSD + whatever packages I've installed (different for different machines), whereas a Linux distro would have a random package handling system (or two or three) plus a random C/C++ compiler (or two or three) etc. Linux distros are like the proprietary Unices of the 90's Unix Wars, where you were never sure of what you were getting and spent a lot of time cursing as you tried to work out how the bastards had changed the man(8) programs to be different from their rivals. I was sysadmin for six different corporate versions of Unix in the early 90s and it was hell until I developed my equivalent of the Rosetta Stone.

        Also, no FreeBSD developers ever talk about distros.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          The userland is a free choice, yes... But apart from a few packaging tools and config files, under the hood, most mainstream distros are much of a muchness. They all use the GNU libc, GNU coreutils, systemd, the same handful of desktops, etc.

          The differences are the setup program, the packaging tools, and where they keep things on what FS.

          There are outliers. Chimera is wonderfully weird. Alpine and Void are different. There are strange little router and firewall ones from CBL Mariner to OpenWRT

          ChromeOS is weird. Flatcar is server ChromeOS. Gentoo is odd. Things like Deepin and SteamOS are starting to explore ChromeOS-like tech and that's good.

          The immutable ones aren't so strange, it's just the way they are installed and updated that is weird.

          Gobo, NixOS and Guix are pretty strange though.

      2. Pete Sdev

        Didn't there used to be a Dragonfly BSD?

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Yes, and others Liam didn't mention or maybe doesn't know about. ISTR one I used for a short while that was media oriented, mainly for music and video playback. Sort of a *very* early KODI :-) I think it even could create/burn bootable video CDs/DVDs. Freesbie comes to mind, but that's not it, same era though. And then there OPNSense, which I use as my firewall/router, but I'd categorise that as an appliance, not a distro, which comes back to what someone else mentioned upthread. What exactly is a "distro"? :-)

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Dragonfly forked from FreeBSD

          Dragonfly (and others) are based on forks of FreeBSD, in some cases on very old ones. I think that the ones listed above are based on current FreeBSD.

        3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          I said distros of *FreeBSD*.

          Dragonfly is a whole different OS. So are NetBSD and OpenBSD. They are related but diverging.

    4. Rich 2 Silver badge

      @bazza - sorry. Tried to upvote you and hit the wrong button! FFS

  5. John H Woods

    You may not have to go without your favourite Linux Apps...

    ... have a look at BSD's linuxulator

  6. steelpillow Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    BSD, Linux or ... Linux

    Just because the mainstream Linux distros are turning to ratshit does not mean that they all are.

    The ecology of lighter-weight old school Linux distros is still far bigger than the BSD ecology and remains my preferred hunting ground.

    But yeah, with MATE on board (good choice!), GhostBSD is now in my radar.

    1. druck Silver badge

      Re: BSD, Linux or ... Linux

      Shame there's no ARMv8 version to give a spin on the Raspberry Pi.

      1. MikeTheHill

        Re: BSD, Linux or ... Linux

        I don't know about Ghost directly, but regular 64bit FreeBSD 13.2 runs just fine on PI4s.

        $ dmesg | some-grepping

        FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p4 GENERIC arm64

        FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 CPUs

        This system runs a ZFS file system for TimeMachine, Proxmox backups and an rsnapshot target. It's also used as a cross-compile system when I need to check multi-platform compatibility.

        If Ghost doesn't yet run on arm64, it can't be too far off from being able to do so.

      2. Never10_use_Puppylinux

        Ghostbsd-Arm64 Re: BSD, Linux or ... Linux

        Work In Progress, have the base test system running for plus 12 Days now as of November 8, 2023 Pacific Daylight time PDT. I was testing XFCE4.18 using SCFB frame buffer driver.

        Follow along at my confusing, not organized blog posts. Ghostbsd-arm64.blogpost.com

        Getting the system to work using ghostbsd source code repositories ( which are drawn from upstream Freebsd source code)

        @robonuggie www.youtube.com/@Robonuggie

        @GaryHTech www.youtube.com/@GaryHTech

        Great FreeBSD Howto videos there on 400

        Can somebody test out and prove Logitech H390 usb headset working on Freebsd 14.0 RC2 on the Raspberry Pi 4B, 3B, 400 keyboard.

        Looking for testers to download 2 garm* tar.gz files write one to ESP FAT32 260Mbyte partition

        write 2nd one to -t Freebsd-ufs 12Gb to larger size partition.

        Give a hand and solutions back to https://t.me/ghostbsd Telegram Grouo Arm64 Development

        or Arm Open-Source telegram group

        https://t.me/+ST6N61pnu3Di8zgk

        See you there!

        Anyone want to setup NextCloud on RaspberryPi Arm64 on Freebsd / Ghostbsd shell script available

        Fred Finster

  7. bazza Silver badge

    I've Used GhostBSD

    I've run it as a desktop for a while - as a VM.

    It was fine. It just worked. I was quite impressed. I found it refreshing.

    One thing I did do was to build a well known piece of *nix software that is popular and highly respected amongst academics. It built just fine. However, what emerged when run was some memory faults and crashes. Why, I asked myself, did the same software in its normal Linux environment not crash?

    The answer I suspect was that FreeBSD's rather more defensive memory allocator wasn't being fooled, whereas glibc's default allocator being more optimised for speed meant that a memory leak / bounds breach problem was able to "get away with it" on Linux. It was quite interesting to come across such a result.

    1. the spectacularly refined chap Silver badge

      Re: I've Used GhostBSD

      Was it a multithreaded app? Malloc() implementations tend not to do much in the way of memory checking, that is the place where Purify, valgrind, ElectricFence etc earn their keep.

      OTOH Linux assigns each thread a grow-on-demand stack that is only ultimately limited to 8MB by default. POSIX threads require you to either allocate a (fixed) stack at the time of thread creation or take an (equally fixed) 2KB default allocation. That default allocation is not very big if there are deeply nested or highly recursive functions at play and is easily breached.

      Linux is the outlier for mostly historical reasons now. To get something close to POSIX threads they implemented the clone() system call and each thread ran as a separate process. Quick and easy to implement but had side effects, such as each stack having grow on demand semantics, also it meant threads were no lighter weight than processes. It was very late in the day Linux got true threads, from memory 2010 or thereabouts. However, the previous behaviour was maintained for compatibility.

      If you come across that it's generally a good indication of naive programmers. Sure you can say "We've coded this for Linux" but more often it is an unstated assumption, lying on wait to catch someone who doesn't happen to be a developer of the project.

      1. Never10_use_Puppylinux

        GC Hans Boehm memory collection should help too.Re: I've Used GhostBSD

        GC Hans Boehm memory collection should help too.Re: I've Used GhostBSD

        Google Malloc replacement, or realloc.

    2. MikeTheHill

      Re: I've Used GhostBSD

      I see this as a feature, not a bug.

      Building and testing your application on any *BSD instead of just a Linux is often a great way to discover how many unwanted and non-standard assumptions have crept into your code base.

      If your project is well structured with a good amount of automated testing, which they all should of course, it shouldn't take much more than an "rsync; make test" to test on a *BSD platform. This could easily be part of your CI flow.

      Reminds me of the old days of SMTP programming. Everyone tested their new code against sendmail and if it worked with sendmail it was deemed to meet the standard. But sendmail accepted all manner of non-standard cruft and was very forgiving. The story goes that when Wietse first connected VMailer (now Postfix) to the net it could hardly exchange mail with any SMTP server or client. Why? Because Wietse wrote to, and tested against, the standards, not to what sendmail accepted.

      Same same for just developing on Linux. Bad habits, narrow dependencies and assumptions creep in over time. *BSD can help keep that in check for you.

      1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

        Re: I've Used GhostBSD

        Flashbacks of "This site works best in Internet Explorer 6". And with the really abusive sites, they'd add something like "Please upgrade to this modern browser"

        ARGGGH

    3. Hans 1
      Boffin

      Re: I've Used GhostBSD

      glibc's malloc is not optimised for speed, nor effectiveness, that is why tcmalloc and jemalloc exist.

  8. Jamie Jones Silver badge

    > "To be fair, when the project started, FreeBSD didn't include a package manager."

    It did' but it wasn't very good. pkg_info

    > "FreeBSD is quite different from Linux, and"

    I'd phrase that as "Linux is quite different from Unix" :-) [ for pedants, I mean the GNU userland of GNU/Linux, not the kernel)

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > It did' but it wasn't very good.

      Some citations:

      https://klarasystems.com/articles/a-quick-look-at-the-history-of-package-management-on-freebsd/

      «

      In the early days, BSD didn’t have a package manager. In Andrew Pantyukhin’s essay “Third-party software management under BSD” he noted that BSD was originally designed “with rich userlands so that users might have a chance to never think about anything third-party.”

      »

      That essay:

      https://people.freebsd.org/~sat/pmp/papref.pdf

      1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

        Not my downvote, but presumably someone else also is familiar with FreeBSD from wayback.

        The link you quoted says:

        "into the role of Ports Meister and went off to write pkg_install(1) as the logical counterpart to ports”.

        pkg_install was the package system prior to the current pkg system. Did you even look at my link?

        Here's another: pkg_add

        And finally, from the latest https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?pkg(7) :

        "HISTORY

        The pkg command first appeared in FreeBSD 9.1. It became the default package tool in FreeBSD 10.0, replacing the pkg_install suite of tools

        pkg_add(1), pkg_info(1) and pkg_create(1)."

        pkg_install (pkg_add, pkg_create, pkg_delete etc.) had been there since way before I got involved over 25 years ago. I remember it well. I was there.

    2. Hans 1
      Trollface

      You forgot the most important, GNU's Not UNIX.

      Same player shoot again!

  9. mfalcon

    Linux - the dance party OS

    Professional sysadm here helping to admin a fleet of RHEL and Windows boxes running on VMware with some physical tin for a bit of extra flavour.

    An older co-worker of mine once summed up Linux as "what happens when a bunch of people meet at a dance party and decide to write an operating system."

    The beauty of FreeBSD is that by being less popular and sexy it mostly doesn't attract the types of "bright ideas" and enthusiastic but inexperienced developers that are trying to turn Linux into who knows what.

    At home I use Windows for gaming and FreeBSD to run all kinds of VMs. The steady and unexciting pace of FreeBSD development is exactly what I want. For a GUI I run Mate on a FreeBSD VM and connect to it using VNC. Wayland need not apply. Other fun things include Solaris, NetBSD, OpenBSD and numerous other OSes including the Cray Unix Unicos.

    1. mfalcon

      Re: Linux - the dance party OS

      To be clear its not that I don't like Linux, I've used it since I first installed it on a 486 in the 90s using 1.44 floppy disks. It is simply that as time goes by many Linux distros are going to places that I don't want to go.

      1. steelpillow Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Linux - the dance party OS

        Don't forget the wallflowers, who hang around sipping beer and keeping well away from the dance floor.

        Maybe you should check out some of the distros that are still going to the same old places, and doing it better than ever. Slackware might be a good yardstick for you.

  10. sabroni Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    re: traditional Unix sanity

    You guys!!!

  11. Mockup1974

    It would be great to see GhostBSD's improvements and desktop friendliness to get upstreamed to FreeBSD. Even if it's just something like an "install-desktop" command that sets up the MATE or Xfce desktop and the other GUI tools and configs that GhostBSD brings for desktop users. But maybe the FreeBSD devs are not too interested. Even today there are Arch users who scoff at people using the "archinstall" script.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > Even if it's just something like an "install-desktop" command

      There is one:

      https://wiki.freebsd.org/desktop-installer

      It's not very good, and the installation program doesn't even mention it. As I have written, it doesn't work in a VM with the RCs of FreeBSD 14 and fails to deliver a working desktop environment.

      However, it does work on FreeBSD 13.x and since I discovered it, I've used it several times. It does switch package sources to Git and other repos for some things, which means that instead of a nice stable FreeBSD installation, you get something built from source which changes almost every day, and needs updates just as frequently as any rolling-release Linux distro. This is, to say the least, not ideal. Worse still is that the conventional `freebsd-update` command no longer updates these components, and you must instead use the `auto-admin` tools:

      https://acadix.biz/auto-admin.php

      The fact that a mature product which is some 20 years old still has frankly rather lashed-together tools such as these shocks me a little, but the BSD world is _different_.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Freebsd also has "meta packages". pkg install kde4 or xfce4, for example, do a pretty neat job. Been around for yonks and can be kept up to date with the usual pkg upgrade command. I can't remember off the top of my head if that pulls in the xorg meta port or just the relevant dependencies. It's ages since I did a clean install :-)

        pkg install xorg

        pkg install lxde|xfce4|kde4|gnome|whatever

        ...should work for most people, maybe some furtling with graphics/sound drivers :-)

        I just spotted a pkg that may be of interest to anyone experimenting

        sysutils/mkdesktop-5.0 Set up any desktop under FreeBSD with ease

        ...or, in ports

        cat /usr/ports/sysutils/mkdesktop/pkg-descr

        Easily set up a desktop under FreeBSD using ncurses.

  12. FIA Silver badge

    FreeBSD is quite different from Linux, and even experienced Linux users will find themselves lost sometimes.

    I'd say that was the other way round. FreeBSD is still very much a traditional unix descendant, whereas GNU/Linux/SystemD does seem to be forging it's own path. i.e. it's Linux that's becoming increasingly different.

    I'm not sure that this is a bad or good thing, it's just a thing. Although as a BSD user I do find my odd forays into Linux land increasingly unfamiliar. (and I still find man pages telling me to go read something in a browser... Grrrrr... )

    I also may be old, but I'm still not 100% sure why ifconfig isn't fit for purpose any more, in BSD land it works as good as it ever did. (Or I suppose more generally, I sometimes find Linux feels like it changes things because someone feels the need to change it, rather than the new thing being materially better).

    1. TonyHoyle

      Linux is fragmenting too much now - before you could hop between distros and there were really only a couple of variations even in system config, now you've even got distros ignoring FHS and calling that a feature..you can have 3 different ways of configuring the network even within the same distro (one of them might even work correctly) and god help you if you do a major update as you'll find a bunch of stuff that worked perfectly well has been 'deprecated'. Even debian is starting to be affected by the rot..

      I previously looked at bsd but couldn't get my head around the ports system (using CVS to update the list of packages, then hunting around the directory tree until you found something that did what you wanted just seemed so primitive). Might have a look at this though.. I just want shit to work these days, don't GAF if it's new or shiny.

  13. Baximelter

    The GUI is not new to BSD

    " . . . some of the other basic niceties that Linux take for granted but are still a novelty in the mostly text-oriented BSD world."

    This may be true of FreeBSD, but I have been using a full-featured XFCE on OpenBSD for years. It can be installed in a single step with pkg_add, as can a full suite of other useful apps.

  14. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    One reason for the lack of distributions is resource

    BSDs do have a unified kernel and userland which helps a lot, but one reason for the lack of distributions is resource.

    Much though I prefer BSD over Linux there is simply an order of magnitude difference in terms of resource supporting some Linux distributions, never mind the entire ecosystem.

    OpenBSD is a great OS if your emphasis is security, firewalling, and various specific network tasks (except wireless), but that specific focus comes at the expense of supporting anything else.

    NetBSD is effectively a tinkerers and academic OS, with a few bleeding edge features buried in a lot of cruft at various levels of completion.

    FreeBSD has some splendid abilities, but in various areas it's substantially behind Linux, both in features that are less finished that you'd prefer, and overall documentation (it's not bad, but it doesn't match e.g. Arch Linux in some areas)

    Creating different distributions tends to dilute contributions to the parent OS.

    This is also to a large extent the fault of Linux. It hasn't been a Unix for a long time, it is its own separate thing. Ongoing and new developments (i.e. Wayland) are structured almost exclusively around Linux with almost no consideration for other OS. Neither the architecture nor far too often the source are written around portability, because that would vastly slow down the pace of development, limit available features, and generally be less exciting on a CV.

    There's the concentration on x64, too, but generally that continues to be applicable to the BSDs. Non x86 platforms vary wildly in support. Additionally, there are endian issues. OpenBSD has bravely moved forward with big endian support for RaptorCS' POWER platforms, which is great for proving your code is portable, but not so useful to actually Get Things Done as almost everything these days is little endian, including graphics card drivers and hardware (AMD support is limited to a small set of old cards), and last time I looked, browser javascript engines (so lacklustre performance will be seen).

  15. Nameless Dread

    FreeBSD to HOST VirtualBox?

    Installed it and liked the fast boot-up to Desktop. - much faster than Linux Mint.

    (Perhaps the verbose start-up messages makes it more interesting than Mint's bla[c/n]k screen.)

    Now, how to install Virtual Box ON the thing ?

    Internet search seems exclusively to yield install GhostBSD INTO Virtual Box on another OS.

    Any pointers ? Somebody ?

  16. jah4reds

    Dual boot FreeBSD and Linux

    "Getting it (FreeBSD) to dual-boot cleanly alongside both Windows and Linux on our testbed machines has, thus far, defeated us..." I was able to dual boot Linux and FreeBSD using rEFInd. Partition your install drive into 1 EFI partition and 2 other primary partitions. Then install Linux into the 1st as an EFI installation. Next install eEFInd in the boot partition (there are instructions on the rEFInd home page). Finally install FreeBSD in the 2nd partition and after installation move the boot files into the EFI drive and configure - 'simples' ;-)

    1. Hans 1
      Devil

      Re: Dual boot FreeBSD and Linux

      FreeBSD is a server OS, it's meant to be installed, configured, and do the job. It does the job better than anything out there, it is not a toy, it's a tool.

  17. Hans 1
    Devil

    BSD is for experts

    I come here again because I failed to mention why I strongly believe BSD is for experts.

    FreeBSD has the fastest networking stack in the industry, say whatever you want, fact, compared to Linux and macos, Windows is not even in the same ballpark even though they copy the FreeBSD network stack every ten years.

    FreeBSD has many goodies, including an in-kernel load balancer, which is rock solid.

    Even the docs are top-notch.

    OpenBSD has never had a zero-day and been around a while.

    Yes, they are harder to install than Windows, macos, or Linux, we don't care, we know what we are doing.

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