Solved Amends for undeserved TrueOS despising

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Sensucht94

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Hi,

A few would remember about this old thread, formerly entitled "
TrueOS compared to FreeBSD: a "True" disappointment
"

a foreword to this revision: the thread was opened in the grip of anguish, for having deleted my perfectly working FreeBSD installation, so as to embrace TrueOS, and following having broken my system after only a week of usage. In front of unavoidable kernel panics at boot, being completely ignorant about ZFS troubleshooting (I had barely managed to mount it from a live media), unable to figure out where the problem stood, I ended up switching back to FreeBSD; this implied compiling and configuring everything once again, and here came my unjustified resentment. Not only did I undeservedly bashed TrueOS, but I also made up many untrue/superficial statements which need to be revised



A couple of recent events brought me about to rewrite it from scratch:



  • Debate on TrueOS was reopened recently on forum

  • Above all, I noticed this thread being adressed on reddit, facebook and Linux forums. People took it very seriously, as if containing the undeniable Truth, and immediately discarded the option of trying TrueOS , regardless of official wiki and professional reviews. This thread has somehow vanified some of the efforts TrueOS developers are putting everyday into making this OS reach desktop users, and be perceived as a concrete alternative to Linux. This felt intolerable, and I apologize for such a gross mistake


So, even though I haven't run TrueOS ever since, basing on objective and mature considerations, my previous statements are revised as follows:



  • I said that CURRENT snapshot's instability had lead me toward system break. Higly unlikely: At the beginning I had started installing software with pkgng, and only later discovered AppCafe and its pbis. After that, I stupidly began compiling software which was not in repos (and if it was not there, a reason there should have been) from CURRENT ports' tree. Later on, looking in the Update-Manager I was presented with the possibility of switching from stable snapshots, to nightly-builds (can't recall how were they referred, probably as testing/developer branch). Now I'd dare someone reproducing such a mess and still be able to boot system after a major upgrade

  • I criticized service management for being a mess, and network configuration to be unclear and unreliable. That was a true lie. Clearly, being on OpenRC I how could I expect to correctly manage boot-time services and tasks eidting rc.conf, withouth accordingly touching conf files in /etc/openrc/conf.d/ : hostname, network, modules, keymaps, etc.... and and making use of rc-update cmd <service> <runlevel>? Having been a Gentoo user, I knew this all too well already, I could have immediatel worked it out, still I chose to blindly scorn TrueOS, just because I hadn't managed to find a thorough documentation around service management on their own FAQs

  • I stated their display manager (PCDM) was buggy and didn't detect half of the Wms/DEs I installed: Did I read a man page, or a wiki reference to learn how it worked? At least to check whether it relies on a init script in $HOME, or just looks for .desktop entries in xsessions? Normally I would have, but I didn't, and became for a while the hipster all-knowing Arch Linux user, criticizing Ubuntu without the minimum cognition

  • I downlooked boot time for being infinitely long. How was boot supposed to be fast, when I had put ZFS on a crappy old Celeron, with 2Gb RAM, with tons of unneeded services still enabled?

  • I despised Lumina..however, hadn't I been a Lumina user way before ever trying TrueOS? It's true there are a couple of things I've never shared about its shape, but the truth it's I like it, and I've been liking it from the moment it was first announced, so that was really a cheap shot of me.


I'm thankful to those who had noticed this thread didn't belong to, nor suite these forums in the first place
 
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This is all well and good, but unless you are feeding this back to the TrueOS project, it’s not going to know how you feel and may not know how to move forward productively.

By posting it here and not there comes across, to me, as just bashing a distro…
 
I thought these threads were supposed to be off topic. Or at least in the Off Topic section. I don't see why they are in the Feedback section especially.
Hi, and thanks for your reply. I thought that was indirectly a why to discuss about how FreeBSD fares as a desktop system, compared to their forks, and a way to talk about what are pros and cons of running current FreeBSd version vs stable, and which ideas coming from TrueOS would be good to implement in FreebSD, obviously remaking everything from scratch and learning from the problems me and others had encountered. I thought as well that anyone could have shared its own experience with FreeBSD as a desktop, especially after having used TrueOS.
I wanted to hear other opinion about BSDinit, compared to others like OpenRC and systemd. Keeping that in mind what I wrote was just meant to be my opinion, not a way to make the umpteenth, unproductive critic of TrueOS by the prospective of a FreeBSD user.
I signed up just for that purpose, but I admit now I understand I didn't specify all this, so, do you think I shall delete the thread? I could as well move it in offtopic section after having edited it, thus to add all the questions I wanted to talk about?
I'm new so I do not want to sound silly or not break the rules
Thank you again
 
This is all well and good, but unless you are feeding this back to the TrueOS project, it’s not going to know how you feel and may not know how to move forward productively.

By posting it here and not there comes across, to me, as just bashing a distro…
Thanks, I was already thinking of posting this on TrueOS that's what I'm going to do :)
 
HI and welcome to the forums.

There is already a current thread about TrueOS in the Off Topic section. Your post would have been more appropriate there.

If you've been using FreeBSD since 2013 you should already know how it fares as a desktop OS. I think everybody here that uses it for that purpose is happy with it, though there are a few people who use TrueOS for their own reason, too. I used PC-BSD years ago and prefer FreeBSD as my main desktop OS.

Anybody can roll a Linux distro and put it out there. TrueOS isn't going away and your input, good or bad, is best directed toward them so they can take it into consideration.
 
I thought these threads were supposed to be off topic. Or at least in the Off Topic section. I don't see why they are in the Feedback section especially.

post
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/61441/
2 page systemd thread.

TrueOS, as well as pfsense and FreeNAS, and CURRENT, are a heck of a lot more relevant, especially on a forum that really isn't that busy.
As for TrueOS, my dim memory, probably full of confirmation bias, seems to recall that once Ubuntu made it easier for everyone, including documentation written to make it easy to use, really helped to popularize LInux and start getting it more and better support. If TrueOS does become more successful, the same could happen for FreeBSD.

Though, yeah, it should probably be in offtopic.
 
I had an Acer laptop running FreeBSD since 2012. It works flawlessly. I experimented with TrueOS in a VM and with dual boot, and ran into similar issues with App-Cafe and Lumina. I actually had much better luck with GhostBSD. But nothing beats installing a raw FreeBSD system and then building a desktop piece by piece from the ports tree.
 
Mate as a gnome descendant probably needs HAL and I guess it is not started as a default as it could conflicts with the DEVD mounter.

The problem is the same under FreeBSD. If you run LXDE you need to deactivate autofs by stopping automountd, autounmountd, and starts HAL (no need to stop DEVD daemon). If AUTOFS and HAL are both working... my god, a real mess. So one must create a script to autostart/autoshut off the automounter when switching from one Desktop to another

Swapping to FreeBSD current doesn't seem to be the best idea. I have tried to install FreeBSD Current from scratch... it fails, you need to modify a lot the Kernel config if you want to get rid of all kind of bugs. FreeBSD current is fundamentally unstable, this is an experimental OS for cutting edge developers, so unfortunately as long as they don't come back to Release or Stable, any user may encounter a future stability issue, this is simply not acceptable in a production context. So I am interested in TrueOS, only as an experiment to test FreeBSD 12 Core.

But frankly I would advise TrueOS to change the strategy if they don't want to kill the project.

For Lumina, we know... this is a minimalistic desktop as LXDE, XFCE, and let's be clear there is no intention to create a challenger to GNOME 3/Unity or KDE4/KDE5. So Lumina will be an "administrator" oriented desktop, not a mass market desktop because missing a lot of functions.

But even as a minimalistic desktop, there is still a lot of work to do.
They must develop their own windows manager (in place of fluxbox) to implement compositing. This will probably come in the next major release this year.

Anyway, as now Lumina is the default desktop of TrueOS, so I would advise all the possible TrueOS users to stay under Lumina, this is the one which will get the better optimisation, but you must accept the "minimalistic" concept. I think TrueOS will keep running not so bad under KDE as KDE was previously the default desktop, and as KDE shares a lot with the bases of TrueOS which uses QT5 Toolkit.

We are still waiting with great impatience KDE5 for FreeBSD
I have never been a great fan of GNOME
Perhaps should we wait for KDE5 to recover a much great TrueOS

And forcing people to use ZFS is also a very bad idea. They don't seem to understand that ZFS is not working well for everybody. Some old controllers suck very much with it and there is another simple reason...
I have a computer with a soft/raid 0 to gain capacity and speed set with the Intel ICH Matrix Raid because I have a windows multiboot.

ZFS simply won't install on such matrix RAID.... Ok, some people will answer I am a stupid boy as ZFS is fundamentally a RAID manager, this is the reason why..... yes, ok I know that... but this is a simple case where user has no choice, he must choose UFS, so why forcing him to use ZFS ? The strategy of TrueOS may focuse on ultra modern hardwares. Yes with SSD, Sata 600, RAID 0 in Desktop pseudo hardware raid as Intel Matrix is not so much in use, but there is also a contradiction in this approach. We know that FreeBSD has not the popularity of Windows or Linux, so on ultra modern configurations there are great chances to encounter some critical hardware compatibilities.

Number of users may choose BSD simply because modern Windows versions don't run correctly anymore on their hardware. So TrueOS says "bullshit" to all theses users.... just by forbidding UFS ?

Oh come on...
 
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But nothing beats installing a raw FreeBSD system and then building a desktop piece by piece from the ports tree.

My thoughts exactly. I've never upgraded any of my machines and always do a fresh build with a strong preference for ports.
 
My thoughts exactly. I've never upgraded any of my machines and always do a fresh build with a strong preference for ports.

Agreed, completely. Although it requires some more time to build, the result is much more stable, reliable, customized and therefore, it suits flawlessly one's need without occupying too much hardware room with unneeded features

Nonetheless, I would have smashed the computer in the rare cases when I had to redo everything and run portmaster -af, because of some unresolved dependency I was missing and I hadn't managed to figure out where the problem laid
 
I had an Acer laptop running FreeBSD since 2012. It works flawlessly. I experimented with TrueOS in a VM and with dual boot, and ran into similar issues with App-Cafe and Lumina. I actually had much better luck with GhostBSD. But nothing beats installing a raw FreeBSD system and then building a desktop piece by piece from the ports tree.

Never tried GhostBSD, maybe when I have some time to spare I will give a look to it on virtualbox. You made me curious
 
Mate as a gnome descendant probably needs HAL and I guess it is not started as a default as it could conflicts with the DEVD mounter.

The problem is the same under FreeBSD. If you run LXDE you need to deactivate autofs by stopping automountd, autounmountd, and starts HAL (no need to stop DEVD daemon). If AUTOFS and HAL are both working... my god, a real mess. So one must create a script to autostart/autoshut off the automounter when switching from one Desktop to another.........

..........Number of users may choose BSD simply because modern Windows versions don't run correctly anymore on their hardware. So TrueOS says "bullshit" to all theses users.... just by forbidding UFS ?

Oh come on...

Hey, Wozzeck, thanks for you detailed reply

I endorse all of the things you pointed out. Regarding UFS/ZSF, my mother bought an Acer TravelMate running windows ME back in 2000, because she was required to have a pc at work. She's never been very comfortable with technology and when she had to change pc and gave me her old one, I found it really messed up and full of viruses. Obviously any desktop oriented Linux distro (Debian and derivatives, Fedora, suse) was way too much heavy for it: I I decided to install Arch, which was, at that point, my favourite OS and I had it installed almost everywhere. Well, any boot was a sweat, any poweron , a new error. At the time I had just come to acknowledge the very existence of BSD , and but hadn't tried it out on a real pc even once. I gave FreeBSD a try, never got back. It ran smoothly from the very first time. It's even decently fast. From that point on I would have installed FreeBSD everywhere and build up desktops from components for me and relatives, keeping in mind what hardware FreeBSD supported.
I still use that laptop (just at home, it's really thick and heavy as you can imagine), and it's just about 18 years old......
If FreeBSD had given up the UFS support, now I would have probably sold that pc on ebay for people needing pieces.

Regarding automount in TrueOS, I had enabled Hal with rc-update, as confirmed by the output i could see on boot. I had disabled automountd as well, so I do not know what the problem was. Anyway I do not intend to talk any further about this topic, or I would feel going "too offtopic" on that forum, and it would be indeed true ;)

Ps: keep in mind as well PCBSD is 64 bit only. That's a true shame, I hate that progressive current trend of making everything 64bit only, it's a true shame. It's true that nowadays you won't find any 32bit cpu in any shop, burt that doesn't mean people have thrown all their old machines already

Best regards!
 
I don't want to sound rude, but really, if I want to see what an OS is like I just install it and have a look. Somebody else's experience is not of much interest to me. The same goes for sweaters and shoes.
 
Never tried GhostBSD, maybe when I have some time to spare I will give a look to it on virtualbox. You made me curious

Surprised ghostbsd runs for anyone, I tried it on a few machines and it didn't want to work, with issues ranging from the installation breaking itself to the installer just crashing.
 
I updated a radical revision of thread, as above, being pointing this for those who may find it useful
 
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