TrueOS

JazzSinatra

JazzSinatra

Do you have any opinion about TrueOS? Do you think that it has good future ahead it and do you believe that TrueOS has good or bad influence to FreeBSD? Could TrueOS compete with Windows, Mac OS or Linux? I'm interested to know what FreeBSD users generally think about TrueOS.
 
It has been evolved from PC-BSD. I would not use if for production since it follows FreeBSD-Current. I installed it once in my laptop and was not very satisfied.
 
It seems to be a hit-and-miss thing for me. The February ISO's boot right up, but for me nothing since ... I'm guessing the moderator is going to point out the "sticky" at the top of this forum section, and suggest that the conversation continue on trueos.org.
 
Well, if the OP objective is to find something like a pre-cooked FreeBSD for some reason, I would go with GhostBSD instead of TrueOS. I do not use it but GhostBSD deviate very little from the vanilla FreeBSD.

I have absolute nothing against TrueOS but I think it is too much customized for my taste, to the point you cannot use pkg(8) without the risk of breaking the system.
 
lebarondemerde said:
I have absolute nothing against TrueOS but I think it is too much customized for my taste, to the point you cannot use pkg(8) without the risk of breaking the system.
Click to expand...

You can use it - however, it is not the "vanilla" pkg from FreeBSD but with some safeguards to play nice with the appcafe and the special upgrade mechanism TrueOS uses. I actually use pkg exclusively when removing packages, because AppCafe just removes every dependency without further notice and happily nukes your desktop setup on the way...

I'm running TrueOS on my desktops at work and my notebook and if i weren't such a lazy bastard and finally move all my stuff over to the ZFS-pool, also full-time on my desktop at home. Main reason: I'm a lazy bastard... TrueOS and Lumina only need little modifications to fit my daily workflow and both work really well nowadays. Especially with the first few releases and updates, some things broke (especially skylake/i915 graphics related), but either falling back to SCFB/Modesetting or just rolling back to the previous BE always gave me back a working system so I was quickly able to get back to work. (Yes, this would also apply to vanilla FreeBSD with a custom DE installation)


I'm also still evaluating TrueOS for the clients at our company - or better say I'm using the term "evaluation" for the test run for an upcoming transition to TrueOS on all Clients :D.
The first 4 NUCs I've deployed are still fine after ~5 months, 5 more clients were installed since then and all users are quite happy so far. The automated deployment via Ansible still needs some polishing for some configurations, but basically works, and maintenance either via ansible or manually via SysAdm is working fine.
Yes, this could be all built from scratch with FreeBSD - but as said: I'm a lazy bastard ;) Also the support for current Intel graphics is key when trying to deploy on various intel-based client platforms with reasonable effort (I'm a one-man-show and have to run the whole infrastructure....)


On servers I rely on vanilla FreeBSD because I like to get my 8 hours of peaceful sleep every night. That's also why I migrated everything from linux to FreeBSD....


To refer to the original questions:
I think especially Lumina as a home-grown BSD-specific DE could be a great benefit not only for FreeBSD. Most (all?) other DEs often suffer from Linuxisms that either break things or need a lot of work to port/adapt to FreeBSD or even BSD in general.
Also the wider use of the -CURRENT branch through TrueOS and the increased feedback and also the work from iX that gets upstreamed might ease and accelerate the development and lead to more mature and tested -RELEASE branch (IMHO).

I don't know if iXsystems really wants to compete with the Windows or Mac world - I really hope they don't. These are completely different ecosystems and target groups. I doubt it would be of any benefit to try and "copy" any of these systems, because their typical users have vastly different concept of an operating system and how to work and interact with a computer.
Looking at the Linux world it went downhill really fast and really ugly since they (forcefully) tried to adapt linux to the desktop for the average pointy-clicky windows user. I doubt this kind of travesty would be possible in the FreeBSD ecosystem though...


So to sum it up:
JazzSinatra said:
I'm interested to know what FreeBSD users generally think about TrueOS.
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I think TrueOS is beneficial for FreeBSD and I really like to use it on my desktop machines. Despite some modifications and specialties it's still mainly FreeBSD under the hood and thus also perfectly fits my every-day work with FreeBSD (and illumos) Servers.
 
My CPU architecture(s) are x86_i386. I would not be able to use TrueOS. (At least until the hardware needs replacement.)
 
I used to run PC-BSD/TrueOS on servers when it followed FreeBSD's RELEASE cycle. When they shifted to a rolling model based on -CURRENT I found my upgrades constantly broke and I stopped using it. TrueOS is an interesting testing ground, but I'd never run it on a production machine or a main workstation, it's not designed to be stable/usable from one month to the next.

For desktop flavours of FreeBSD, GhostBSD is probably your best bet. It's stable, lighter and geared toward less advanced users. Though neither are ever going to compete against macOS or Windows for market share.
 
sko said:
I think especially Lumina as a home-grown BSD-specific DE could be a great benefit not only for FreeBSD. Most (all?) other DEs often suffer from Linuxisms that either break things or need a lot of work to port/adapt to FreeBSD or even BSD in general.
Click to expand...

True but if we stuck with Gnome 2.12 and for those 12 years since 2005 purely focussed on compatibility, tweaks, fixes rather than always playing catchup with the latest (arguably broken) upstream releases, we could have had an advanced and extremely robust DE by now. I tried back then but failed. Gnome in it's current state was too large for one person, but with a small team (i.e gnome@), this would have been very possible.

It is so silly that this 12 year old screenshot of an older Gnome: http://www.osnews.com/img/11800/gnome1.png shows more functionality than most modern environments.
 
JazzSinatra said:
Do you have any opinion about TrueOS? Do you think that it has good future ahead it and do you believe that TrueOS has good or bad influence to FreeBSD? Could TrueOS compete with Windows, Mac OS or Linux? I'm interested to know what FreeBSD users generally think about TrueOS.
Click to expand...

I helped beta test PC-BSD beginning at 0.73, when it was at FreeBSD 5.3 IIRC, on and into the 1.0 series before moving to vanilla FreeBSD in 2005. I considered it to be the Windows of the BSD world, though I have not, and would not, use TrueOS due to my experience with PC-BSD.
 
I've been using TrueOS as my main OS for the last few months. I like it and I want it to succeed but I cannot recommend it over FreeBSD for servers or Linux/Windows as a desktop OS. Not yet anyway.

GOOD POINTS

TrueOS is an easier way to get started with FreeBSD than vanilla FreeBSD. GhostBSD is still based upon FreeBSD 10.x and doesn't support ZFS. GhostBSD 11 has some experimental ZFS support but its devs don't recommend it be used. Hence GhostBSD is ancient and is of no interest to me whatsoever because ZFS is pretty much the only reason I use FreeBSD and TrueOS.

Better (Intel) GPU support out-of-the-box - My laptop has an Intel Haswell GPU. Whilst thats pretty old now, its not properly supported in FreeBSD 11 nor 12 - I cannot achieve 4K output under either. TrueOS has drm-next integrated into its kernel and so this allows me to get the full 4K res out of my display. This is the main reason I'm running it over vanilla FreeBSD.

Boot env install. I think this is the best thing to happen to OS installation during my lifetime. I hope FreeBSD, OpenIndiana and all other ZFS-friendly OSs adopt TrueOS ability to install into a boot env.

BAD POINTS

I'm very concerned about TrueOS support or lack of it. I have opened 7 github tickets for TrueOS specific issues over the last two months. Only one of them got a reply - that PCDM autologin was broke. They said they fixed and closed the ticket but myself and other users have found that it is still broken and we've had no reply since. One of the other unreplied issues involves the TrueOS installer trashing my FreeBSD 11 install and making it unbootable - its been over a month since I reported that and I've not had a single response from the devs yet. I realise these are complex probs and may take time to fix and whilst It would be unreasonable to expect an instant fix the TrueOS team should make every effort to at least reply to all valid bug reports within a few days of people opening them or else people are likely to give up on the project and they won't have any testers or users.

Lumina. I understand why they want to create a (Free)BSD centric desktop and I would like to see it succeed but its just not ready yet. The Lumina version shipped in current TrueOS releases is buggy (and ugly) as all hell and I simply find it unusable. I can't even play a video fullscreen properly. Once you swap it out for a more mature desktop such as MATE, which is easily done thankfully, you get a usable desktop OS but first impressions count and Lumina is not putting their best foot forward. If the TrueOS/Lumina team are reading this - PLEASE don't waste your time on creating any Lumina apps! There is too much work needed to be done on the actual Lumina desktop to be wasting time creating new, Lumina specific text editors, media players etc.

Poor default apps. TrueOS now ships with Qupzilla as the default browser, to save space on the install iso. Bad idea! I used it for 10 minutes until I encountered serious probs and was forced to install Firefox. I would honestly rather see TrueOS ship with no browser than an unusable one. In general I find most of the apps shipped with TrueOS not to be fit for purpose and I have to install more suitable alternatives.

On top of this, as someone has already mentioned, many users (including myself) have been unable to install any TrueOS releases since March/April. Again, this is something I have created a TrueOS github ticket for but it has been ignored so far.

TrueOS holds much promise but they need to up their support game and start listening to their users more.
 
kpedersen said:
It is so silly that this 12 year old screenshot of an older Gnome: http://www.osnews.com/img/11800/gnome1.png shows more functionality than most modern environments.
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Looks just like Mate (which Mate being based on gnome2 I guess is would).

As a neub I've opted for FreeBSD 11 Release with Mate ... using just pre-build binaries (pkg install) ... and that works well whilst being relatively easy. Haven't tried TrueOS, and don't feel any need to try it either.

Installed FreeBSD, followed the guidance similar to here (couldn't find/install xf86-video-fbdev, but I guess as I installed x11/nvidia-driver-340 for my old GT8600 that doesn't seem to matter), and intend to keep it updated with
freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
pkg upgrade
 
I just want to test TrueOS because they say it's easy way to enter FreeBSD world but :mad:
all i saw are
unstablity
ugly desktop & crash for time to time
browser carshed
vesa driver dosn't work for my lenovo labtop T430
intel driver not work well
and alot of that
so i think TrueOS dosn't the gateway to FreeBSD :cool:
 
islamux said:
I just want to test TrueOS because they say it's easy way to enter FreeBSD world but :mad:
all i saw are
unstablity
ugly desktop & crash for time to time
browser carshed
vesa driver dosn't work for my lenovo labtop T430
intel driver not work well
and alot of that
so i think TrueOS dosn't the gateway to FreeBSD :cool:
Click to expand...

Welcome to FreeBSD? :D

It's easy enough to switch to mate or KDE. Just install it through App Cafe. Driver issues can't really be blamed on the TrueOS team.
 
dinsdale said:
(And how am I still new member? I've been here since 2013!)
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They've changed forum software during my hiatus but member status appears to be based on the number of your posts. From the people who have posted in this thread there is:

islamux
New Member
messages 15

sko
Active Member
Messages 161

lebarondemerde
Well-Known Member
Messages 436

kpedersen
Aspiring Daemon
Messages 964

gkontos
Daemon
Messages 2,047

You currently have 19 posts.
 
Trihexagonal said:
They've changed forum software during my hiatus but member status appears to be based on the number of your posts. From the people who have posted in this thread there is:

islamux
New Member
messages 15

sko
Active Member
Messages 161

lebarondemerde
Well-Known Member
Messages 436

kpedersen
Aspiring Daemon
Messages 964

gkontos
Daemon
Messages 2,047

You currently have 19 posts.
Click to expand...

Thank you, I was pointing out that irony in an attempt to indicate I have been skulking on this forum for some time so my opinion is not that of a 'new user'. Also, an apparently poor attempt at humor. ;)

update: Oh, and this post just pushed me into Member! yay!
 
islamux said:
want to test TrueOS because they say it's easy way to enter FreeBSD world
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say so, but obviously "they" would. Installing FreeBSD with no GUI has got to be about as easy as it gets. If somebody wants easier than that - get somebody else to do it. :)
 
I don't want to cause bad blood, especially since that was over a decade ago, but there was a serious problem that I discovered and proved to exist beyond a shadow of a doubt while a PC-BSD beta tester. The response was complete silence for weeks, although they did slate a change in the next version to be released. That's when I made my move to FreeBSD. OJ was there at the time IIRC.

Then again, that was when it was PC-BSD and things might be different now in TrueOS, but not from what I see in the post by Dan MacDonald.
 
Lol, yeah, I thought PC-BSD would be helpful in getting into *BSD. It wasn't really. It did come with KDE pre-installed and that's about it from my perspective. I can do that easily myself just like in Linux, the only thing hard about it is waiting for all the dependencies to download on a slow connection. I really have nothing bad to say about PC-BSD. The head developer was very helpful to me on occasion. In the end though, I didn't see any point in that distro, at least for me. So, I just went to FreeBSD, and all's good for me now. :)
 
OJ said:
Lol, yeah, I thought PC-BSD would be helpful in getting into *BSD. It wasn't really.
Click to expand...

It was for me and that is one good thing I have to say about it. I never did like the .pbi, Push Button Installer, system or AppCafe and taught myself to use ports. They even asked me why I used ports instead of their installer.

But the problem I discovered put everyone using it at risk, and at the time they were promoting it for use as a server, which was a disaster waiting to happen. I'm sure they have corrected that by now though.
 
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