Woke up this morning #BSD curious. For all the users out there, is there a reason for someone running Linux desktop to consider running #BSDDesktop (of any kind or flavor), or is it more useful to have as a tool for servers? My only previous experience with BSD is brief dalliances with TrueNAS.
@spaceraser I certainly had reasons to move away from #Linux, so tried #FreeBSD years ago (first in a virtual machine to get a feeling).
My reason to move Desktops as well as Servers was the advantage I see in having ONE set of management tools, ONE local package repository, etc.
On the surface, a #BSD desktop looks and feels exactly the same as a Linux desktop, using the same software like window managers etc, so it was really about the "lower layers".
First of all, if you're thinking of messing around with BSD on a laptop... eh, good luck. Things like suspend and hardware compatibility on BSD is more like Linux in the "good old days."
#OpenBSD will probably give you the best hardware compatibility, in my experience, but possibly the worst performance, because of the very heavy security mitigations (hey, there's a reason they're there. I'm not knocking it, but I am realistic/pragmatic about it).
#FreeBSD is the most Linux like, and even has partial Linux binary compatibility. #OpenBSD is more security-focused, is a smaller and more focused (there's that word again) team, priorities-wise. #NetBSD probably has the strongest ties to the BSD of old, and has the least surprises for a BSD veteran. But I spent very little time on Net, so I can't say much about it.
Not a bizarre-but-lovable-and-extremely-useful hodgepodge of unixynness, windowsiness, and maciness. (I'm talking about Linux -- and not hating. I'm typing on a Linux box now)
With #BSD, there's no silly info pages or html help (at least as a primary source of documentation). There's just REALLY good manpages, especially on OpenBSD. FreeBSD comes with (or it might be an optional install) their excellent handbook as a PDF you can peruse at your leisure. Again, NetBSD I have the least knowledge of.
#OpenBSD - This is an OPERATING SYSTEM, not a distro. Very nicely organized. It's created by people who love unix, and is not beholden to any corporate sugar daddies (although they do work with them and give their code away freely). I had horrible performance on my Core 2 Duo, sadly. BUT it dealt with S3 suspend on my laptop flawlessly.
The installer is just a script, but it's relatively straightforward, and there's a very good install walkthrough video series on YT and #PeerTube by "Charlie Root" a.k.a. "Root BSD". Do beware, though -- he's a neat guy, but a bit of a sh*tposter and patterns himself a bit on Luke Smith, which is a rather interesting character.
Also check out The OpenBSD Guy on youtube. Very nice guy from what I can tell from his videos, and he's got that great Persian accent, kinda like ElectroBOOM. ;)
One more thing about the OpenBSD devs... they "dog food" their stuff. I don't think you'll EVER see an OpenBSD presenter making a presentation on a macbook or windowze machine.
#NetBSD - This felt like #OpenBSD minus the super aggressive security mitigations (Open is a fork of Net). It could not S3 suspend at all, so I didn't spend much time on it. I don't remember the installation process, but since I don't remember struggling with it or having to go through a video walkthrough, it must have been easy enough. ;)
One of the main (I think) NetBSD devs has a presence on the #Fediverse, and is very helpful.
#FreeBSD - This is the more corporate and slightly linux-y BSD, but it's still a true BSD and a true Unix. It didn't feel quite as cohesive as OpenBSD, but still far more so than Linux, in terms of organization and documentation. Performance was great, but it took 30 seconds to resume from S3 suspend, every time. It would be amazing to run on an old desktop, not so much a laptop (in my experience with a single machine).
#OpenBSD includes Xorg and some VERY basic utilities in the base OS install. #FreeBSD only gives you a text mode install. Xorg is in the ports. Can't remember about NetBSD.
In BSD, there's kind of two package managers -- the OS-level, that takes care of the OS file, and the Ports package manager, that gives you stuff like firefox and GIMP.
The OS level packages are literally just tarballs (.tgz files in OpenBSD), but Ports uses a more linux-like package manager that deals with dependencies and so on. There's only about a dozen OS ("base install") packages (which you select upon installing, and which get updated/upgraded with a separate command), but thousands of Ports packages available.
In OpenBSD, there's a bit of a prevalent philosophy of preferring base packages over ports. So someone might use xsetroot (even though it's only bichromatic) rather than something like feh or nitrogen to set the wallpaper, because xsetroot is in the base install. Same goes for something like xlock vs xscreensaver, or Perl over Python maybe.
I tried to use their own cwm window manager instead of i3wm, and got it eventually configured so that it was almost indistinguishable from i3 at a glance.
But it's NOT a rule. The ports are there to be used, and you couldn't do much (unless you only want to do basic webserving and/or programming/scripting) with only the base install.
So while your Linux box will have thousands of packages (1709 on this relatively pared-down Debian box), a BSD box might only have a few hundred or few dozen packages (Ports) installed, because the base install isn't counted.
One more thing I wanted to stress: BSD is an operating system. Linux is a kernel that gets included in distributions with varying level of completeness, organization, sanity, and purpose.
Any package in the BSD base install is "owned" by the BSD. They review the code, make changes to it, make sure it's doing everything they want it to do. It's not just "shovelware" like linux packages ("Want ifconfig? You shouldn't! Nobody is updating it to work with new hardware! Use ip instead. Ok, put DOWN the pitchforks!!!") lol
If I sound like I'm being down on Linux, I'm only being critical of what I love the most, OS-wise. It's so utterly fantastic, capable, and powerful. But it's got its warts, and I'm not against pointing them out at times.
Yes, this is true, although I kind of wish they'd give it the overhaul it deserves, since they're probably not going to switch to Wayland any time... ever.
I use Wayland every day, and it's fine. But I can imagine from the perspective of someone who build window managers, Wayland feels like they got halfway through the work and just kind declared it done.
@RL_Dane@royal@spaceraser@ianthetechie Yeah, not sure what the future holds for #OpenBSD in terms of display server, although someone actually got Wayland to do things on it. Saw a post about it on the fediverse not too long ago.
@kint@RL_Dane@royal@spaceraser@ianthetechie The problem with #Wayland, in terms of #OpenBSD support, is that it relies heavily on #Linux subsystems. Since OpenBSD has no Linux compatibility layer, that means that either ports or workaround have to be developed. Porters would naturally prefer to upstream as many patches that might be applicable to other platforms and/or security, but the likelihood that Wayland merges patches for non-Linux OSes is significantly lower, if even non-zero.
@RL_Dane@kint@royal@spaceraser@ianthetechie I think you mean was a compat_linux(8). I believe #OpenBSD 5.9 was the last release that included it before it was ripped out. The fedora_base package that was required is long gone too.
The previous binary compatibility layers did not "magically" add support for Linux-specific device interfaces, e.g: evdev or ALSA. It would not have made porting Wayland any easier.
Ah, I get that, and I do understand that binary compatibility != kernel compatibility, which is what's really needed for Wayland to work without a lot of porting work.
Is #Arcan ever going to be used as a display server? I'm still not clear on what it actually is, but I've heard some folks in the #OpenBSD world are kinda excited about it.
I still haven't tried it yet. I have used X11 over the network (especially over SSH tunnel), and even XDMCP (haha) going way back, but it doesn't work well with modern (non-X11-native, e.g. GTK, QT) interfaces. It just turns into a really bad copy of VNC, schlepping pixels over without compression or inter-frame comparison (afaik)
Yeah, tragic attitude with some FOSS projects is to completely ignore anything that isn't Linux.
That's another reason why Wayland still isn't a complete X11 replacement, and may never be. (Although I think in most cases, it'll just have to do. I'm already using it everywhere :/
@RL_Dane@spaceraser not to bash Linux too much, but basically BSDs take a comprehensive view whereas Linux focuses solely on kernel innovation. In my opinion this results in a more cohesive system, but that’s hotly debated ;)
As Dane said, the BSDs also have, generally speaking, excellent docs both in the (FreeBSD) Handbook and manpages.
The package approach is also different. Everything is source-first (with binaries available) in a “ports tree.” What does this mean?
@RL_Dane@spaceraser going back to the model differences… one could (if stretching a bit) characterize FreeBSD as Arch done better. You have the same core team ensuring userland binaries are up to date in step with the kernel in actual RELEASEs according to a schedule (with minor patches as needed). Third party packages are maintained by port maintainers and in most cases the result is that you don’t have to make a false compromise between stability and up to date packages.
@RL_Dane@spaceraser by default, packages are snapshot into quarterly “releases” and in the interim you get only important fixes like security updates. This results in an incredibly stable system that’s easy to manage with the option to go full rolling release on third party pkgs (which still generally work on a few old releases) if you’re wanting absolute bleeding edge.
@RL_Dane@spaceraser FreeBSD in particular also takes some kernel liberties that Linux won’t for various reasons and I think it’s great. Two examples that come to mind are Kernel TLS (KTLS) and ZFS (the world’s best designed file system).
In case it’s not obvious, I’m slightly biased toward FreeBSD for desktop use and that’s what I run on my literal desktop alongside my MacBook Pro.
So why BSD? Basically quality of docs, cohesiveness of the whole system, and nice things ™️ in the kernel.
@RL_Dane@spaceraser so, why NOT BSD? As Dane said, hardware support is not to the level of Linux, particularly in the laptop. Additionally, there is a lot of software, FOSS and otherwise that stubbornly builds for Linux (even worse, only one distro). This is understandable but probably WILL cause you some friction. Also if you have to work with Docker, sucks to be you cuz Docker etc. are designed exclusively for Linux.
Yeah, the "Linux. What's BSD?" attitude really sucks, ESPECIALLY when you hear it from a FREEBSD CORE TEAM PRESENTER, AAAAGH! --
rl_dane segfault
connection closed
+++ATH0
McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[
@RL_Dane@spaceraser Second, while docs are good, it’s a smaller community. I happen to like it but it’s way smaller than Linux so expect some rough sailing if you have an issue with hardware or some use case they isn’t represented well in the community.
If these aren’t issues for you, I think you’ll love the FreeBSD desktop once you get it all configured (oh yeah also X config; it’s WAY easier than in decades past but it’s not Ubuntu).
Ok, sorry, didn't mean it as a dig against #NetBSD! XD
I was mainly comparing the performance, which I surmised was due to OpenBSD's mitigations.
I'm glad NetBSD has a good emphasis on security as well, and I look forward to trying it again. :)
P.S. I love it when FOSS folks jump up to defend their beloved projects (with facts and mostly good attitudes, heh). It's such a good thing to see, and I always enjoy the interactions.
@RL_Dane@royal@spaceraser I wouldn't bet on poor performance on OpenBSD being due to mitigations (but maybe SMT off by default?). Many OSs apply the same kind of mitigations.
What impacts OpenBSD performance is a coarse-grained lock in large chunks of the kernel (this is being improved over the years). Then you also have TCP/IP stack and i/o throughput where they don't shine. The project has always prioritized other things, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time.
My machine doesn't have hyperthreading support.
The problem I was having wasn't in network throughput but chiefly i/o, I believe, and probably also a lot of latency in other areas that I'm not as aware of. It was almost unusable.
I totally get that performance isn't their top priority. When I get another machine to try it on, I totally will.
One other thing; I did kinda miss full emoji and full unicode support. It may sound trifling, but so much of modern communication (even on the command line) uses emoji.
@RL_Dane@royal@spaceraser
That said, it's not like NetBSD performance is that better (maybe somewhere in between OpenBSD and FreeBSD) . The only BSD which can almost keep up with Linux in this field is FreeBSD. System performance is a complex matter, requires a lot of work, so never take it for granted: https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
Long, long ago, @bifrosty2k and I explored using FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility for running legacy Realmedia Streaming Server stuff though I no longer remember what the outcome was of that aside from we thankfully retired that format entirely.
@RL_Dane I was indeed blessed to have known Doug while he was alive. Alas, the last time I saw him in person was when I was invited to participate in CoLABoration 2010 Program for the Future at the Computer History Museum some years back.
@RL_Dane I can't really speak for him, but given that he was already demonstrating GUI paradigms in the 1960s, I am guessing he was in favor of them? ;)
Doug did seem rather despondent when I last saw him though, how did he phrase it, "I just want to have a dialog"? I got the impression that what the Internet became fell far short of his vision for a collaborative and dynamic set of tools to facilitate solving problems beyond the abilities of any one individual. Despite my inference regarding his mood in that regard, he still seemed happy and enlivened to be around his cohorts.
Aside from that event at the Computer History Museum in 2010, he also worked with Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg on a book titled The Engelbart Hypothesis, which had its second edition published in 2009 and I know he and Bill English were at least present at an event at UC Berkeley where passages of the book were read and he signed copies for those who were interested in such things.
I couldn't really tell you what Doug was doing the last few years of his life though.
That's interesting. I think online collaboration has really matured since he passed, but also so has the hard walls of the silos those tools live in.
The vendor lock-in is really egregious nowadays. As someone old enough to remember watching 2001 on TV (a couple decades after it was originally released), it blows my mind that we finally have video calling, BUT it's so horribly tied into phone brands and social network brands.
We should have enforced standards for that by now.
BSD-newbie on Desktop here... first of all thanks for the feedback and insights,
I started to try FreeBSD on a Notebook here a short while ago. As others said, depending on your hardware it will be some work to get things working. Eg. While my older core2duo was running Xorg without troubles. I had to tinker with videocard settings on my newer daily driver because of having trouble to detect my discrete amd gpu.
Newer hardware can be unsupported. I have plugged two intel AX2x0 wifi cards, support for them is there byy the iwlwifi driver but far from 100% but it kind of works. ymmv
Official documentation is really good. For some special things like backlight control (with acpi-ibm) I found some tips in blogposts.
The system itself feels clean.
When I switched it also felt like getting home (Started with Linux in the mid 90ies). It's fun.
It does feel like older Linux, before all of the corporatization and all of the myriad "mee too!!!" distros that do nothing but slap a wallpaper/theme on Ubuntu/Arch and call it done. :eyeroll:
oh, one last post (sorry for threading here)... I was unsure whether to take OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I chose the latter, because I wanted KDE Plasma, which is in ports of FreeBSD and setting it up was straight forward. (surprisingly the project I code for was also in it. Something only a few Linux Distros do. Maybe that helped a bit to make my mind up, too ;-)
That's really neat!
The Amiga is some hardware I really wanted to get into back in the day, but I spent the 16-bit era on the classic monochrome macintosh, for better or worse. :)
But even VGA's 16-color 640x480 mode had a fixed palette. It could have been so much more useful. :P
I don't think any PC video modes had assignable palettes except for the 256 color modes. Same for Macs, now that I think about it.
Random aside, I truly miss the days when operating systems could be told to switch into lower color modes, or even monochrome.
That would do wonders for readability. I still want to give an atomic wedgie to every single dev that presents me with light gray on dark gray text. Frickin' hosers.
what I really still miss was the datatype feature of the later Workbench Desktop e.g. add a de/packer to the system and any programm using datatypes were able to handle it. In theory a sound programm could load a gfx file, knows it is not sound data and it could process the data and vice versa. Much superior to a mime database. Kind of KIO but really transparent and flexible.
Workbench was ridiculously ahead of its time. I didn't know about the data types.
I remember that even the classic Macs had their simple four-character (case-sensitive) type and creator codes, and even that was so much superior to old-fashioned file extensions, if a bit hidden and obtuse.
Classic macs wouldn't look at the filename at all. The creator code would tell the finder which program to open it in, and the type code would tell that program how to handle it.
(Egad, the 500-character limit is driving me absolutely nuts. "Eeeeey, I'm havin' a CONVERSATION, heeeere!!!")
I've been tempted to play around with Amiga as a pseudo daily-driver, even in emulation. It's a whole environment I had zero exposure to, except a couple hours hanging with a friend once.
If it has a SCART output, there's gotta be an HDMI adapter for that.
If you dig it out, definitely check all the capacitors and any batteries inside. Batteries are a ticking time bomb. :(
Also, I know the 8-bit Commodore power supplies gradually failed "high" (driving too much voltage into the computer). I'm not sure if the 16-bit machines had that problem or not.
I didn't know there was a Turrican for the Amiga. I didn't have that game growing up -- I only heard about it recently on some youtube videos talking about the Commodore SID chip. I know people love the theme music, but honestly it just sounds so incredibly harsh and chaotic to me. The SID was capable of so much more soothing sounds. XD
@RL_Dane@Tionisla
Yeah, Amigas don't have SCART, they were designed in 'Murica after all! ;) SCART is effectively non existent in the USA, and while Japan's 21JP has a similar form factor, it has a different pin out. So much for standards?
Probably the first modification I did to my A2000 was swap in a "fatter" Agnus which was stock in Europe for PAL I guess? A lot of demos were also PAL, the demo scene in the USA wasn't very big and the "fatter" Agnus had more RAM anyway. So despite the NTSC stock Agnus being sufficient in its country of origin, the "fatter" Agnus was still a modest win for the RAM bump alone.
However all Amigas do have RGB output available stock without modifications. Moreover, people are still making accessories for Amigas so HDMI output is possible, just as in decades past, VGA output was commonplace.
Some of the Amiga HDMI output options are open source, e.g.
At least personally I'm not particularly fond of HDMI, the HDCP aspects in particular. However, HDMI is widely available on current displays. DVI is harder to find these days and so are good multisync CRTs to really take advantage of all the video modes the Amigas are capable of driving.
Ah, of course. Well, if it has an RGB output, that'll give you everything you need, anyway.
If you look up "Perifractic's Retro Recipes" on yewtu.be, he's done some MONSTER upgrades to his amiga (1200?? I can't recall) including an 040 or better CPU and a high resolution HDMI output. It's really a FrankenMiga. :D
I also heard of an Amiga mod using a Raspberry Pi Zero as a drop-in replacement for the 68k CPU -- emulating the actual cpu pins in software.
@RL_Dane Ah yeah, I think I signed up for notifications whenever that RaspPi based accelerator goes into production, but I don't think I have received an email notification yet? I probably can't afford it right now anyway. ;( @Tionisla
My cousin had a a1200 later on, with running the MUI/Magic Workbench extensions. It looked gorgeous back then. My a500 was already dated. I used it still for awhile and then I eventually switched to the pc and pretty quickly to Slackware/Linux because I really thought Win3.11 a joke to work with....
Yes, it not only showed off its gaming machine roots with amazing graphics modes, but honestly was no less than five years ahead of its time. Only the Sega Genesis came close, and even then, not quite.
With the crazy DMA and blitter functions it was more like a decade before its time.
Nice! I didn't get solidly into Linux until 2000, when RedHat (6.2) was finally able to drive my laptop's screen at 800x600.
I excitedly grabbed an Infomagic multi-CD Linux kit from a bookstore in 1997, but RH 5.0 could only give me 640x480 on my laptop, so I went back to windows 95 for three more years.
I did get to use OS/2 2.1 for a few months in 1994. It was quite advanced as well, although in a kinda fusty IBM way. ;)
Ah, my desktop had an ET4000. I don't know why I didn't try tha -- oh yeah, I gave it away, because a 4 year old computer was "useless" back then facepalm
RH 5.0 had fvwm95, which was pretty cool.
#OpenBSDstill ships with fvwm as the default wm. ;)
I really liked WindowMaker for a while there 20 years ago :D
Have you tried pcmanfm? I've found it to be the very best lightweight file manager. Surprisingly, I like it even better than Thunar.
I don't use file managers much anymore, though.
I do use dolphin on Plasma at work, because sometimes it's just nice to have a graphical representation of files, but the great thing is that it has a built-in terminal pane that you can pop open with F4 :D
/e: almost forgot, also worked on the file heuristics
Unfortunately my wife was diagnosed with a severe kind of cancer, and time is so scarce, I rarely get to anything :-(
There's some half finished work for the modplayer and I have made a simple script based on yad or kdialog to encode the music to flac, which I should upstream if I find time to iron out some bugs,
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