Has anyone here tried BSD?

YZMSQ · 2010-01-24 07:07:37

Hi there,
We all know that Archlinux is BSD-like.However,has anyone here really experienced BSD,like FreeBSD,OpenBSD,NetBSD......What about that?:D

Mardoct · 2010-01-24 07:49:17

I've been running a private server on Arch fine, but currently plan to try getting BSD on it for improved robustness. I know that there is at least one member around here that regularly uses BSD as a desktop.

YZMSQ · 2010-01-24 07:54:41

I wanna try BSD one day.......

Acecero · 2010-01-24 08:01:09

YZMSQ wrote:

I wanna try BSD one day.......

What's to stop you from trying one now?

na12 · 2010-01-24 08:26:24

I tried freebsd,but i was not satisfied with it, upgrade whole system is hell.

YZMSQ · 2010-01-24 08:44:49

Acecero wrote:

YZMSQ wrote:
I wanna try BSD one day.......
What's to stop you from trying one now?

ha...I just new to Unix-like system,I wanna learn Linux firstly......then I may try BSD...:P

tomd123 · 2010-01-24 08:46:01

If I wouldn't be using arch, I would be using freebsd (yes I used it)

hw-tph · 2010-01-24 08:55:12

I have used OpenBSD for a few purposes and just given FreeBSD a few quick tries.

My thoughts? Performance is seriously lacking (noticably slower than Linux and FreeBSD on machines that see continuous high load), but OpenBSD is fairly straightforward to use and the base system is very well documented. The OS is a bare bones installation - any services you want you will need to install yourself. You should also note that it's basically only the bare OS installation that is considered secure, any services or applications you install from the ports tree (or in any other way) may introduce security issues. This is the same as with Arch or pretty much any OS. The default shell is now ksh, which is an improvement from before.

I see no advantage of using OpenBSD (or FreeBSD) over Linux as a modern desktop OS, but the kernel fanatics will surely claim some feature in the Mach kernels as superior to the Linux kernel... In fact, I fail to see a real world advantage of using any BSD system over Linux in any given common computing task (i.e. desktop, server).

Acecero · 2010-01-24 09:07:08

YZMSQ wrote:

Acecero wrote:
YZMSQ wrote:
I wanna try BSD one day.......
What's to stop you from trying one now?
ha...I just new to Unix-like system,I wanna learn Linux firstly......then I may try BSD...:P

I understand it's a lot to take in, but you will learn much more at a faster rate if you try both at the same time.

Cdh · 2010-01-24 09:27:07

I tried freebsd, but I didn't like the package management. pkg_add is not very comfortable and the binaries are a bit out of date.
Of course there are the ports but I don't like compiling everything myself. Consumes too much time for me.
There is a reason why I use Archlinux instead of Gentoo...

loafer · 2010-01-24 10:01:24

I use freebsd as a home server (samba and nfs). It works fine and as I don't have a great deal of stuff installed (no x or a de installed) the port updates are fairly minimal (a few a day).

I tried it as a desktop but the lack of flash support put me off. I didn't have much success running it in Linux compatibility mode, it was slow as hell.

Themaister · 2010-01-24 10:51:04

Cdh wrote:

I tried freebsd, but I didn't like the package management. pkg_add is not very comfortable and the binaries are a bit out of date.
Of course there are the ports but I don't like compiling everything myself. Consumes too much time for me.
There is a reason why I use Archlinux instead of Gentoo...

Same experience here, tbh.

mcsaba77 · 2010-01-24 11:36:02

I used FreeBSD for about 2 years because it was easier to learn than linux. Just like arch, configuration is done via rc.conf, but instead of arrays, you enable apache with apache_enable=yes. Start-up files are installed in /etc/rc.d, and they do automatic dependency checking. Each has provides and depends on lines - so there is really nothing else to configure. You start a service that requires another one, it will be loaded automatically.

Packages work great, they do automatic dependency checking and resolution, but in time they'll be outdated. Most people I know use the ports system after installing the FreeBSD. Ports are even easier than AUR. I'm not sure it's still available or hasn't been replaced by something else, but the portupgrade tool made it really straightforward. portinstall xorg will install xorg and dependencies, portupgrade <forgot knobs> will look for upgrades, build them, and install them automatically. If there are changes needed in the system (new config files) the upgrade process will stop and prompt you to do the changes, but there was an option that made the package/ports manager leave all those to the end (so you can leave your machine while it updates itself without having it stalled on a prompt).

Performance was great, started up faster than most linux distroes (although I didn't know about Arch at that time). Used KDE 3.x as my desktop, worked great, and so did my nvidia card (nvidia provides freebsd drivers). Well, in general, performance was comparable to the then current linux distributions. It felt somehow different though, but I could not put my finger on the difference (some things seemed faster, some slower, but only by a small margin).

Switched to linux when I got myself a laptop about three years ago. Actually, FreeBSD worked fine on it, only my webcam wasn't supported. Been using linux in the past few years, but still have fond memories of FreeBSD. It's a very nice and clean system, with excellent features. It's also more secure than linux - not necessarily on thechnical merits, but simply because far fewer hacks are targeted at FreeBSD (yeah, I know, security through obscurity).

Last edited by mcsaba77 (2010-01-24 11:37:30)

mcsaba77 · 2010-01-24 11:43:26

Just one more thing about ports - gentoos portage is nowhere near close in quality and easy-of-use. I mean at that time, emerging midnight commander would pull in the gnome desktop as a dependency - wtf? So you end up adding/substracting knobs to no end because the system comes with insane defaults. Ports on the other hand have very sane defaults, there are very very few things to change. So I understand building everything sounds like a hastle, but it's really one command (like "portinstall kdebase" if you want a basic kde system). Fire and forget - so you can build/upgrade in the background while working on sth. else with no problems.

Another thing I liked about ports was it's excellent web interface: freshports. http://www.freshports.org/ There you can see every update to every port with full changelog. You can get email notifications selectively - for example, you can upload your list of installed ports and you'll get a notification if there are updates available. Or you can have just a small list of wathced ports. Brilliant!

Sia · 2010-01-24 11:58:56

For Desktop user with KDE, Gnome ...etc . I can say every *nix like is the same.

sand_man · 2010-01-24 23:11:41

mcsaba77: portmaster is god-like.

portmaster -af and your whole ports system gets updated. Takes a few days on my humble server though

tomd123 · 2010-01-25 00:57:28

sand_man wrote:

mcsaba77: portmaster is god-like.
portmaster -af and your whole ports system gets updated. Takes a few days on my humble server though

You know you only need to do that on major release upgrades right? 7.0 -> 8.0

MP2E · 2010-01-25 01:17:53

I absolutely loved FreeBSD. It made me swear off Linux for a little while, the ONLY reason I came back was because I discovered Arch Linux and fell in love with the AUR, which is ports-like. I probably would have been using it to this day had the nvidia drivers not supported x64(well they do now, but why switch back when I'm perfectly content? )

Saint0fCloud · 2010-01-25 02:21:03

I love FreeBSD, I use it on my desktop and my server in addition to NetBSD on an older laptop. The performance, stability, and simplicity of freebsd trumps linux anyday for me plus flash works great and ZFS has been really awesome. Nevertheless the non native support for flash is still a weakpoint in addition to the lack of hardware support compared to linux.

hw-tph wrote:

I see no advantage of using OpenBSD (or FreeBSD) over Linux as a modern desktop OS, but the kernel fanatics will surely claim some feature in the Mach kernels as superior to the Linux kernel... In fact, I fail to see a real world advantage of using any BSD system over Linux in any given common computing task (i.e. desktop, server).

I don't see what the Mach kernel has to do with anything but otherwise there are numerous advantages and disadvantages just like any other OS

fx4 · 2010-01-25 02:27:16

I used FreeBSD as a desktop for many many years. There was a time when Linux was much slower than FreeBSD, hardware support was about the same, and Linux distributions were put together in a very haphazard way (back in the days of Caldera and RedHat 5.x, etc). FreeBSD was a very thorough, mature, and well-designed system whereas Linux was not. Little things like documentation for everything imaginable, manpages everywhere, the ports system, logical file system layout, separation of the core system from the applications, etc. At one point, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Microsoft were all using FreeBSD servers.

Over the years, however, hardware support started falling behind on FreeBSD. Then came the botched 5.x release which left everyone hanging; DragonFly BSD split off as a result, and many others stuck with the 4.x series until 2006 or so. Meanwhile, Linux hardware support only got better as corporations with a lot of money were paying professional developers to write Linux drivers. Gnome and KDE became very Linux-only oriented about that time as well. I stopped using FreeBSD in 2007, although recently installed 8.0-RELEASE on my T61. There are lots of things I miss from FreeBSD, the general tightness of the system sums it up, but the availability and quality of drivers on Linux--especially for laptops--is a lot better. Arch Linux comes closest of all the distributions to emulating the FreeBSD experience, although AUR or ABS is nowhere near as intricate as the ports system.

Oxyd · 2010-01-25 02:46:05

I'm using FreeBSD on my desktop that I'm typing from right now, Arch is on the laptop.

About a year ago, I started to get really frustrated with Linux distros -- thanks to Linux itself. You upgrade the kernel and stuff breaks. Kernel devs implement shiny new stuff instead of making sure that it at least works. I thought that using some less bleeding-edge distro than Arch would make things better, but I can't stand Debian, Gentoo is broken, Ubuntu and Fedora are too overcomplicated for me. So I switched to Windows. I was happy for some time, but my fingers are too used to the shell, and stuff like Cygwin just doesn't cut it. Then I found FreeBSD and been using it ever since.

The system itself is very simple and clean. Documentation is excellent so there's no smashing your head against the keyboard involved. All you really get is a basic Unix system: you have a shell, an editor (vi, ed), a compiler and the base necessary tools. You then build the rest yourself.

Third-party software management is a bit different from Linux distros. Linux distros are almost all about package management. Some distros also provide shiny stuff and patches everywhere, but we're on Arch forums and we know well Arch doesn't do that: Arch merely packages stuff and makes sure the packages work well together. Arch devs don't develop the kernel, they just package it. They don't develop base system utilities, they just package them. FreeBSD, on the other hand, is the kernel and the base tools. It does provide rather simple tools for package management (pkg_add, pkg_delete), and you can optionally install the Ports Tree, which is just a system of makefiles that take care of fetching, configuring and building software for you. Or you can install stuff yourself, though that's not recommended. FreeBSD isn't about the software that you install or how you install it, it's about providing you with the base platform on which the software can run.

That said, I find the Ports Tree very mature and easy to use. You can install third party scripts that will help you with software management, like portupgrade or portmaster (the latter being my favourite). But the system itself is very simple and thus easy to understand -- there's no magic involved.

(Some posters before me have mentioned packages being outdated. You probably were running a -RELEASE version, which is all fine and great, but it also means that the packages that are fetched by default are the packages that were available and built when -RELEASE was released. You can define the environment variable PACKAGESITE to point pkg_add to newer packages. It's all explained in the handbook -- especially the grey note may be of interest to you.)

During my day-to-day desktop usage, I don't see any difference from my previous Arch desktop. I have Xfce running, with Opera, Pidgin, Transmission, ePDFReader, and a bunch of terminals. I don't like shiny stuff, I didn't have it on Arch, I don't have it here. If you want, though, you can have it, there's no difference -- GUI software doesn't usually suffer any portability problems between Linux and FreeBSD. If I sat you at my desktop, I think you wouldn't even tell this is not a Linux distro, until you typed "uname -a" into the terminal.

HAL may be even more pain on FreeBSD than it is on Linux, but I hate HAL, I hated it when I was using Arch, I had it disabled back then, I have it disabled now. I have seen people reporting they got it to work successfully on FreeBSD, though. So if you like things like automounting, I believe you can have them. But I'm not of the sort of people who like auto- stuff, myself.

All in all, if you like barebones simplicity and like learning new things (it's different from Linux!), I don't see why you couldn't just give it a try. You can install it into VirtualBox, if you don't feel like messing up your primary PC and get some feel for what the system is and is not about.

sand_man · 2010-01-25 04:53:22

tomd123 wrote:

sand_man wrote:
mcsaba77: portmaster is god-like.
portmaster -af and your whole ports system gets updated. Takes a few days on my humble server though
You know you only need to do that on major release upgrades right? 7.0 -> 8.0

Yes of course.

YZMSQ · 2010-01-25 09:23:12

Acecero wrote:

YZMSQ wrote:
Acecero wrote:
What's to stop you from trying one now?
ha...I just new to Unix-like system,I wanna learn Linux firstly......then I may try BSD...:P
I understand it's a lot to take in, but you will learn much more at a faster rate if you try both at the same time.

hoho...good idea....but it will take a lot of time and you should have a sharp mind at the same time.....:P
PS:Now I'm learning Linux and Bash,C,........I always complain that why the time is so limited......so I will not learn BSD right now....forgive me...:rolleyes:

Last edited by YZMSQ (2010-01-25 09:27:37)

Zeist · 2010-01-25 10:26:58

I run OpenBSD on my routing machine and I'm randomly experimenting with FreeBSD to see if I want to switch my storage machine over to it to use zfs.

Acecero · 2010-01-25 13:22:34

YZMSQ wrote:

Acecero wrote:
YZMSQ wrote:
ha...I just new to Unix-like system,I wanna learn Linux firstly......then I may try BSD...:P
I understand it's a lot to take in, but you will learn much more at a faster rate if you try both at the same time.
hoho...good idea....but it will take a lot of time and you should have a sharp mind at the same time.....:P
PS:Now I'm learning Linux and Bash,C,........I always complain that why the time is so limited......so I will not learn BSD right now....forgive me...:rolleyes:

Well that answer is bit more specific to my earlier question, rather than "I'm just new Unix-like systems." I was not pressuring you into using BSD, I was merely suggesting the idea trying BSD also by getting the hands-on experience, instead of having people tell you what it's like. Seeing how dedicated you are to learning Bash and C, that is time consumering and I respect that. You probably have a busy life as well. So again I didn't mean to change your learning path, go with it.

P.S. I didn't like your sarcastic tone. Please follow the rules. I don't like that kind of disrespect among others who were willing share their opinions or thoughts.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-24 07:07:37

Has anyone here tried BSD?

#2 2010-01-24 07:49:17

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#3 2010-01-24 07:54:41

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#4 2010-01-24 08:01:09

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#5 2010-01-24 08:26:24

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#6 2010-01-24 08:44:49

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#7 2010-01-24 08:46:01

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#8 2010-01-24 08:55:12

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#9 2010-01-24 09:07:08

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#10 2010-01-24 09:27:07

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#11 2010-01-24 10:01:24

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#12 2010-01-24 10:51:04

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#13 2010-01-24 11:36:02

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#14 2010-01-24 11:43:26

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#15 2010-01-24 11:58:56

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#16 2010-01-24 23:11:41

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#17 2010-01-25 00:57:28

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#18 2010-01-25 01:17:53

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#19 2010-01-25 02:21:03

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#20 2010-01-25 02:27:16

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#21 2010-01-25 02:46:05

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#22 2010-01-25 04:53:22

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#23 2010-01-25 09:23:12

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#24 2010-01-25 10:26:58

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

#25 2010-01-25 13:22:34

Re: Has anyone here tried BSD?

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