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#26 2009-07-20 07:43:38

CodeBlock
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From: Ohio, USA
Registered: 2008-06-13
Posts: 76
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Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

Despite that this post is over two years old, I have just recently tried FreeBSD and I love it. I run it on my spare desktop, and use synergy (the monitor is right next to my main desktop's monitor), and it's awesome. I also run it on one of my home servers, and on my laptop (which dual-boots with arch). I honestly love BSD since I've tried it. The community is really nice, ##freebsd is awesome, and just overall I really like it.
Just my $0.02.

Edit: Forgot to mention ports. You know.. I used to be scared of compiling stuff from source .. but.. ports has taught me that it's really not that bad. I have grown to love ports. I know Arch has the Arch Build System.. haven't messed with that much, but I love ports. You can customize every aspect of everything, etc... Just overall, in my ~1 week of using it, I really like BSD. But don't worry I'll be keeping Arch on the laptop too tongue

Last edited by CodeBlock (2009-07-20 07:49:03)


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#27 2009-07-20 10:20:38

SpeedVin
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2009-04-29
Posts: 955

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

What vesion of FreeBSD you are using 7.2 or 8.0 Beta 1?


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#28 2009-07-20 11:02:24

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

CodeBlock, if you love ports then you should play around with ABS! You will love it.
I haven't played with any BSDs a whole lot. I recently tried FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 1 and I liked it. I just can't see what it has over Arch.


neutral

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#29 2009-07-20 11:37:18

SpeedVin
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2009-04-29
Posts: 955

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

sand_man wrote:

CodeBlock, if you love ports then you should play around with ABS! You will love it.
I haven't played with any BSDs a whole lot. I recently tried FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 1 and I liked it. I just can't see what it has over Arch.

Some people talk that FreeBSD kernel is cleaner than Linux.


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#30 2009-07-20 23:30:33

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

SpeedVin wrote:
sand_man wrote:

CodeBlock, if you love ports then you should play around with ABS! You will love it.
I haven't played with any BSDs a whole lot. I recently tried FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 1 and I liked it. I just can't see what it has over Arch.

Some people talk that FreeBSD kernel is cleaner than Linux.

I wouldn't know, I'm just an end-user.


neutral

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#31 2009-07-22 23:54:58

rizzix
Member
Registered: 2005-10-22
Posts: 55

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

All I can say is that there's less politics in FreeBSD development, unlike Linux. Though arguably the politics in Linux are all with good intentions.
Nonetheless the freebsd OS is quite nice smile However, perhaps an ArchBSD would be ideal.

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#32 2009-07-23 00:57:54

venky80
Member
Registered: 2007-05-13
Posts: 1,002

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

bsd sucks if you have a uvc webcam and want to use it!


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#33 2009-07-23 01:31:02

sw2wolf
Member
From: China
Registered: 2009-06-08
Posts: 99
Website

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

I am using FreeBSD 7.2 as my desktop. It is very robust and fast except there is no GOOD VM in FreeBSD.  It seems that the newest Arch is not very steady:  sometimes auto-reboot sometimes dead.   However, Arch is still my first desktop when i need to run Windows application using KVM


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#34 2009-07-23 01:57:14

cyclotomic
Member
From: New York
Registered: 2008-07-08
Posts: 52

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a nice OS, hardware support is a little lacking though.

Last edited by cyclotomic (2009-07-23 01:57:31)

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#35 2009-07-23 03:38:46

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

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

cyclotomic wrote:

FreeBSD is a nice OS, hardware support is a little lacking though.

Just wondering what's not working for you?

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#36 2009-07-23 03:58:38

cyclotomic
Member
From: New York
Registered: 2008-07-08
Posts: 52

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

Alphalutra1 wrote:
cyclotomic wrote:

FreeBSD is a nice OS, hardware support is a little lacking though.

Just wondering what's not working for you?

Graphics card (ATI), even though I can't really blame FreeBSD for not having proprietary support from ATI since that's completely in ATI's control.  Also my wireless card (Atheros 9000 series).

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#37 2009-07-24 02:59:26

deadrabbit
Member
Registered: 2008-04-26
Posts: 118

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

cyclotomic wrote:

FreeBSD is a nice OS, hardware support is a little lacking though.

I recently tried FreeBSD for the first time, and I really liked it, but I ran in trouble with hardware support. I was trying to run it on some old hardware, AMD Geode with Cyrix chipset, and the soundcard wasn't supported. It works fine in Linux though, I wish I could run Arch on old i486 hardware. Other than the hardware problem, I really liked FreeBSD - it was very organized, and the ports system works well.

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#38 2009-07-24 03:10:29

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

I need to use a virtual machine at work for connecting to VPNs. I would use FreeBSD if VirtualBox had guest additions for it. Once again, Arch wins big_smile


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#39 2009-07-27 04:05:42

rhomp2002
Member
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 38

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

I tried PC-BSD a couple of times and found that it does not have good support for my hardware.  Surprised because I use an ASUS common motherboard and PC-BSD cannot link up to the ethernet controller.  That was a bit of a bummer since Linux has been linking up to that since 2.6.21

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#40 2009-07-28 10:53:22

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

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

>Surprised because I use an ASUS common motherboard and PC-BSD cannot link up to the ethernet controller. That was a bit of a bummer since Linux has been linking up to that since 2.6.21

Really? Windows can adress even more hardware :-) There are even some drivers (wifi, lan) or technologies (e.g. superpages) from *BSD in Linux now. That's the miracle of opensource. *BSD is about quality not quantity take it as flame bait or think some minutes about it.


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#41 2009-08-03 08:58:43

woeye
Member
From: Munich, Bavaria
Registered: 2009-08-03
Posts: 10
Website

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

I came across ArchLinux some days ago. Tried it, loved it smile Linux is still my first choice for desktop systems. When it comes to a server OS I still prefer FreeBSD or NetBSD though. FreeBSD has a lot of nice features on the server side such as Mandatory Access Control, ZFS, Jails. In all the years I've used it always proved to be a reliable system for me. Also NetBSD has caught up with their latest release 5.0, too. From I've read SMP performance on NetBSD 5 seems to be very impressive. I haven't tested it myself yet though. I feel FreeBSD/NetBSD and ArchLinux have many things in common. Thus I like to use all of them smile

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#42 2009-08-03 09:47:56

esh
Member
Registered: 2008-11-05
Posts: 28

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

If anyone has any input on the SMP performance these days on any BSD it would be interesting. When I last set up the linux servers here, FreeBSD was just starting into SMP support and it was a distant forethought in OpenBSD/NetBSD.

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#43 2009-08-03 10:11:24

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

huh, NetBSD 5 was only released yesterday...interesting

http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-5/NetBSD-5.0.html
#  Added support for Microsoft Xbox.

big_smile

Last edited by sand_man (2009-08-03 10:16:00)


neutral

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#44 2009-08-03 14:31:39

woeye
Member
From: Munich, Bavaria
Registered: 2009-08-03
Posts: 10
Website

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

sand_man wrote:

huh, NetBSD 5 was only released yesterday...interesting

http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-5/NetBSD-5.0.html
#  Added support for Microsoft Xbox.

big_smile

5.0.1, yes. But 5.0 is a bit older than that wink

There's a nice paper about 5.0 on the web: http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50.pdf

I think it's always good to see other OSes evolving. Choice is always a good thing imho. Imagine we all would
be forced to run Vista. What fun cool

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#45 2009-08-04 23:52:21

DaveCode
Member
Registered: 2008-08-15
Posts: 103

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

Web hosts running xBSD tend to be far behind in software versions without reason.  That says nil about ports, which are mostly up to date.  But the only *servers* that keep up-to-date use Arch.  Of course, it could be done with xBSD, in theory, but I've not seen it.

Upstream bugfixes add stability.  Grep 'segfault' in PHP changelogs.

The big diff between xBSD and Linux is drivers.  Linux is way ahead and probably will be for years.  Common knowledge.  I don't know how to blame xBSD -- manpower, project management, history, kernel architecture, or what else.

Many server farms update their racks every 3-4 years.  Old stuff goes to auction.  New stuff is always hottest latest.  They even like to advertise that fact.

I'd use xBSD if those guys would get their act together on drivers.  They do an OK job, but it's nowhere near Linux.  xBSD really needs to focus more effort and manpower on drivers.

Arch has itself together and is well run.  It's friendly and helpful.  It leaves upstream code alone, minimizing politics compared to other Linuxes.  It mostly takes care of your file layout, config files, etc.  So I let Arch think through all that, and just follow along.

As for AUR:  the few packages that I build myself, I tend to simply make config from source, and that works fine.  But use AUR if you want.

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#46 2009-08-05 01:42:01

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

The thing is with Linux you have so many distributions using the same kernel and assisting its growth in one way or another.
With the BSDs, they are not separate distributions, they each have their own developed kernel.
Can you imagine if Arch had it's own kernel (not Linux)? Imagine how slowly drivers would be developed.

Linux:
Distro A may be more or less very much the same as Distro B

BSD:
FreeBSD is not the same as NetBSD or any other

Basically I'm referring to the size of the community.


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#47 2009-08-05 04:12:20

whaevr
Member
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 182

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

Being that everyone is talking about custom kernels and support for things

Newest xkcd
supported_features.png

Heh, its funny because I could see it happening..we're talking about adobe here.

Last edited by whaevr (2009-08-05 04:12:52)

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#48 2009-08-05 09:13:07

jelly
Administrator
From: /dev/null
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 714

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

sand_man wrote:

The thing is with Linux you have so many distributions using the same kernel and assisting its growth in one way or another.
With the BSDs, they are not separate distributions, they each have their own developed kernel.
Can you imagine if Arch had it's own kernel (not Linux)? Imagine how slowly drivers would be developed.

Linux:
Distro A may be more or less very much the same as Distro B

BSD:
FreeBSD is not the same as NetBSD or any other

Basically I'm referring to the size of the community.

Well the BSD kernel development would be slow then yeah, but because they work so much as a team they do develop nice code. Also from what i heard linux kernel dev are somethimes moar hackers like "hey it's works ! "and BSD oldskool kernel dev's are like "hmm that's dirty" .

I would prefer the good way, but because linux is more popular then BSD, so there are more apps, things working for linux. I will stick too it . As for a server i might use it tongue, but still i am more familiar with linux so i probaly would put arch on it. ( /me == lazy)

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#49 2009-08-05 22:27:02

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

Well I guess that's why Linus still oversees everything that goes into the kernel. Have a read of the kernel ML one day. He is quite passionate about it wink


neutral

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#50 2009-08-13 09:29:13

CodeBlock
Member
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: 2008-06-13
Posts: 76
Website

Re: Arch vs FreeBSD

SpeedVin wrote:

What vesion of FreeBSD you are using 7.2 or 8.0 Beta 1?

7.2-RELEASE. Thinking about trying 8-BETA2, have not yet though.

As far as VM software, VirtualBox works for me on BSD, however it is not complete yet. VMware3 is in ports. As I don't use VMware I'm not sure how old that is, but it is there- it uses Linux compat, another nice BSD feature.


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