Excitement and opportunity for the future of FBSD

cracauer@ said:
Speaking of Arch: how does Arch avoid the problem we have with occasional build fallout and some packages becoming temporarily unavailable due to dependency breakage.

I understand how Debian does it, but Arch seems to do what FreeBSD does, but with less (no?) fallout.
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Arch, just tries really hard to not break stuff. But there are some major changes that usually break upgrades for a brief window of time (usually announced on the main page if known, otherwise fallout on forum/irc/etc). Derivatives (manjaro for example) tries to hold back packages for a certain amount of time before moving to the main repos.
Alpine, has a concept similar to FreeBSD/debian, with stable branches and a rolling branch (which is similar to the stable branch of freebsd).

So all in all, the FreeBSD option looks good, but in can be improved. PKG really could benefit from a review of the solver (and resilience of the sqlite backend).
As is, and barring the issues with packages occasionally ghosting for a while (or dependencies not correctly defined) I think the latest tracking of base, ports and kmods is working fine.
 
wolffnx said:
If the desktop attracts more users to FreeBSD, is fine
but not modify the FreeBSD main line that is servers,make a "flavor" of fbsd oriented to that users and done

what more do you need from FreeBSD now? you have a desktop,you have a good OS, K.I.S.S philosophy
sorry for sound like an asshole but is you want games, go to Windows and if you want the latest "hacker movie" desktop go to Linux
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I don't mean to be argumentative but you can accomplish the "hacker movie" desktop and modern as well as older titles of video games on FreeBSD at the moment. There is no reason to move to a different operating system in order to do those things. There is an exception for some of the video game titles however, they don't work at the moment. :D

I would encourage anyone who is interested in porting more things to FreeBSD to do so. It does no harm to the system at all in making things work on FreeBSD and it won't change the operating system by running software. <-- I mean, granted it's not malicious software meant to compromise or change the operating system.
 
kpedersen said:
Absolutely. The foundation has an impossible task:
  • Support a good operating system
  • Support a popular operating system
These are mutually exclusive properties. The latter helps to ensure funding but then, for what purpose?
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Looking at the funding of the FreeBSD foundation, your conclusion that "being popular ensures funding" is incorrect.

If a million individual desktop users adopt FreeBSD (probably replacing Windows or Linux on the same hardware), I don't think that nets the foundation very much money. The funding for the foundation is dominated by a small number of organizations, which are mostly FreeBSD users: companies that use FreeBSD internally. The reason the foundation has recently focused on desktop usage and WiFi is in particular due to a very small number of large grants to the foundation from one donor, who is using FreeBSD heavily (for reasons we don't need to discuss here). Most other large donors use FreeBSD either as an embedded system or as a server.

The exception to what I said above: In 2024, the foundation received a large donation from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which is itself a charitable organization, not a commercial company that uses FreeBSD internally.

Donations from individuals pale by comparison.
 
ralphbsz said:
Looking at the funding of the FreeBSD foundation, your conclusion that "being popular ensures funding" is incorrect.
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I'm not so sure. By popular, I don't necessarily mean "with individuals". One that comes to mind is trying to tailor the LinuxEmu layer to provide docker containers in the hope that it attracts companies stuck with that kind of stack.

Allowing better exploitation of FreeBSD by commercial entities does contribute to funding but not necessarily a better OS.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Docker,lxd,lxc,podman, bad solutions for an inherit DLL hell.
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Its mainly so people can just grab and run pre-packaged cruft without learning / having time for / doing a proper job. It just so happens that "Docker Image" is an alias for "Bunch of packaged Linux binaries", hence on FreeBSD it just turns into emulation with extra steps. Some quotes from the recent article that are relevant:

You can find FreeBSD OCI images on GitHub and Docker Hub. But we imagine many people will want to consume Linux images.
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is about to introduce a whole raft of new users to FreeBSD. We’ve already been seeing a large uptick in new users visiting the YouTube channel and Subreddit
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All this work is essentially advocacy for Linux rather than FreeBSD. But if it still brings in some bucks, I don't think the foundation minds.
 
wolffnx said:
sorry for sound like an asshole but is you want games, go to Windows and if you want the latest "hacker movie" desktop go to Linux
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That was "ONCE" true. The reality in 2025/2026 is VERY different. All of the games I play run "perfect" on Linux now and Windows (10 / 11) has turned into a lot of things "I did not ask for": Co-Pilot AI, Recall (who even asked for that?), One Drive, Cloud, Seriously? You are displaying an Advertisement to me on my Windows O/S that asks my if "I want to install Minecraft on to my Windows?" What year is this?

FreeBSD on the desktop is pretty challenged when it comes to maintaining "stable" graphic card drivers on the O/S. As a user you have no idea or control when your "currently working" FreeBSD graphic card driver is going to be "suddenly and un-explainably" removed from FreeBSD and replaced with a non-working graphic driver. The madding part is: All I want is the old WORKING graphic driver "the was literally just working seconds ago" re-installed back using "pkg" or whatever -- so I can just re-install the old driver again and be on my way Sorry - nope, we don't do that. The needs of the "many" out weigh the needs of the "few", or "the one". OK... But they sure manage to DO THAT JUST FINE ON LINUX DEBIAN?

See here (link): URGENT - NVIDIA - REL15.0: 580.119.02_1 of nvidia driver/drm61/kmod - ARE KNOWN BROKEN

I am actively switching all of my FreeBSD desktop installs to FreeBSD servers at this point.
 
CShell said:
That was "ONCE" true. The reality in 2025/2026 is VERY different. All of the games I play run "perfect" on Linux now and Windows (10 / 11) has turned into a lot of things "I did not ask for": Co-Pilot AI, Recall (who even asked for that?), One Drive, Cloud, Seriously? You are displaying an Advertisement to me on my Windows O/S that asks my if "I want to install Minecraft on to my Windows?" What year is this?
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I've only seen that on Home (seemed more tame though 11 vs 8-10); sysadmins should use Pro+ :cool:
 
CShell said:
As a user you have no idea or control when your "currently working" FreeBSD graphic card driver is going to be "suddenly and un-explainably" removed from FreeBSD and replaced with a non-working graphic driver.
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Hmm. After 22 years of using FreeBSD with nvidia cards, I've never had the issue once. I see that with 15.0 some have had some issues but that's on a major upgrade and I don't know if they've been fixed. Otherwise, as I said, I've never seen it.
 
CShell said:
That was "ONCE" true. The reality in 2025/2026 is VERY different. All of the games I play run "perfect" on Linux now and Windows (10 / 11) has turned into a lot of things "I did not ask for": Co-Pilot AI, Recall (who even asked for that?), One Drive, Cloud, Seriously? You are displaying an Advertisement to me on my Windows O/S that asks my if "I want to install Minecraft on to my Windows?" What year is this?

FreeBSD on the desktop is pretty challenged when it comes to maintaining "stable" graphic card drivers on the O/S. As a user you have no idea or control when your "currently working" FreeBSD graphic card driver is going to be "suddenly and un-explainably" removed from FreeBSD and replaced with a non-working graphic driver. The madding part is: All I want is the old WORKING graphic driver "the was literally just working seconds ago" re-installed back using "pkg" or whatever -- so I can just re-install the old driver again and be on my way Sorry - nope, we don't do that. The needs of the "many" out weigh the needs of the "few", or "the one". OK... But they sure manage to DO THAT JUST FINE ON LINUX DEBIAN?

See here (link): URGENT - NVIDIA - REL15.0: 580.119.02_1 of nvidia driver/drm61/kmod - ARE KNOWN BROKEN

I am actively switching all of my FreeBSD desktop installs to FreeBSD servers at this point.
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Don't forget, FreeBSD itself and its ports are mostly maintained by volunteers.

If you force me "keep ALL versions of nvidia driver ports everytime and maintain!", I need to resign from maintaining it.

In case breakages on 580.119.02, it fixed HDMI breakage existed on previous version for affected users. So reverting back is not at all an option.

And more, nvidia driver ports are already tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo complexed and keeping every version once available is unrealistic for volunteers.
 
T-Aoki said:
maintained by volunteers
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T-Aoki said:
If you force
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Don't listen to those who complain just because they happen to be the loudest.

I shout: THANK YOU T-Aoki and thanks to your fellow volunteers. Your work is IMMENSELY APPRECIATED by many. Keep doing it while it fulfills you or it gives you something that you appreciate. Do it on your own terms so you can keep doing it.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Hmm. After 22 years of using FreeBSD with nvidia cards, I've never had the issue once. I see that with 15.0 some have had some issues but that's on a major upgrade and I don't know if they've been fixed. Otherwise, as I said, I've never seen it.
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Did you follow the link I provided? NVIDIA RTX4080
 
T-Aoki said:
If you force me "keep ALL versions of nvidia driver ports everytime and maintain!", I need to resign from maintaining it.
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My issue is solved -- FreeBSD is running nicely as a server now.

You need to THINK about what I am writing instead of attacking what I am writing. The current NVIDIA distribution policy is disabling working FreeBSD desktops "in mid release cycle". The disabled FreeBSD desktops are (NOT EVEN) being disabled during FreeBSD POINT or MAJOR releases, just randomly whenever one does a pkg update. There is no way to plan for that.

Whether you resign, don't resign or whatever is not something I have ever asked, thought of or even care about.

This is/was my VERY LAST FreeBSD NVIDIA card bug report. You can interpret whatever silence you hear from now on as "everything is fine" for all I care.

I standby what I wrote, which is: FreeBSD on the desktop is pretty challenged when it comes to maintaining "stable" graphic card drivers on the O/S.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Cshell, you use wine devel. Because for me it asked some lib32 not available... I know nothing about FreeBSD multilib.
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On FreeBSD 15 -- I (DID) recently rebuild wine and it went fine (aka my 32bit games started and ran fine after applying the patch). If you are still looking for a fix to the 32 bit issue -- there is one !

Interestingly the software fix details were buried in the published bug report -- look at the (very last) comment in the published bug report. You need to apply a software "patch" your /usr/port wine source code using the patch(1) command. Then rebuild and install wine as you do normally.

The patch will allow you to specify an "--old" flag to your wine initial startup pkg32.sh command. For example:

/usr/local/share/wine/pkg32.sh --old (see patch for rest of argvs)
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CShell said:
You need to THINK about what I am writing instead of attacking what I am writing.
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You're clearly mis-understanding.
I'm not attacking anyone including you.
Just wrote facts only.

Provide all version of drivers that whichever of them works for anyone (some need A, but others need older B, so provide both) would be ideal, but too hard for limited number of volunteers work to maintain.
It should be forced only under expensive and paid commercial maintainance contracts.

Volunteers provides anything possible to do within spare times and workloads with resource (including hardwares) in hand. Not more.
And current form of nvidia driver ports are exactly that.

On the other hand, users need to report issues in official way (currently via Bugzilla or Phabricator if the person has patch to fix).
Unlike commercial maintainance contracts, volunteers cannot ask EVERYONE using the port "hey, are the driver sets in use working 100% fine?".
User's efforts for reporting "officially" is mandatory. If anyone already filed the PR for it, the user can simply watch the PR to see what's going on.
Otherwise, any maintainer would think "my ports are working OK". Because the maintainers cannot know the breakage unless it happenes in hand or officially reported.

This forum is (unfortunately) NOT an official place to report / track issues.
The fact I'm attending in this forums is just an inofficial bonus.
So as other maintainers / developers.
 
msplsh said:
So funny people in here arguing to keep people out when that's the opposite of what the Foundation is trying to do.
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Just an observation.... The goals of the FreeBSD Foundation are not tied to the goals of the FreeBSD Core team. There is of course some overlap but to my knowledge there is no direct hierarchy in play - they are independent entities.
 
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