Hi all,
I've been using Linux since 1996, so I'm not an old grumpy greybeard veteran yet but I'm not a newby in the *nix world either.
Recently I grew more and more fed up with the nonsense, childishness, incompetence and arrogance of a certain lead developer of a certain init system who infected Linux like an incurable disease, turning what was once a nice OS into a windowish unreliable nightmare. And that's unfair to Windows because at least Microsoft has highly skilled developers and they (pretend to) care about their customers.
Anyway, I never had the opportunity to try FreeBSD 11 so this summer I wiped my Linux partition and installed FreeBSD instead.
About the installer, well I installed slackware 20 years ago, old habits die hard, I was not lost. However I never ever found how to tell it to install boot0 automatically, I quickly found in the cookbook how to do it afterwards but still that was confusing.
First boot, unreliable WiFi, no X, no nothing, that was expected I knew I wasn't installing Ubuntu, but I was a bit in a hurry so I decided to switch to TrueOS.
After installing TrueOS, without any major trouble, I used it for a few weeks until I realised that it was not really ready from prime time yet. What the devs are doing to mainstream FreeBSD is wonderful but their product is far from being ready, a true newby would be lost and a more experienced guy feels frustrated because so much is hidden + it lacks lots of documentation IMHO and the upgrade process is a bit clunky.
So, back to the "real" FreeBSD, as my WiFi was unreliable with 11.x I gave 12.x a try. I knew after using trueos that the issues I had were fixed in -current and indeed the WiFi worked well but -current clearly means bleeding edge and I'm not 20 anymore, I don't have nights to waste trying to fix what broke with the last update.
At that point I had a good knowledge of what I needed and installed 11.1 again, I compiled the unified rtwn driver of -current in order to fix my WiFi, configured X, installed slim, wasted half an hour searching why it would not start my XFCE session, wasted another half a day to understand why this damn Hal refused to mount my NTFS usb stick when I clicked on it, fixed Nvidia tearing issues (same sh*t as with the Linux drivers) and finally I can say that I have a working Freebsd computer at home and it's really pleasant to use (especially its init system ;-) ).
So, after this long long post here is my question, is there any willingness to mainstream FreeBSD, for example by giving some help/money to the TrueOS devs, or is the steep learning curve assumed ? Don't get my wrong I'm not criticizing at all, I like this OS the way it is, it reminds me lots of good memories to hack through config files in order to get exactly what I want , where I want and how I want, but for one guy like me there are thousands who give up and install gnu-systemd-OS and think they are using a real Unix, and that's a pity. Next time I'll see a guy like that I'll give him a nickel and tell him to buy a better Unix
I've been using Linux since 1996, so I'm not an old grumpy greybeard veteran yet but I'm not a newby in the *nix world either.
Recently I grew more and more fed up with the nonsense, childishness, incompetence and arrogance of a certain lead developer of a certain init system who infected Linux like an incurable disease, turning what was once a nice OS into a windowish unreliable nightmare. And that's unfair to Windows because at least Microsoft has highly skilled developers and they (pretend to) care about their customers.
Anyway, I never had the opportunity to try FreeBSD 11 so this summer I wiped my Linux partition and installed FreeBSD instead.
About the installer, well I installed slackware 20 years ago, old habits die hard, I was not lost. However I never ever found how to tell it to install boot0 automatically, I quickly found in the cookbook how to do it afterwards but still that was confusing.
First boot, unreliable WiFi, no X, no nothing, that was expected I knew I wasn't installing Ubuntu, but I was a bit in a hurry so I decided to switch to TrueOS.
After installing TrueOS, without any major trouble, I used it for a few weeks until I realised that it was not really ready from prime time yet. What the devs are doing to mainstream FreeBSD is wonderful but their product is far from being ready, a true newby would be lost and a more experienced guy feels frustrated because so much is hidden + it lacks lots of documentation IMHO and the upgrade process is a bit clunky.
So, back to the "real" FreeBSD, as my WiFi was unreliable with 11.x I gave 12.x a try. I knew after using trueos that the issues I had were fixed in -current and indeed the WiFi worked well but -current clearly means bleeding edge and I'm not 20 anymore, I don't have nights to waste trying to fix what broke with the last update.
At that point I had a good knowledge of what I needed and installed 11.1 again, I compiled the unified rtwn driver of -current in order to fix my WiFi, configured X, installed slim, wasted half an hour searching why it would not start my XFCE session, wasted another half a day to understand why this damn Hal refused to mount my NTFS usb stick when I clicked on it, fixed Nvidia tearing issues (same sh*t as with the Linux drivers) and finally I can say that I have a working Freebsd computer at home and it's really pleasant to use (especially its init system ;-) ).
So, after this long long post here is my question, is there any willingness to mainstream FreeBSD, for example by giving some help/money to the TrueOS devs, or is the steep learning curve assumed ? Don't get my wrong I'm not criticizing at all, I like this OS the way it is, it reminds me lots of good memories to hack through config files in order to get exactly what I want , where I want and how I want, but for one guy like me there are thousands who give up and install gnu-systemd-OS and think they are using a real Unix, and that's a pity. Next time I'll see a guy like that I'll give him a nickel and tell him to buy a better Unix