Possible convert. Please help me justify this madness.

richw

richw

I want to switch to FreeBSD. More specifically, I want to WANT to switch to FreeBSD.

I've always been an OSX and Linux user, but have always admired FreeBSD's stability, the ports system, etc... but my last foray into FreeBSD ended in tears because while I want to use X86_64 (large amounts of RAM, more consistent with my various server environments etc), I have nVidia cards and I never had luck running X with compositing etc. I'm a sucker for a nice, clean, responsive desktop with just a *bit* of eyecandy (shadows and transparency - they do everything in terms of taking away the flatness of a 2D desktop).

I poked around the nVidia site and saw they now have FreeBSD X64 drivers (and have for some time, I just haven't looked in a while).

This changes everything, but I don't want to make a monumental shift without answering a few questions first... is FreeBSD still regularly maintained, or is it "years behind" Linux like I keep reading around the place?

How many people here are happily using FreeBSD x86_64 as a workstation, with nVidia cards, with compositing etc?

If you weren't *always* a FreeBSD user and were, today, suddenly faced with the opportunity to switch, would you? Would you abandon the nice comfy sheltered harbor of say... Ubuntu?

I regard myself as a bit of a power user (not a guru but certainly FAR more adept than an end-user) and I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. I only resorted to Ubuntu et al because they're easy, there's no screwing around and everything just installs and works.

But I can't help feeling excited at the prospect of a switch to FreeBSD, and I don't want to read some 12-month-old "FreeBSD vs Linux" article either. I'd love to hear from some of you now, in the current state of things, about the wisdom of a switch to FreeBSD for a web dev workstation.
 
richw said:
How many people here are happily using FreeBSD x86_64 as a workstation, with nVidia cards, with compositing etc?
Click to expand...

At least one. I'm running FreeBSD-9.1-RELEASE on a 2008 iMac with a Core 2 Duo processor and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS video card. I use xcompmgr for compositing. Works great. Would work even better if I had a faster processor and video card.

I typically have Chromium, Gimp and about a dozen urxvt-unicode terminals open. I run i3 as my window manager under X11.

I am very happy with FreeBSD.
 
Typing this on my FreeBSD workstation:
Code: 
tingo@kg-v2$ uname -a
FreeBSD kg-v2.kg4.no 8.3-STABLE FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE #6: Fri Apr 27 23:50:55 CEST 2012
     root@kg-v2.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
I'm happy with it.
Note: I also have a laptop, and it runs Xubuntu - getting Xorg to work on the laptop under FreeBSD was too much of a hassle.
 
FreeBSD is wonderful

With respect to your questions:

FreeBSD is actively maintained and well ahead of Linux distributions in many areas. You'll find ZFS and jails here and see them actively developed as state-of-the-art tools. Ports of recent software are regularly updated and easily obtained. The extensive documentation and active community are an uncommon fount of exceptional knowledge and know-how.

I've run eye-candy desktops on multiple machines using the nVidia drivers and affirm it is quite possible. And it is not FreeBSD's fault, but I've moved past this because of the tediousness. The trouble is that your average fancy window manager is tiresome to maintain and frequently lacking in value. In other words, you'll find FreeBSD quite capable of providing the necessary framework, but the goal you seek is not trivial. In this area, your needs as a web developer may exceed my own; I am happy with dwm managing my windows.

I think it hard for the average Linux user, adapted to Windows-like behavior, to understand the value in changing to FreeBSD. (Can you see how a desire for sizzle might make lead you to select a lesser grade of steak ?) I stopped looking for my exit from Windows when I encountered FreeBSD and I'd already determined that Linux distributions were not my solution. I left my comfort zone in the pursuit of a fundamental correctness and would do so again if necessary.

Considering your post:

You'll be happy with FreeBSD if you see the value in a system that provides for a well-designed working environment in which to accomplish wide ranging goals.

You might do well to start with PC-BSD to see what a distributed FreeBSD looks like and to skip over the system administration required to build out the features you seek--yet access much of the superb functionality.

FreeBSD is not an easy pathway, but the gardens are delightful.
 
Coming from Ubuntu you might be better off going the Arch Linux -> Gentoo -> FreeBSD way.
Arch will teach you to do more stuff yourself and provides excellent documentation but is mostly binary based. You can compile everything with the Arch Build System if you want though. Gentoo will teach you to use ports and compile most of your software. FreeBSD shares most of the philosophy of Arch/Gentoo, but you won't have to learn any new commands if you try more advances linux distros first coming from Ubuntu to get used to this philosophy.
 
In addition to the views of forum members, you can read this article for beginners to help familiarize with FreeBSD, and feel free to ask any doubt (always respecting Forum Rules). As great recommendation, check out ThwackAFAQ.
 
blackout24 said:
Coming from Ubuntu you might be better off going the Arch Linux -> Gentoo -> FreeBSD way.
Click to expand...

This does not make sense to me. If you want to test FreeBSD, better to just try it for real than try a Linux distribution that is very different in the details.
 
I use Ubuntu on my workstation and FreeBSD on my servers. I would like to move the workstation to FreeBSD eventually.

If you want to transition I would advise trying to do it slowly rather than all at once. Especially if you need your computer for work. IMHO, if you can find a way to get used to FreeBSD before moving your main workstation over it will be more enjoyable and less stressful.
 
VMs are ideal for testing. You can test the software setup and configuration. It does not test actual hardware compatibility, though.
 
wblock@ said:
This does not make sense to me. If you want to test FreeBSD, better to just try it for real than try a Linux distribution that is very different in the details.
Click to expand...

My point is that it's a more gentle way to introduce someone to FreeBSD. Ubuntu -> FreeBSD is quite a radical transition. I use Arch Linux myself for a very long time and it helped me getting into FreeBSD. It's not a huge step.
 
Running FreebSD 9.1 as my workstation at home. i3 WM, with nvidia 3d acceleration I believe. Only 4GB RAM but the graphics seem to work perfectly for fast paced games like Nexuiz, SuperTuxKart. :)
I have just recently bought one of those douchy, trendy ultrabooks (the Asus zenbook). EFI gave me trouble so ended up trying Fedora on it which installed beautifully and simply. However, found myself cursing Fedora last night because I couldn't get some simple things to work from the command line as they would have reliably done from my FreeBSD machine, not to mention all that "Updates waiting to be installed" notification nonesense. Linux just seems like a mess to me, FreeBSD feels like /home.
I have run PCBSD for my desktop as well for a couple years very happily. Love it for it's ability to "just work" out of the box. I find a fresh FreeBSD install lets me get things working more efficiently but there are things that PCBSD sets up out of the box that I have still yet to accomplish from a "vanilla" FreeBSD install.
Try PCBSD, you can't go wrong with that judging by what you're looking for.
 
A couple of years ago, with Sun looking like it was going to go belly up, I decided to move away from Solaris and try Linux. I've used a few distributions, mainly Debian and its derivatives; they all had a lot of good things going for them, but some things I found deeply irritating too.

Since I started years ago with BSD and then SunOS, I decided to try going full circle and try FreeBSD. I have never regretted the decision. It is imho a bit more awkward in a few areas (eg I had some bother getting mobile broadband on my laptop working, whereas it was dead simple with Linux's nm-applet), but the trade off - you get a coherent system that is easy to maintain and, if you come from a unix background, behaves as you would want/hope - is worth it.

I have FreeBSD running on my home computer, my laptop, a small fileserver at work, and a solar-powered micro-atx box I use on a boat. Works great on all of them!
 
While working to help someone over in this thread, http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=34918, I somehow managed to really mess up my ports system and Python environment. Thanks to FreeBSD being a tightly organized core operating system I was able to simply delete/uninstall ALL my installed software and then reinstall everything as packages (binaries) using a little script I have that simply lists all my favourite programs. I cleaned out my system, reinstalled everything and was back up and running in 1 hour.

Probably possible in some Linux distros but I couldn't have ever done that in any other OS I've used (Slackware, Gentoo, Windows).

EDIT:
Also jail(8) is awesome. Basically built in cloning/virtualization of your system which is useful for testing.
 
Just a word of warning, if you are trying to run a triple head setup (you mentioned Nvidia cards (plural)) that you will lose the ability to run the composite extension. This is an Xorg problem, not a FreeBSD problem, as composite does not work with Xinerama, at least as far as I can tell.

That being said, I run FreeBSD 9.1 as my primary desktop computer with a triple head setup (two Nvidia cards) and it works perfectly (although no fancy eye candy like drop shadows and true transparency).

Good luck with your switch, I think you will come to enjoy FreeBSD as you learn how it works.
 
dave said:
Just my two cents: If you want a BSD workstation with eye candy and nVidia video, get a Mac.
Click to expand...

Pretty much what I have done.

No it's not a full FreeBSD system, but it is (IMHO) the best system for desktop stuff.

If you want to run services though, spin up a FreeBSD box, OS X server is a bit of a joke (yes I've run it). Looks nice on the surface, but just doesn't work very well in reality.

blackout24 said:
My point is that it's a more gentle way to introduce someone to FreeBSD. Ubuntu -> FreeBSD is quite a radical transition. I use Arch Linux myself for a very long time and it helped me getting into FreeBSD. It's not a huge step.
Click to expand...


Not really. OS X probably has about as much (or more) in common with FreeBSD than any Linux distribution.

If you are set on a FreeBSD desktop, I second the notion of trying PC-BSD. It's pre-configured to work and you'll spend more time evaluating the platform than initially trying to make it work. Trying to make it work for days only to find it's not for you is a big waste of time.
 
throAU said:
If you are set on a FreeBSD desktop, I second the notion of trying PC-BSD. It's pre-configured to work and you'll spend more time evaluating the platform than initially trying to make it work. Trying to make it work for days only to find it's not for you is a big waste of time.
Click to expand...

I recommend this approach; it's what I've been doing for the last week or so.

I've been out of touch with FreeBSD for a good 10 years (although kept my hands in the BSD world via OpenBSD for some networking needs) and recently decided to attempt a BSD desktop again. I went with PC-BSD because it was the quickest/easiest way to get a functioning desktop environment with all the bells and whistles. I also liked how easy the installer made it to load a handful of WM's/DE's so I could spend some time in each of them and decide what setup works best for me.

After a few days I was able to make up my mind and decide I'm sticking with BSD on my desktop. PC-BSD made it easy to ensure there's no funky hardware compatibility issues, and I finally settled in with xfce (I tried hard to like KDE but it just wasn't happening.) Now one of these weekends, when I have a full day to dedicate to it, I'll rebuild this desktop with FreeBSD and put everything together the way I like it. But for the time being I'm quite happy using this PC-BSD installation. In some ways (laziness) I'm tempted to just keep the PC-BSD installation, but the geek in me gets some satisfaction from starting off with clean slate and only installing the components I need.

I used FreeBSD on my desktop about 10-12 years ago (in the 4.x series.) For various reasons, mostly lack of time and motivation, I ended up with Windows-only desktops for the next 9 years. Then last year I got my motivation back and tried FreeBSD but couldn't get my laptop's wireless card to work. I tried a few USB Wifi dongles but they all failed. I started to feel like maybe it was easier to give in to the Linux hype, so I ended up running Ubuntu, then Arch, then Fedora. They all had stability issues and I just always felt unhappy with the structure (or lack-there-of) of Linux. Everything felt like it was slapped together by poor coders. I also spent a LOT of time getting familiar with various virtualization solutions surrounding Linux (KVM+libvirt, RHEV/oVirt, Xen) for a handful of open source applications I've been wanting to test, but I could never settle on a solution that I felt happy with. They all left me with the impression of being unnecessarily complicated, poorly documented, and questionably unstable. These were the same impressions I was left with on the desktop side of Linux. Now I'm quite happy with FreeBSD, ZFS, and Jails. I cut my teeth on the BSD's so they've always given me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Now I feel quite happy with my desktop and testing setups.
 
richw said:
How many people here are happily using FreeBSD x86_64 as a workstation, with nVidia cards, with compositing etc?
Click to expand...
I'm pretty happy with it, other than having a proprietary driver (which is also a problem on Linux.)
richw said:
If you weren't *always* a FreeBSD user and were, today, suddenly faced with the opportunity to switch, would you? Would you abandon the nice comfy sheltered harbor of say... Ubuntu?
Click to expand...
If I had only ever run Unbuntu (and not as a server,) I'd want to ease into FreeBSD gradually. I would also say the same thing about a switch to Slackware or Gentoo, though. I started on Slackware, and I'm also a hardcore C/shell/etc. programmer, so it's hard to pretend like I didn't bring that experience with me when I started using FreeBSD. My main difficulty in switching from Slackware came from differences in command-line tools and device naming. For an Ubuntu user, however, the difficulty will be operating entirely from a terminal for the majority of system setup, both during and after installation.
richw said:
This changes everything, but I don't want to make a monumental shift without answering a few questions first... is FreeBSD still regularly maintained, or is it "years behind" Linux like I keep reading around the place?
Click to expand...
A major philosophical difference between FreeBSD and Ubuntu is that Ubuntu will release an LTS version and then provide thousands of updates (many of which are for security) over the next few years, whereas FreeBSD is fairly conservative about saying, "OK, this is the version you should use now." On the other hand, some distros (e.g. Slackware) don't provide updates, or even a package repository. I'd say FreeBSD falls right in between Ubuntu and Slackware with respect to number of updates and package recency.
richw said:
I regard myself as a bit of a power user (not a guru but certainly FAR more adept than an end-user) and I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. I only resorted to Ubuntu et al because they're easy, there's no screwing around and everything just installs and works.
Click to expand...
Wanting to be able to magically install software to do anything you can think of and wanting to be able to harness the full power of your operating system are conflicting goals. This is because the former requires that the structure of your installation be extremely predictable, and the latter requires that you be allowed to change anything you want. I really don't need to satisfy both of those on the same machine, so I switched from one machine running Slackware to one machine running Kubuntu plus another running FreeBSD. Kubuntu is on a laptop, which I use for superficial things like the web, music, presentations, and email, and for working remotely on my FreeBSD machine. There isn't any reason I couldn't use the FreeBSD machine directly, other than that it's a tower and I do most of my work away from home.

Kevin Barry
 
I have very recently tried to use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a reasonably new hardware. The system had an Intel ATOM 1.66 GHz CPU and integrated Intel GPU. 2 GB of memory and not so old 320 GB 2.5" SATA HD. Just the kind of hardware you have on low end notebooks nowadays. Everything was kind of autodetected and the system was usable on the surface after installation. However, performance was abysmally bad. Launching applications took up to a minute sometimes, most of the time at least 20-30 seconds to get any kind of feedback that the application is in fact starting.

Needless to say I wiped the system right away being grateful I didn't need to use it. I'm very sure that with FreeBSD I would have gotten an equivalent system that would blown doors away from the Ubuntu installation performance wise.
 
I got bored with Windows and wanted to see how other operating systems worked. Ubuntu and Mint were nice, but they didn't teach me anything about how the OS really worked. I went to PC-BSD because I was curious about the BSD model and immediately loved how it worked. But even then, I wasn't satisfied because I found the GUI to be sluggish and slow, and everything was already set up. So I took the leap to FreeBSD and learned with zero knowledge how to build everything from scratch (on a vanilla system with nothing on it) to compiling and running X11 and KDE4 on a full blown workstation.

Needless to say, I've learned more in the past 12 months about computers than I have from running Windows over the past 15 years. And I learn something new about FreeBSD just about every week. It's always interesting, and always a rewarding learning experience.
 
KDE on FreeBSD is a fast moving target as well. I currently do not have a FreeBSD desktop, but I still "keep my finger on the pulse" so to speak. The version in ports is usually -fairly- current, no less current, than, say, the latest mainstream Linux release+updates, but not always up to the minute. There is, however, a ports overlay from the KDE team which usually has the absolute latest, and sometimes even pre-release KDE stuff. Just remember, that is COMPLETELY unsupported here.

GNOME, on the other hand, is a bit more... problematic, because the GNOME developers seem to have a problem with anything NOT Linux, and use tons of linuxisms in their code, making it difficult to keep up.

Enlightenment (E17) works fine and all the ugly tilers seem to work fine as well, by most reports.

I've had more experience with E17 and KDE than anything else, at least on FreeBSD.

There are issues with every OS, however, so if you run into something, googlize it. :)
 
break19 said:
Gnome, on the other hand, is a bit more... problematic, because the gnome developers seem to have a problem with anything NOT linux, and use tons of linuxisms in their code, making it difficult to keep up.
Click to expand...
It's not just FreeBSD that has trouble keeping up. Slackware ditched GNOME completely several years ago because it was difficult to maintain from a distro perspective.

Kevin Barry
 
My 2 cents:

Play with the different operating systems to get a feel for them. Then when it comes to make a decision you will not only be facile with the OS but also have a sense of the strengths and weakness.

Some examples:
  1. Desktop with nvidia card and lots of eye candy. Your only real choice is FreeBSD/PC-BSD or Linux
  2. Mail server. OpenBSD has developed a simple, yet elegant mail server with OpenSMTP.
  3. ARM development box: I would probably go Debian.
  4. Firewall: Probably OpenBSD again due to packet filtering which is simple, elegant and enabled by default.
  5. Web server: FreeBSD is reliable and fast but can be time consuming to set up. Debian, reliable but not as fast as FreeBSD but less time consuming to set up.
  6. Bleeding edge open source - Arch Linux vs Fedora.
  7. KDE in a BSD -> FreeBSD. GNOME in a BSD -> OpenBSD.
 
shepper said:
4) Firewall: Probably OpenBSD again due to packet filtering which is simple, elegant and enabled by default.
Click to expand...
OpenBSD's pf is included in FreeBSD and it only takes a few lines in rc.conf to enable. You can also run it along side ipfw.

Kevin Barry
 
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