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#26 2007-04-30 15:07:11

Excessive
Member
Registered: 2006-09-27
Posts: 13

Re: Good bye Arch people..

I want to thank all of you for your kind replies and suggestions. As for me, I'm now using FreeBSD 6.2 nicely. As for my personal opinions,

- Ports are awesome, and it also says whether the package has known security issues or not.
- Kernel is better structured, so compiling my own kernel is really easy.
- X configuration is really hard at first. I managed to set it up in 2 days.
- Most of my network problems (Slow DNS resolution etc) has gone with BSD. It is really fast.
- I didn't have any hardware issues since I started working on it.

Overall, I'm extremely satisfied with FreeBSD. It's a bit hard at first, but most of the system is similar to Arch, especially centalized rc.conf configuration file.

Thanks again for comments! smile

Last edited by Excessive (2007-04-30 15:08:15)


void life () {
  // void
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#27 2007-04-30 20:25:52

Alphalutra1
Member
Registered: 2006-09-16
Posts: 59

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Excessive wrote:

- X configuration is really hard at first. I managed to set it up in 2 days.

Wouldn't it be the same on every platform, or am I missing something somewhere hmm

FreeBSD has xorgconfig and X -configure, so those are pretty automatic.  I know it is still on 6.9 (although 7.2 is available), but it took me a grand total of a minute using xorgconfig, but maybe you have some exotic setup?

But yes, I agree that is is an excellent operating system, quite fast, and everything works great (and I am running it right now tongue)

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

Last edited by Alphalutra1 (2007-04-30 20:26:43)

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#28 2007-04-30 21:36:29

Excessive
Member
Registered: 2006-09-27
Posts: 13

Re: Good bye Arch people..

I used to use xf86config, so I know that tool. But somehow, the settings at xorg.conf didn't work for me much, so I had to do a lot of tweaking. I mean a lot smile

Other than that, everything works really cool.


void life () {
  // void
}

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#29 2007-04-30 22:16:00

chrismortimore
Member
From: Edinburgh, UK
Registered: 2006-07-15
Posts: 655

Re: Good bye Arch people..

I must say, I do like FreeBSD.  I've just never had the time to fully test it, which is a shame really.  Anyway, good to hear it's working out for you smile

Last edited by chrismortimore (2007-04-30 22:16:24)


Desktop: AMD Athlon64 3800+ Venice Core, 2GB PC3200, 2x160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10, 2x320GB WD Caviar RE, Nvidia 6600GT 256MB
Laptop: Intel Pentium M, 512MB PC2700, 60GB IBM TravelStar, Nvidia 5200Go 64MB

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#30 2007-05-02 18:32:30

oli
Member
From: 127.0.0.1
Registered: 2006-02-07
Posts: 164
Website

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Alphalutra1 wrote:
Excessive wrote:

- X configuration is really hard at first. I managed to set it up in 2 days.

Wouldn't it be the same on every platform, or am I missing something somewhere hmm

FreeBSD has xorgconfig and X -configure, so those are pretty automatic.  I know it is still on 6.9 (although 7.2 is available), but it took me a grand total of a minute using xorgconfig, but maybe you have some exotic setup?

But yes, I agree that is is an excellent operating system, quite fast, and everything works great (and I am running it right now tongue)

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

7.2 is in work and should be ready in about 1-3 weeks, at the same time they're shifting X11BASE from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local. Every port out of the about 16.700 should be ready to install without any problems - so it's rather hard and time consuming work.


Use UNIX or die.

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#31 2007-05-03 17:03:32

wuischke
Member
From: Suisse Romande
Registered: 2007-01-06
Posts: 630

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Very interesting topic.

I use Arch on my notebook hardware and OpenBSD on my old "server". (Got my new CDs yesterday smile )

I tried OpenBSD 4.0 (which is of course less desktop orientated than FreeBSD) on my notebook and it feels simply "too old" for an Desktop system. Ironically I'm kind of dependant on Opera [don't like Firefox] and Flash (both closed source on one of the purest OS systems) which ran under Linux emulation, but sound was aweful for flash video. As it is a notebook good ACPI support would be really nice, too. (But even Linux fails there in some regards.)

But it is an great system for non-X-services and I happily support the development to have it one day as my main system.

FreeBSD sounds really tempting offering more desktop orientated features. I'll give it a try soon.

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#32 2007-05-04 03:21:04

scottro
Member
From: NYC
Registered: 2002-10-11
Posts: 466
Website

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Arch is probably better as a desktop.  Flash 9 in FreeBSD is iffy, as is alsa support in general. 

Xorg 7.x, as stated is going to be moved to the main ports tree shortly, though right now many people are simply using a git repository that has it done. 

As I said, however, in one of my earlier posts in this thread, it's almost amusing as I sometimes hear FreeBSD folks say, darn it, I'm moving to Linux, more things work. 

@wuischke, yes, it's far easier to get a FreeBSD desktop going than it is with OpenBSD.   That is no slight on Open, as Theo says in the Faq (or whoever wrote the answer to the question can I use it as a desktop) different people have different needs.  FreeBSD's developers are trying to expand the system from being primarily a server O/S, and will hopefully succeed without weakening the things that make it such a good server.

Emulation is another aspect where FreeBSD is behind.  We have qemu, but vmware in ports only goes up to version 3 and it's stopped working for me on CURRENT since January.  (Also, this is workstation, and one does need a serial number for it to work.)

Soooo much of this, however, boils down to an individual's personal taste.  It is, however, one reason  that FreeBSD folks like Arch (and vice versa) there is a similarity in principle--both have a fairly minimal default install with most services off by default.  In contrast, some of the newcomer friendly Linux distros have almost everything turned on by default and one has to spend more time removing things than one does adding things in Arch (or FreeBSD).

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#33 2007-05-08 14:34:37

Bison
Member
From: Jacksonville, FL
Registered: 2006-04-12
Posts: 158
Website

Re: Good bye Arch people..

phrakture wrote:
ralvez wrote:

Sometimes when I see this type of posts I wonder if it is "them" or "me" but ... I do not seem to experience the instability many talk about. roll

It is true that from time to time I hit a small bump (like I had with Firestarter not working a couple of days ago) but it was resolved within a few days (3 I think) and meanwhile I kept using the "old" version, so I did not suffer any real disruption.

Do not get me wrong, I'm not criticizing your decision to leave, I just wonder if that is the type of annoyance you experience?

Or perhaps people that find these problems  to be too much are very "high productivity" oriented and those things cut into what they need from a professional point of view.

To me my computer is my "work tool" (I'm a programmer/web developer") but so far I have not felt that "I'm crippled" with this OS. In a sense, it is not less nor more unstable than other OSes; including Macs and Windows.

I hope you find what you are looking for in BSD. Good luck!!

R

I agree 100%.  The biggest hurdle I had recently was upgrading.... oh I don't even remember... some app with an internal database and had to regen the db because the format changed.  It's not a big deal.  You hit this stuff in the windows world was well - the difference is that there's no "windows -Syu"

I would also agree here.  I did the same thing about a year ago (frustrated with the xorg packages), and went to freebsd.  The ports system is not a simple as you might think, but it does have its benefits.

I don't have nearly as many problems as I used to, and most of them are 100% my fault.  My last problem dealt with upgraded berkeley db without upgrading other things that depended on it.  But for the most part, I have an extremely stable desktop and server (lighttpd, RoR, svn, postfix, etc.).  I hear lots of people telling me to never use arch as a server, but its been the best so far for me.

The first thing anyone said to me in #freebsd was "welcome to hell".

Again, I'm not criticizing your decision to move to FreeBSD.  Its pretty fun, and I miss a few things about it.

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#34 2007-05-08 16:38:37

dtw
Forum Fellow
From: UK
Registered: 2004-08-03
Posts: 4,439
Website

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Excessive wrote:

Unfortunately, I'm extremely bored with Linux in general, and its "unsolvable" problems. I'm not a newbie, using Linux since 1996. Arch was the best of all, but it depends on a unstable system. It doesn't matter whether you did something right or wrong, there is always a chance for something to go wrong, without a cause. This is same with almost all Linux distributions. I will switch to FreeBSD today, leaving everything else behind.

Having Arch Linux for almost a year made me feel using the best Linux distro out there. I want to thank developers and excellent community for the memories. I will miss everything, especially the Arch logo.

Keep up the good work.

Dude, get a blog.

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#35 2007-05-08 17:01:36

KerowynM
Member
Registered: 2006-06-04
Posts: 78

Re: Good bye Arch people..

I'm also in the "What instability?" camp.  At first I was having some issues, but they turned out to be heat related, got the fans working and now I'm amazed at my stability.

Still, whatever floats your boat.  Good luck.

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#36 2007-05-09 00:43:42

ataraxia
Member
From: Pittsburgh
Registered: 2007-05-06
Posts: 1,553

Re: Good bye Arch people..

I get the feeling here that "instability" refers to design/APIs of the kernel, rather than crashing. I get that feeling sometimes, too - like at 2.6.20, all my hard drives get new names suddenly? It's a bit of a "what did Linus think of now?"

Every OS certainly has its trouble. FreeBSD does the opposite - swallows huge changes in one bite as -CURRENT goes -RELEASE. (I started using it at 3.2, and so I've seen it several times...)

The Mac has "Russian Roulette on update" trouble also. Among other things, there's the update_prebinding race condition that replaces your executables with all-zero-byte files if you run a program while the system is prebinding it...

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#37 2007-05-09 07:12:42

STiAT
Member
From: Vienna, Austria
Registered: 2004-12-23
Posts: 606

Re: Good bye Arch people..

dtw wrote:

Dude, get a blog.

He wanted to say bye ... let him take this spot smile.
Anyway, what's the point if he posts on his blog and posts the link here, or if he does directly on the boards. Seems as if he wanted us to know it tongue


Ability is nothing without opportunity.

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#38 2007-05-09 18:29:12

Weeks
Member
Registered: 2006-01-26
Posts: 91

Re: Good bye Arch people..

ataraxia wrote:

I get the feeling here that "instability" refers to design/APIs of the kernel, rather than crashing. I get that feeling sometimes, too - like at 2.6.20, all my hard drives get new names suddenly? It's a bit of a "what did Linus think of now?"

I've not updated to 2.6.20 so I've not witnessed it and I would agree that inconsistency is bad, but there is a way around that if you find that particularly vexing: udev rules based on your hard-disk's manufacturer and all kinds of other sysfs info.

Although that won't help your grub/lilo configs, but they can be altered on the fly.

dtw wrote:

Dude, get a blog.

This has spawned an interesting discussion. I've always wanted to try FreBSD but their kernel didn't like my flaky ACPI hardware and perhaps other things. Debian was the same to be fair.

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#39 2007-05-09 18:45:20

oli
Member
From: 127.0.0.1
Registered: 2006-02-07
Posts: 164
Website

Re: Good bye Arch people..

ataraxia wrote:

I get the feeling here that "instability" refers to design/APIs of the kernel, rather than crashing. I get that feeling sometimes, too - like at 2.6.20, all my hard drives get new names suddenly? It's a bit of a "what did Linus think of now?"

Every OS certainly has its trouble. FreeBSD does the opposite - swallows huge changes in one bite as -CURRENT goes -RELEASE. (I started using it at 3.2, and so I've seen it several times...)

The Mac has "Russian Roulette on update" trouble also. Among other things, there's the update_prebinding race condition that replaces your executables with all-zero-byte files if you run a program while the system is prebinding it...

Some people say running current is more stable than some Linux distro wink

To be fair, current -> release doesn't happen every 3-6 weeks, like in Linux kernel wink


Use UNIX or die.

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#40 2007-05-13 16:10:54

Carnevil
Member
Registered: 2007-05-09
Posts: 4

Re: Good bye Arch people..

I've run FreeBSD as a desktop for the last 3 years.  I'm running Arch at the moment because I'm waiting on the importation of Xorg 7.2.  I find after using FreeBSD, distros like Arch are alot easier to go to.  So moving from Arch to FreeBSD shouldn't be that hard.

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#41 2007-05-13 18:45:43

Romashka
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2005-12-07
Posts: 1,054

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Please everyone willing to say "good bye" use this next time:
The Official Good Bye Everyone Thread


to live is to die

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#42 2007-05-14 00:33:06

iphitus
Forum Fellow
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-10-09
Posts: 4,927

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Weeks wrote:
ataraxia wrote:

I get the feeling here that "instability" refers to design/APIs of the kernel, rather than crashing. I get that feeling sometimes, too - like at 2.6.20, all my hard drives get new names suddenly? It's a bit of a "what did Linus think of now?"

I've not updated to 2.6.20 so I've not witnessed it and I would agree that inconsistency is bad, but there is a way around that if you find that particularly vexing: udev rules based on your hard-disk's manufacturer and all kinds of other sysfs info.

Although that won't help your grub/lilo configs, but they can be altered on the fly.

dtw wrote:

Dude, get a blog.

This has spawned an interesting discussion. I've always wanted to try FreBSD but their kernel didn't like my flaky ACPI hardware and perhaps other things. Debian was the same to be fair.

well. keep trying. bugs get fixed you know. and if it isnt fixed, then its about time you reported it.

if you dont like this mentality, buy a corporate version. for all the community distributions, the users are the testers.

James

Last edited by iphitus (2007-05-14 00:33:54)

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#43 2007-05-19 14:18:49

japetto
Member
From: Chicago, IL US
Registered: 2006-07-02
Posts: 183

Re: Good bye Arch people..

Parting is such sweet sorrow, IMO.

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