2024: The year of desktop FreeBSD?

[Beastie7]

It does sound like you have a design in mind but you expect others to do the work for you. I would recommend you consider contributing your ideas to the GhostBSD efforts if possible. They do have a default desktop and a live system as well. You may have some input that could be valuable in their operating system.

I'm not asking anyone to do anything. I'm simply stating the current status quo (and outcomes that many seem to be complaining about) and what could be done to improve the issue with that. FreeBSD lacks drivers.. and applications. Yes, I know.. catch 22. But something needs to be done. You could probably guess what my suggestion would be to alleviate that.** I got burnt by FreeBSD and went back to macOS.. with all other benefits involved (apps, ecosystem, hardware, iOS)... I see don't reason to go back. I'm sure a lot of committers would agree.. just look at the all of the attendees at annual BSD conferences.. mostly Macs. There's not enough dogfooding.. but, that's not my problem either. macOS is BSD Unix on the desktop; that's very good convenience to give up. However, FreeBSD with solid gnome2 (as a UX) would be something nice and different IMO.

**Hint: Ubuntu solved this issue years ago.. something Redhat themselves even ignored around.. say, Ubuntu 8.04. (yes, I used Linux previously). And now the Linux community are getting first party releases from companies like Presonus and Valve.

As you say, people need to get sh*t done - but: why should I care?

Lol.. so that's your angle.. self-centeredness. ok. sure.

What you care for or not is up to you; that's not my prerogative. However, there are many environments where FreeBSD would fit the bill. FreeBSD could be a great low cost alternative to commercial desktops for environments that don't require typical commercial apps. For example, FreeBSD could easily replace macOS (potentially) or Scientific Linux for academia or other related stuff; but scientists are not going to waste time mucking with a shell. ZFS would a be huge boom for science/HPC stuff.

 

[PMc]

Lol.. so that's your angle.. self-centeredness. ok. sure.

Well, now we can all see what kind of character is in play here (see my complete text above).

I wonder if this is just trolling and rabble-rousing without any interest in practical participation, or if that "desktop" agenda is indeed driven by the pure greed to consume the goods that others should produce.

 

[smithi]

The mechanism exists but only /etc/rc.d/ntpd seems to have an entry for resume.

That's ok, it's new. You can add scripts, probably best to /usr/local/etc/rc.d/*

Do you (does anyone) know how to view /etc/rc.d/ntpd at:

https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/etc?h=releng/14.0

I can't find any of the usual files in /etc, including rc.d/ ?

 

[Beastie7]

I wonder if this is just trolling and rabble-rousing without any interest in practical participation, or if that "desktop" agenda is indeed driven by the pure greed to consume the goods that others should produce.

You sound like a stallman zealot. I'll just end my discussion here. We can agree to disagree.

 

[Charlie_]

Do you (does anyone) know how to view /etc/rc.d/ntpd at:

https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.d?h=releng/14.0

 

[smithi]

https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.d?h=releng/14.0

Wow, thanks! /libexec is about the last place I'd have looked, despite working with bsdconfig sources a year ago, also there.

 

[bakul]

Wow, thanks! /libexec is about the last place I'd have looked, despite working with bsdconfig sources a year ago, also there.

You know about locate(1), right?

locate ntpd | grep ntpd$ | grep src

Assuming you have a local copy of FreeBSD sources.

 

[spectrum48]

So you say, somebody else should sit down and make the install more convenient, for nothing, so that these can make more money??

So that they can money without even bothering to read the handbook (which is also given free to them thanks to hard unpaid volunteer work).

 

[smithi]

You know about locate(1), right?

locate ntpd | grep ntpd$ | grep src

Assuming you have a local copy of FreeBSD sources.

Not to hand presently, and not 14; that's why I'm using cgit.freebsd.org on a phone. Not nearly as smooth as svnweb, but it's what there is, easy enough after the clue.

The way ntpd uses the resume invocation to restart itself is illustrative of one usage. Others will likely use both suspend and resume calls.

 

[3301]

Are you double booting with something else, for example?

No. I use only FreeBSD as a desktop/developer environment.
Anything "missing" from Linux-land is virtualized (bhyve).
I have different PC with Windows and ... Steam and it's solely for gaming .

 

[deFrisselle]

Not strictly FreeBSD, I have a Lenovo Ideapad 300 with GhostBSD installed The last few years I've used it to stream projects to Twitch
Otherwise it is my travel PC I use when away or around town

 

[PMc]

So that they can money without even bothering to read the handbook (which is also given free to them thanks to hard unpaid volunteer work).

Yeah, thats the general idea. We gotta move these color tv, cuz 'i want my mtv'

 

[astyle]

It is possible for some users the prerequisite of literacy is too much to ask. In this case a simpler pre-installed solution should be used. I do find the idea that a user would download an image and burn or write that image to an installation media yet be unable to follow a written guide regarding additional system changes hard to believe.

Most people trying out a new OS for the first time fit that description. In the Linux world, they're known as distro-hoppers who watch youtube instead of actually trying to follow actual written instructions.

 

[piizog]

That being said, I've also ran FreeBSD on the desktop without issue.

Correcting myself here, I do have some issues with the desktop. I upgraded my graphics to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX recently, but the amdgpu drivers in the repos don't support it, so I have to use scfb drivers and that's not... good.

 

[LibreQuest]

Most people trying out a new OS for the first time fit that description. In the Linux world, they're known as distro-hoppers who watch youtube instead of actually trying to follow actual written instructions.

That is a fair point. I was in fact surprised when I first installed FreeBSD. On first boot I saw there was no graphical login. That's when I decided I should read the manual to find out what I had done wrong. I then realized it wasn't a pre built user experience like I had been used to. Which meant I could just install those things that I wanted and after a while it has just become usual when setting up a new system. I honestly don't like or dislike it more or less than a pre built experience. It does make it much easier to know how to quickly configure the system hardware. When I used Linux I spent an equal amount of time removing things from a fresh install as I do adding them on freebsd. Overall I prefer FreeBSD for all my systems. I do have a few running openbsd as well.

 

[blackbird9]

Sadly I don't think 2024 will be the year of desktop freebsd, at least not for me, because of this:-

Intermittant bug in 14.0-RELEASE DRI/crocus driver?

I upgraded 13.2-RELEASE to 14.0-RELEASE a couple of days ago. Hardware is a thinkpad X201 with intel integrated graphics. I am loading i915kms.ko in rc.conf. I'm running a simple setup using windowmaker as the window manager. My uid is in the video group. From cold start, running a glxgears...

forums.freebsd.org

which is this bug:-

267915 – x11-wm/mutter: after graphics/mesa-* 21.3.8 -> 22.2.3 update OpenGL compositing fails on Intel Iris Pro

bugs.freebsd.org

which I have been told by development is not going to be fixed.

In a nutshell, the bug is that switching to another VT once the gui is running kills GPU hardware acceleration and forces the system to fall back to an unaccelerated software driver. In my testing I found this has various consequences depending on what program is being run; I found it is pathological for watching a video fullscreen with mpv, in which case you are locked out of the desktop until the video ends with no way to recover; that was the most severe adverse consequence I have seen so far; of course my testing is not exhaustive.

The bug also happens on suspend-resume, at least on my machine. I found after a resume, restarting the X server by logging out and back in was enough to get hardware accel working again. Whereas following a manual VT switch, the only reliable way to get accel working was a full reboot. But maybe I just got lucky with the suspend-resume case.

The developer says he uses wayland, never switches VT, and doesn't see the loss of hardware accel on suspend-resume with wayland, so maybe there is a kind of workaround if you put up with the limitation of never using VT's and use wayland.

As things stand for users running X11, basically it's broken. All you can do is never do a VT switch and remember to restart X after suspend-resume which is a bit of a pain; or just avoid running any programs that use gpu hardware accel, which is also a major pain for a desktop.

To check if your system has this bug, run this simple test (assuming X11, not wayland):-

Boot machine, start X server, log into an X session.
You can find the name of your DRI accelerated driver in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, look for a "DRI driver" line like this:-
[ 16.864] (II) modeset(0): [DRI2] DRI driver: crocus
In this case we are using the modesetting driver.

Next run xdriinfo in a terminal, note output correctly shows "Screen 0: crocus".
Here 'crocus' is the name of the accelerated gpu driver for intel, if you have non-intel graphics the driver name may be different. However this confirms that gpu acceleration is active.

Do a VT switch to a different VT, then switch back to VT 9 (the X11 VT).

Repeat the xdriinfo test and note the following erroneous output:-
$ xdriinfo
libGL error: failed to authenticate magic 1
libGL error: failed to load driver: crocus
Screen 0: swrast

Showing the system has failed to load the accelerated DRI driver and has changed to the software rasterizer 'swrast' following the VT switch, confirming the bug is present.

 

[k3y5]

Yeah, I went there with the title, but don't worry, the reference is both deliberate and self-aware.

I'm actually about to write an article about this very subject to a Finnish computer culture magazine, from the viewpoint of a newbie-ish, enthusiast, non-sysadmin, desktop user. When I got my new used laptop, I wanted too test it out as a lark, thinking that my double-boot to Linux would be my daily driver and FreeBSD would be a testing playground.

However, the opposite happened. Linux has faded into the tail end of my bootloader and I daily drive FreeBSD 14 with i3wm for all my general computing needs. I've found the experience extremely smooth and the performance snappy. And FreeBSD uses way fewer resources as well. I am naturally lucky in that all the requisite drivers came with the kernel so everything on the laptop worked out of the box.

Despite this, I've noticed that a lot of folks don't bother with FreeBSD as a general desktop OS. I would be very interested in hearing of your reasons why people do or don't daily drive FreeBSD. This question is both out of general curiosity and as background for the article. Are you double booting with something else, for example?

Full disclosure, I still do run Linux on my desktop since I do a bit of gaming and I do media production as my line of work, so the added hardware support comes in clutch.

I try to use FreeBSD whenever I can. The jail system + bhyve has given me the unique ability to segment my desktop system into specific 'security zones,' for different uses. Which is super cool when you connect different zones to different proxies/openvpn connections. Only using Linux for work when docker containers or other Linux kernel things are necessary. At this point I'm just using a raspberry pi rack when I _have_ to do specific Linux things.

Right now I'm working on getting a local Gitlab server setup at the house on FreeBSD as my own little code box. Where I can push code to my local server. Then have it update a remote AWS S3 bucket as an encrypted archived backup, along with gitlab/hub remote repos. Which means Microshit can't remove, freeze, or alter any "banned," repos like PopcornTime. Data now lives in three places on a single push and I have resilient ownership, happy happy.

 

[Zare]

Desktop is a dead concept.
It used to mean "a computer capable of running latest application software, targeted towards end-users".

Nowadays when most favoured proprietary OS is a half-online thing with its own app store pushing people to use "cloud" software, it's a bit defunct to speak about the "desktop OS". You'll be able to run the Microsoft Office because it is about to stop being a native application and turn into cloud service permanently.

The end-user thing, we're already there and have been for some time. I mean if someone makes a custom FreeBSD installer and a desktop-provisioning port/package you could tomorrow have a 1-click automated 21st century desktop easily.

Showstopper for "Desktop UNIX" has always been the lack of applications from premier software companies and games. For some things we lack unified library support for easy porting - having an performant audio software for all OSes is not an easy thing to do since none of the OSes share basic audio stacks. For some things it's just up to company's decision, Adobe has had Photoshop proof of concept on Linux for 20 years and it's their decision not to pursue it.

It's maybe counterintuitive but things are going to improve for us with these companies moving from software as a product to software as a service model. There is only one valid SaaS desktop platform and that's the Web which we fully support.

 

[Jose]

This is indeed a well-trodden path. If I'm going to repeat myself, let me do so accurately:

I think, at this stage, I am finally convinced that FreeBSD is not ready for all desktop users.

I don't know if this is still true, but I do remember that at one point, Dell was offering Ubuntu laptops. However, they weren't easy to find on the page and I feel as if I remember them being more expensive than the Windows equivalent. When netbooks seemed like they were going to be a thing...

forums.FreeBSD.org

RTL8821CE driver?

Hello, As sure as some of you know, getting WiFi to work on this OS can be a hassle - especially when the network card you have is not supported. Just curious - will there be the prospect of an RTL8821CE driver in FreeBSD?

forums.FreeBSD.org

And my views on how this kind of thread decays:

Why do you use FreeBSD on desktop?

I should also add that installing FreeBSD is really simple unlike Arch/Gentoo. Usually It's not possible to install these distros without wiki. on Discord, ppl challenge each other for 'speedruns', who can install FreeBSD faster! and I think those 'speedruns' are actually kept track of on...

forums.FreeBSD.org

I've tried to condense these into a sort of joke:
The Apple desktop is a big iPhone.
The Windows desktop is a joke.
The Linux desktop is a sick joke.

I know. Don't quit my day job.

 

[astyle]

Desktop is a dead concept.
It used to mean "a computer capable of running latest application software, targeted towards end-users".

Nowadays when most favoured proprietary OS is a half-online thing with its own app store pushing people to use "cloud" software, it's a bit defunct to speak about the "desktop OS". You'll be able to run the Microsoft Office because it is about to stop being a native application and turn into cloud service permanently.

The end-user thing, we're already there and have been for some time. I mean if someone makes a custom FreeBSD installer and a desktop-provisioning port/package you could tomorrow have a 1-click automated 21st century desktop easily.

Showstopper for "Desktop UNIX" has always been the lack of applications from premier software companies and games. For some things we lack unified library support for easy porting - having an performant audio software for all OSes is not an easy thing to do since none of the OSes share basic audio stacks. For some things it's just up to company's decision, Adobe has had Photoshop proof of concept on Linux for 20 years and it's their decision not to pursue it.

It's maybe counterintuitive but things are going to improve for us with these companies moving from software as a product to software as a service model. There is only one valid SaaS desktop platform and that's the Web which we fully support.

Hmmm... How about Under-Desk UNIX server?

Under-desk Server Rack 19" Rack 600x800 12 Units Black - Network Cabinet Rack - Rack Cabinets and Accessories - Networking

Rugged floor rack cabinet characterized by a sturdy structure with quickly removable panels and easily reversible doors. The linear and modern design does not neglect the aesthetic aspect made unique by the red colored profiles. Fully compatible with all

www.techly.com

Nope, not a desktop

Dunno if you saw post #67...

2024: The year of desktop FreeBSD?

To summarize: There seem to be at least two groups of people on this subject: Those who like & use FreeBSD as a desktop OS, and those who don't. Who would have guessed? 🤡

forums.freebsd.org

 

[grahamperrin]

not going to be fixed.

I'll continue in the linked topic. Thanks.

 

[grahamperrin]

Desktop is a dead concept. …

A notebook with Windows is standard issue in my organisation, that'll not change any time soon.

There's equally good support (IMHO) for macOS, however Mac hardware is no longer purchased without senior authorisation of a business case. I assume that the resulting dwindling use is mostly due to overpricing by Apple.

 

[cracauer@]

A notebook with Windows is standard issue in my organisation, that'll not change any time soon.

There's equally good support (IMHO) for macOS, however Mac hardware is no longer purchased without senior authorisation of a business case. I assume that the resulting dwindling use is mostly due to overpricing by Apple.

I worked for a company where you could pick between Linux laptops and Macbooks, but you needed a solid business case to use a Windows notebook. That was done because of security concerns around Windows and (even more so) the typical software that casual users put on their Windows machines.

Linux distributions, FreeBSD ports and macOS' brew have much better security on average than what a Windows user downloads from literally random sources.

 

[grahamperrin]

Thanks,

what a Windows user downloads from literally random sources.

Various protections are in place.

 

[astyle]

I worked for a company where you could pick between Linux laptops and Macbooks, but you needed a solid business case to use a Windows notebook. That was done because of security concerns around Windows and (even more so) the typical software that casual users put on their Windows machines.

Linux distributions, FreeBSD ports and macOS' brew have much better security on average than what a Windows user downloads from literally random sources.

The vast majority of FreeBSD's ports are from 'random sources'. The very design of the security model of the OS makes a difference in how safe it is to install stuff from random sources. It's relatively safe on FreeBSD/Linux, but on Windows, a 'random source' can mean trouble if you're not paying attention.