FuryBSD - New FreeBSD Desktop OS

Hey everybody,

I'm new to the FreeBSD forums and have read through the rules, so hopefully, I won't have any faux pas. If there's a better place to post this, please let me know or feel free to move it. I'd appreciate it greatly.

I wanted to let everybody know that a few of us have gotten together and launched a new FreeBSD-based desktop project called FuryBSD. It's completely Free, Open Source, and available in a hybrid, live image right now. The goal of FuryBSD is to maintain tight integration with FreeBSD, meaning we use the tools provided in FreeBSD to maintain the OS, including updating and installing. There won't be any unnecessary tuneables. We hope that this effort will mean that users wanting a desktop experience can enjoy FreeBSD without having the Frankenstein's monster issue of additional layers of failure from custom utilities that are unsustainable to maintain. The test image is available for download from the website here.

If anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer them, but I just wanted to try to get the word out there that there's a new FreeBSD Desktop in town. Thanks, everybody!

Disclosure: I work for iXsystems, but FuryBSD is not an iXsystems project. FuryBSD is a wholly community-driven and open-source effort. I don't want anyone to be surprised if you've seen my name before as I am involved in many other open-source projects and communities.

Thanks,

Joshua
 
Interesting but,
"the Frankenstein's monster issue of additional layers of failure from custom utilities that are unsustainable to maintain."
Could you provide a list of the utilities ?
 
Thanks for your response. I'd rather not get specific because I'm not looking to call any other past BSD desktop projects out on their design decisions and utilities. I can say from personal experience I think it's better to have tighter compatibility with FreeBSD rather than diverging too much, creating new utilities and changes that are difficult to keep up with. As an example, if we were to build our own installer and something changes upstream, it creates an additional layer of failure or something extra to maintain. Eventually, it becomes unsustainable for a small desktop development team because there are just too many moving parts.
 
So much for losing Trident. You took up that slack and welcome to it.

I downloaded the live image and will give it a fair try since I see Joe is on the team. I still need to update my W520 from 11.2 and have it offline for the moment so no time constraints. I don't use Telegraph but will let you know my honest opinion of the first time user experience as a favor.
 
Can't say I'm particularly thrilled, anything with even a tangential connection to iXsystems automatically makes me suspicious at this point. Is FuryBSD based on TrueOS or plain FreeBSD? What are the differences from GhostBSD?
 
Hey everybody,

I'm new to the FreeBSD forums and have read through the rules, so hopefully, I won't have any faux pas. If there's a better place to post this, please let me know or feel free to move it. I'd appreciate it greatly.

I wanted to let everybody know that a few of us have gotten together and launched a new FreeBSD-based desktop project called FuryBSD. It's completely Free, Open Source, and available in a hybrid, live image right now. The goal of FuryBSD is to maintain tight integration with FreeBSD, meaning we use the tools provided in FreeBSD to maintain the OS, including updating and installing. There won't be any unnecessary tuneables. We hope that this effort will mean that users wanting a desktop experience can enjoy FreeBSD without having the Frankenstein's monster issue of additional layers of failure from custom utilities that are unsustainable to maintain. The test image is available for download from the website here.

If anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer them, but I just wanted to try to get the word out there that there's a new FreeBSD Desktop in town. Thanks, everybody!

Disclosure: I work for iXsystems, but FuryBSD is not an iXsystems project. FuryBSD is a wholly community-driven and open-source effort. I don't want anyone to be surprised if you've seen my name before as I am involved in many other open-source projects and communities.

Thanks,

Joshua
Why not join GhostBSD or NomadBSD team? How your goals are different then their?
 
Hi guys I'm Joe Maloney in case you didn't already know. This is soley a community project. All costs for this are coming out of my pocket, all the development is coming only out of my free time, and I want to keep it that way. I do work with Eric very closely. I helped write the later iterations of his LiveCD which this new project is based on, and we still collaborate together a lot even in the last week.

I hope to collaborate with NomadBSD as well and perhaps contribute to dsbdriverd which I have enabled but have not pushed yet. Currently the ISO is nothing more than stock FreeBSD with a wrapper script that calls a lot of bsdinstall modules. The key difference is I am using dump, and restore which are FreeBSD utilities to clone the live file system after the user creates a pool with bsdinstall. I will not make an alternate installer, alternate update system, pkg-base, etc. This project uses FreeBSD tools.

My goals are ship XFCE as the default supported image at 1.2GB which allows the user to boot up into a fully read write file system without persitance. Persistance support may or may not come in the future because it is not my main goal. I don't want to step on NomadBSD too much either because I like that project, and would like to work with them. My main goal is simply to automate booting a FreeBSD desktop, provide some tools to make repetivie tasks easier, a hardware info tool, etc.

I plan to offer KDE, and Gnome images in the future. If the users makes changes, enables network, installs nvidia-driver, the installer will commit the changes after the user is happy with the changes. So in that way persistence is a thing, but you have to install it to get the persistence. It's not meant to live on USB stick forever other than to test hardware compatibility before committing to disk. It's a fancier version of my ansible playbooks with my LiveCD work co-developed with Eric. Stock FreeBSD all the way otherwise with custom theming coming to make it look nice, and some other tools like directory services integration. I will also be offering a PXE boot capable ISO.
 
Have you improved/expanded touchscreen support?

Not yet. To the best of my knowledge this still requires a patch to ports with 12.1 to use libinput properly. I have been looking at it, and will poke the right people for updates once I can confirm the patches work. I want to avoid committing anything for that to FuryBSD until it's official in ports.
 
Will I be able to stick a SIM card in my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and have Internet access almost immediately without jumping through lots of hoops?

I haven't actually figured out how to do this yet on FreeBSD, but on Windows it's a breeze.
 
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Will I be able to stick a SIM card in my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and have Internet access almost immediately without jumping through lots of hoops?

I have actually figured out how to do this yet on FreeBSD, but on Windows it's a breeze.

We might need some extra modules for SIM card. I can confirm in the near future. Also networking is not setup automatically but can be enabled using bsdconfig.
 
I try almost anything once, sometimes even twice. But, If I don't see or hear something new and interesting about Lumina or a new and exciting news regarding deployment, employment and management of FreeBSD jails or/and bhyve, within FreeBSD, then I'm not interested in yet another FreeBSD-like OS with GUI for dummies. We have plenty "out_of_control" point&click/smart-ass GUI/OS implementations: MS-Windows, Mac/OSX, iOS, Android OS and so many Linux-inside with GUI distributions that can make one's frontal cortex useless. But, this is only my personal rumbling and view. I wish anyone, who tries, all the best, no matter the outcome. It's better to try something and hope for the best than let your knowledge and imagination go to waist.

Good Luck!
 
Some people leave freebsd after they tried to install it once and failed the first time. Just like I failed in installing Arch linux and never tried that linux distribution again.
 
Some people leave freebsd after they tried to install it once and failed the first time. Just like I failed in installing Arch linux and never tried that linux distribution again.
When I installed and configured FreeBSD for the 1-st time, over a year ago, it worked for me the first time. But if it didn't, I'd have tried 2-nd time, if I had to. And, I'm as dumb as the come :) Tho, I do have more luck than brains - heh
 
Some people leave freebsd after they tried to install it once and failed the first time. Just like I failed in installing Arch linux and never tried that linux distribution again.

I quite like Arch Linux and got it installed fairly easily using this guide:-

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqh9AQt3nho


Not sure that this tutorial works any more as Arch Linux is a quickly changing target.

I have it set up on my PXE server so I can boot it up on any of my systems quite easily if I need access to a Linux system.
 
When I installed and configured FreeBSD for the 1-st time, over a year ago, it worked for me the first time. But if it didn't, I'd have tried 2-nd time, if I had to. And, I'm as dumb as the come :) Tho, I do have more luck than brains - heh

The problem for most Linux users trying FreeBSD, is that they expect a GUI and are somewhat confused by a command prompt. IMV it's probably better have a GUI bolted on for new users so that they can get used to FreeBSD and what it has to offer. Of course getting a GUI installed is a lot easier than it used to be, but then there is problem of knowing which to chose, and each one has its own configuration and this abundance of choice leaves such a installation error prone.
 
If the users makes changes, enables network, installs nvidia-driver, the installer will commit the changes after the user is happy with the changes. So in that way persistence is a thing, but you have to install it to get the persistence. It's not meant to live on USB stick forever other than to test hardware compatibility before committing to disk.

I had planned to wait till FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE came out to update my W520 and have other laptops to use so I'll go ahead and install it to disk to see how it goes. I prefer LXDE as a DE but have used XFCE and like it better than Lumina so it's all good.

It's the least I can do, all things considered. :p
 
I try almost anything once, sometimes even twice. But, If I don't see or hear something new and interesting about Lumina or a new and exciting news regarding deployment, employment and management of FreeBSD jails or/and bhyve, within FreeBSD, then I'm not interested in yet another FreeBSD-like OS with GUI for dummies. We have plenty "out_of_control" point&click/smart-ass GUI/OS implementations: MS-Windows, Mac/OSX, iOS, Android OS and so many Linux-inside with GUI distributions that can make one's frontal cortex useless. But, this is only my personal rumbling and view. I wish anyone, who tries, all the best, no matter the outcome. It's better to try something and hope for the best than let your knowledge and imagination go to waist.

Good Luck!

I think if you want to gain interest for a new project like this, you have to have at least 1 thing that's glaringly missing or wrong with the standard dist. Its like a bar advertising that they have booze and music; well so does everyone else.
 
I pay a lot more attention to the psychological side of software development now than I've ever used to. What I've noticed on my first steps in the BSD world is that I expected everything to work instantly and magically, and it looks like so do a great many people on this planet. [ I understand the reasons for this but it would be even more off-topic. ;) ]

A concrete example is keyboard mapping selection in the OpenBSD installer. It took me several attempts to find the code for my mapping. It had been there all the time, of course, but I had only seen it after I had finally accepted to go slowly through the installation process.

FreeBSD's installer is light years ahead of OpenBSD's and FreeBSD comes with a comprehensive and well-written documentation - not always quite up-to-date yet always helpful, at least as a good starting point. Plus the whole load of information in the forums.

So what could go wrong for someone giving a try to FreeBSD, if it was not for his/her unrealistic expectations?

To some extent, newcomers can be gently guided on the way to serenity and simplicity (a guidance also known as "User eXperience Design"), but no one can travel in their place.

This raises a series of "philosophical" questions:

- What brings together the people developing FreeBSD?
- What brings together the people using FreeBSD?
- What is the deepest, most fundamental reason for FreeBSD to exist, that makes it unique and irreplaceable?
- What does it mean for someone to give FreeBSD a try?
- What does that person get in return for her efforts, big or small, successful or not?
- Would that person get as much if her efforts were alleviated?

I've been active in the software development field for 30+ years and I've constantly verified that technology is never a limiting factor, nor a root cause of project failure. Failures are always the consequence of unresolved psychological issues, or incompatibility with psychological requirements. A common example of this is when the deployment of a new application threatens the fragile balance of a group (e.g. company, subsidiary, department, team).

Furthermore, technology is never meaningful in itself, it is just a tool. Things such as meaning, purpose, motivation, etc. arise from relationships, hence the importance of psychology.

This is why I think it would be greatly beneficial to the developers involved to seriously address the questions above, and probably even more, before engaging into the development effort of any "user-friendly" flavor of FreeBSD. Answering these questions will help them determine if they will reach any user community, what kind of community, and how to best reach it and serve it in the long term.
 
I had planned to wait till FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE came out to update my W520 and have other laptops to use so I'll go ahead and install it to disk to see how it goes. I prefer LXDE as a DE but have used XFCE and like it better than Lumina so it's all good.

It's the least I can do, all things considered. :p
Cool. I highly recommend the 12.1 image released just a few minutes ago on github. I just committed dsbdriverd from the NombadBSD project as well.
 
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