Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), which is backed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is funding open source work again. This time, the recipients are the FreeBSD Foundation and SerNet, which is one of the backers of the Samba Project. The STF gave the GNOME ecosystem €1 million in 2023, as we …
and it will only work if doing things in FreeBSD comes as easy as in Windows to the masses, like setting up a printer or shared folder, dropping down to shells and magical commands will make it fail, users don't want this. Look at W11, yes love it or hate it, but M$ have realised maybe just in time by looking at it's own history, that the GUI rules the user no matter how great it's capabilities ..
Win3.1 OK
Win95 Good
Win98 Better
WinME Burn In Hell
W7 Really Good
W8 This Was Microsoft Having A Laugh With Us All
W9 Shhh It's Never Mentioned
W10 Very Good
W11 It's Good And Getting Better As Legacy Code And Apps removed Or Upgrade
[Author here]
> it will only work if doing things in FreeBSD comes as easy as in Windows to the masses,
Yeah, no.
FreeBSD is a niche OS compared to Linux, just as desktop Linux is a niche compared to Windows.
This is not an effort to make FreeBSD into a better desktop than Linux. It is an effort to make FreeBSD a better desktop, full stop.
FreeBSD is a highly capable Unix-like OS in its own terms and in its own space, but it is predominantly a server OS. I was invited to the EuroBSDCon by the FreeBSD project and talking to multiple BSD developers there, quite a few of them told me that they actually ran Linux for desktop use -- not because they lack the skills to get FreeBSD working. They don't. But because it's easier and it works better. Better drivers, better power management, more apps, etc.
But FreeBSD can be used as a desktop and if it had better power management, some faster wifi drivers, and a few other things, it'd be a pretty good one. And much of that would benefit servers, too.
But FreeBSD can be used as a desktop and if it had better power management, some faster wifi drivers, and a few other things, it'd be a pretty good one.
I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop system for a quarter of a century with no problems (except for occasional Firefox & Thunderbird insanities). But I mainly use it on a desktop machine with a wired connection(*), rather than a laptop, so don't need power management or WiFi. I also stick to XFCE as I hate kitchen sink desktops.
(*) The net connection has always been into my office and I had major building work done 15 years ago, so the entire house got wired at the time. Now only the bathrooms & loos don't have at least two ethernet sockets.
In many British houses you'll find lavatories often in their own tiny rooms, separate from the room with the bath and/or shower, so it really makes sense to give them their own name, though toilet itself is a euphemism! In the US, of course, you often have palatial rooms with all the amenities together. Except in public spaces where the bathrooms don't come with baths…
I think you’re referring to userland in Apple’s case, which is different. The POSIX layer of XNU was 4.3BSD derived. The userland tooling came from FreeBSD. The primary reason that Linux wasn’t a consideration for the XNU Kernel is that Linux didn’t exist in the late 89’s when XNU was being developed at NeXT. They did use to use some GNU utilities in userland, BASH arguably being the most prominent- and a project that Apple contributed to, until the GPLv3 stupidity - hence 3.whatever being the version shipped with macOS today. Though now almost everyone on macOS uses the superior ZShell, I can see them dropping BASH soon too.
That's GPL fanbois FUD.
Both Sony and Apple (And Nexflix, and Netgate, and opnsense, and.....) contribute:
https://christitus.com/sony-playstation-and-freebsd/
As for apple, just search for work "sponsored by apple", e.g. : https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=7dd39ef4e0d56b213445754a189d204b70a77a00
Why is the BSD licence a problem? It was written like that for a reason: you're free to use it for whatever you want. While I think this simplicity may have be one reason for choosing BSD, another one would be there is only one FreeBSD; OpenBSD and NetBSD are separate projects but the userland are pretty much identical. With Linux, you'd have to choose a particular disto and stick with it. Think how many changes there have been in the userland of Debian or Fedora since the Playstation! And, neither existed when NeXT was being developed! There have been very few changes in the FreeBSD userland over this time, which is why you still find systems with uptimes measured in decades…
Where Linux has been more successful, as the article notes, is drivers. But for the carefully controlled hardware environments of Macs and Playstations, that's hardly a problem.
“The problem is that as the BSD licence isn't copyleft”
Why do GPL supporters refer to “copyleft” as of its actually a thing. It’s just a strap line used in GPL documentation - nothing more
But you are right - The BSD licence isn’t viral like GPL (and for the avoidance of doubt, this is a GOOD thing). Which is why a lot of people like it
and it will only work if doing things in FreeBSD comes as easy as in Windows to the masses
This thing about shells...
A member of our local history group has beenp hotographing documents and emailing them out in batches. Using my GUI email client I can select a series of emails, each with multiple attachments and selecting save with attachments. What I then get is a directory (folder if you prefer) with a lot of email texts (which are irrelevant) and a series of directories (ditto) named Attachments1, Attachments2 etc containing the images which I do want gathered into the same directory. I have too options.
1. Use the GUI file manager, go into each attachment folder in turn, select its contents, hit CTRL-X , back out of the folder into the parent folder andhit CTRL-V. Repeat for each folder in turn.
2. Open a shell terminal in the directory and issue the command
mv Atta*/* .
and I'm done.
Which option would you take?
The reason some of use use shell commands some of the time is because they're just so much slicker.
“dropping down to shells and magical commands will make it fail, users don't want this”
Speak for yourself. I much prefer a transparent command line that can be documented and understood to an opaque GUI application that doesn’t do what you want and (increasingly often these days) decides that it knows better than you and “just does stuff” without asking or even warning
Agree.
After generally enjoying the configuration of Linux VMs via Ansible, I have found Ubuntu-on-a-laptop unexpectedly tiresome to configure.
A good deal of that is because a lot of guidance in forums and the like talks about opening app such-and-such and going into panel XYZ to click on button A. The GUI app in question may not exist on the version and flavor of Ubuntu you are running (Ubuntu Cinnamon in my case).
Assuming said GUI app exists, from having written technical documentation, talking a user through the entire click chain exhaustively, without assuming anything about their level of knowledge, is far from a trivial undertaking.
i.e. "Click on the Wifi Off button in the Settings app" is not necessarily all that robust and future-proof explanation. Not if the settings app changes from release to release (cough, Windows 8-vs-8.1 UI, cough)
Not claiming here that shell-based configuration is all that beginner-friendly. It is liable to be more stable and easier to document though.
...talking a user through the entire click chain exhaustively...
I've often felt that the majority of the ridiculously overpriced mainstream comptech books for particular versions of things like Windows or major productivity apps (which have to be replaced every 2-3 years every time the menu structures change slightly) ballooned the number of pages (and price) of those books 80% by tediously going step-by-step-by-step, click-by-click-by-click, dropdown here, long press there, bla bla bla" when all I wanted to see was:
"Go to the X page/menu and select the desired option"
..and let the presumably somewhat intelligent and observant reader figure the rest out.
And save at least 9,999,999,999,999 trees from unnecessary destruction. Not to mention all the money you spent on uselessly fat books that you could have used for something more useful, like food to sustain your bodily functions.
To expand on that, if a GUI configuration application IS used on Unix like boxes, it generally (unless you are in a systemd dystopia) will update that same config file you can edit on the command line, so you get the best of both world:
A gui config tool has no need to embed itself opaquely deep in the OS - it can simply operate on standard config files.
「… an opaque GUI application that doesn’t do what you want and (increasingly often these days) decides that it knows better than you and “just does stuff” without asking or even warning」
If that was intended to bring balance to the commentary, it didn't.
The countless GUI applications that I use are quite unlike what you describe.
「As for describing ANY version of windows as “good” or (sorry - give me a moment to stop laughing) “very good” just highlights that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about (not an accusation I throw about lightly by the way)」
Welcome, time traveller. What news bring you from 1970?
I use FreeBSD, iPadOS, Windows, Android, and so on, with a twenty-first century ability to recognise goodness.
"W11 It's Good And Getting Better As Legacy Code And Apps removed Or Upgrade"
Excellent.
I found it quite interesting that an American company that "is focused on tackling some of the most complex problems faced by the Department of Defense and the US Intelligence Community" has chosen to use FreeBSD as an endpoint operating system with a special focus on modern laptops.
"the work contributes to the reliability and performance of Samba and makes it compatible with the latest protocols"
By the time this development has reached any meaningful stability and relevance, the goalposts will have moved again.
Microsoft drives SMB. SAMBA has been forever playing catchup on a very complicated file protocol against a multi billion dollar company who got a giant head start and increased it over time. SAMBA has always sucked, it continues to suck, and when those "Latest protocols" finally make it into the offering, not only will they not be the latest protocols any more...they will, in all likelihood, suck.
Open source is great until the mission is to closely emulate someone's multi gazillion dollar commercial offering.
IF you just must have SMB so those FreeBSD desktops can co-exist in a Microsoft world, the commercial stack from Tuxera would be the way to go. It absolutely does NOT suck...good ACL structure, the full feature set of SMB 3 including multi-channel for actual high performance, and excellent stability.
But if you are a deadly serious about FreeBSD (or Linux, frankly) - just use NFS. It's lighter, higher performance if mounted properly, and best of all,it keeps the Windows users out of your network shares!
What you wrote about multi-billion-dollar Microsoft moving the goalposts makes sense, but, how is it that not-multi-billion-dollar Tuxera can keep up with MS' SMB/CIFS changes? Similarly, not-multi-billion-dollar Thursby Systems had done a good job with its "ADmit Mac" client, which let OS X-based Macs authenticate to AD and access AD resources.
I've used the SAMBA server included in Knoppix v3.x to succesfully copy "critical" [of course, the user had no backups] files from a PC's failing hard drive, over the network to my Win2K box.
Because definitely NOT million dollar Tuxera *licensed* the important stuff from Microsoft. I sh!t you not. They aren't trying to reverse engineer or emulate the critical bits of the protocol.
I don't know if Thursby also licensed some code from Microsoft to ensure interoperability for AD, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Congrats on saving those critical files with the tools available to you. I'm not saying SAMBA doesn't work for very small values of "Work". it's slow and would choke on anything resembling a modern SMB implementation (Multichannel, SMBoRDMA, la la la) but for a simple task from a rescue disk, sure, that's one way to do it.
And for those downvoters who just don't like that I called their open sores baby ugly. Get over it. The baby is stupid too.
Don't forget TrueNAS - the Core version runs on *BSD, and in my experience (admittedly limited as I only run one TrueNAS server) is utterly stable, as is the ZFS array that it uses.
My server is an old laptop (chosen for its connectivity), and the only bit that was awkward and frustrating to configure was power management...
It's really good to see the public sector investing in FOSS - a shame it's not my government though!
For the minister, though I'm sure he/she would rather drink a local one ->
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream The Register 
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