Credit where credit is due

D

donallen

As someone who had a long career in software development and management, a significant part of which was operating system development, it shouldn't be
surprising that I have a strong interest and strong opinions about operating systems. In all the years since we've had a choice between Linux and the BSDs, I've
favored the BSD approach simply because the major components of the system are, at least in theory, developed in coordinated fashion, unlike Linux.

Over the course of those years, I've periodically tried FreeBSD, and while I could see that there was a lot to like about the system, each time I ran into a show-stopping
problem and had to abandon its use. I wasn't shy about expressing my disappointment in this forum about the QA problems, especially given my experience with OpenBSD, which I've
always found to be rock solid (it has it's own set of problems -- performance, lack of a modern file-system, etc. -- but what's there Just Works) and the Linux distribution I always used, Slackware, also rock solid.

It's been a few years since I tried FreeBSD and so I thought it was time to give it another go. I installed 12.1 on a spare machine and while there were some setup problems, which I've discussed
in previous recent posts, I was able to deal with all of them. When the system ran pretty much flawlessly on that machine, I installed it on a machine that I use for serious work and which, having multiple SSDs, benefits from ZFS. The pattern continued -- the system performs well, no serious problems, a pleasure to use. It's been long enough now that I don't expect this to change.

So, having complained when I thought the project fell short, I want to publicly acknowledge that the current incarnation of FreeBSD is, after all these years, serving me exceedingly well.
 
Years ago I used SCO openserver and SCO unixware on large servers. Currently FreeBSD on my desktop and it gives the same feeling.
Solaris totally missed the boat for the desktop.
 
Far too many people try FreeBSD and abandon the attempt because it doesn't work the same way as Linux so they declare it useless or pointless. Thanks for giving your experience and not giving up.
 
I thought *not* being the same as Linux is one of the key motivators to try it? :-/ After all, given the popularity of Linux, it's probably what you try first when you want a Unix-like system for your PC. You try other things if you're not completely satisfied :)
 
Or if the "other things" promise to be better. That was my motivation. I have no complaints about Slackware -- it's a great distribution because Patrick is a really smart guy and he isn't attracted to new stuff just because it's shiny. But Linux doesn't provide as good a way to get at the virtues of ZFS, which I especially needed on one machine, but provides benefits on all machines (data integrity, easy backups). And I've always disliked the feeling that things are just cobbled together in the Linux world, nothing directing the whole thing, making sure it's sensible and coordinated.

I have mentioned that FreeBSD post-installation setup presented some issues for me, e.g., console switching not working. I don't run into issues like that with my favorite Linux, Slackware, or with OpenBSD and Dragonfly, both of which I've experimented with fairly recently. I think those should be attended to, because I think they're easy to fix either with code or documentation and they have the potential to cause prospective users who are less experienced than I am to throw up their hands.

I've already submitted one PR (about getting an error when you follow the Handbook instructions for bootstrapping 'pkg') and will submit more, as soon as time permits, that reflect what I've found.
 
It's easier to install FreeBSD than Arch-Linux. I tried Arch twice and failed to install it.
But FreeBSD has long boot times to detect hardware there is room for improvement.
The bootloader is picky when it is your first time.
Ooh, it would be nice if people should start to reverse-engineer some closed drivers, not following the rules, and port it to freebsd.
 
Yes, FreeBSD is easier to install than Arch. I used Arch for a time and it's well done, but I went back to Slackware when Arch decided to use systemd. I also
had a few problems with the rolling releases breaking things.

But as I've said before, FreeBSD presents post-installation problems that you don't see with others, including Arch.
 
Two significant problems have appeared, to my dismay. Mounting ext4 filesystems on usb drives does not work. There is a PR about this, to which I've added some information.

chromium sync doesn't work. Same thing -- there are a couple of PRs and I've added my own comment.

Both are serious problems, particularly the latter, because Firefox does not work well. Open too many tabs and it will get wedged, requiring some manual process-killing and a restart. chromium without synchronization is of no use to me -- I have too much stuff that needs to be sync-ed to just start over. An operating system with marginal web browsing capability isn't too useful.
 
donallen said:
Firefox does not work well. Open too many tabs and it will get wedged
Click to expand...

Not in my experience - I currently see no failures at all, and mine might run for 14 days or longer, and I do everything with it. It may depend on how much "too many" tabs are - here there a are usually 20-50 (in many windows on many screens). It may have problems with very botched javascript, but even then that gets cleanly removed again.
Caveat: using ESR version, and no plugins/extensions.
 
PMc said:
Not in my experience - I currently see no failures at all, and mine might run for 14 days or longer, and I do everything with it. It may depend on how much "too many" tabs are - here there a are usually 20-50 (in many windows on many screens). It may have problems with very botched javascript, but even then that gets cleanly removed again.
Caveat: using ESR version, and no plugins/extensions.
Click to expand...

I am using the firefox package, which is multiple versions ahead of firefox-esr, assuming the version numbers are comparable. That could be the difference in our experiences. I see things grind to a halt a few times/day with 7 or 8 tabs open. I'll give the esr version a try, to see if the situation improves. Thanks.
 
donallen said:
I am using the firefox package, which is multiple versions ahead of firefox-esr, assuming the version numbers are comparable. That could be the difference in our experiences. I see things grind to a halt a few times/day with 7 or 8 tabs open. I'll give the esr version a try, to see if the situation improves. Thanks.
Click to expand...

The esr version is earlier, as the version number implies. Trying to use it results in a warning message that going backwards can corrupt data firefox saves and suggests using a different account. Not feasible. I will either have to put up with Firefox, go back to Linux, or try to help get chromium working. It's only 3.14159 billion lines of code. Shouldn't be a problem.
 
donallen said:
The esr version is earlier, as the version number implies. Trying to use it results in a warning message that going backwards can corrupt data firefox saves and suggests using a different account. Not feasible. I will either have to put up with Firefox, go back to Linux, or try to help get chromium working. It's only 3.14159 billion lines of code. Shouldn't be a problem.
Click to expand...

Well, if You say so...
Fixing up that firefox config or indeed using a different account might be less lines. But that's up to you - I just wanted to report my experience, because
  1. I am positively surprized (there were times when this was not so good), and
  2. there might be ways that You could isolate (and maybe remedy) the issue.
Getting practical: I, for my part, would not worry too much about that warning. And anyway, that user-specific config can be [saved and] restored from backup (while ff isn't running - I did that occasionally when I lost a bunch of open windows and needed them back), so this is not a show-stopper for just trying if the ESR might behave better.
 
PMc said:
Well, if You say so...
Fixing up that firefox config or indeed using a different account might be less lines. But that's up to you - I just wanted to report my experience, because
  1. I am positively surprized (there were times when this was not so good), and
  2. there might be ways that You could isolate (and maybe remedy) the issue.
Click to expand...

I do appreciate your trying to help. But if I need to invest more time in dealing with FreeBSD-specific problems rather than working on my own current project, I can restore Linux from a backup and just get on with it. I'm trying to avoid that, because of the benefits of FreeBSD for me, principally ZFS (data integrity, easy backups while running, via snapshots, a great feature), but if/when it feels like the costs out-weigh the benefits, I'll stop. My plan now is to avoid overloading Firefox, since I haven't been able to find an alternative browser that works properly (tried opera and surf).
 
donallen said:
I do appreciate your trying to help. But if I need to invest more time in dealing with FreeBSD-specific problems rather than working on my own current project, I can restore Linux from a backup
Click to expand...
Your absolutely right. If I had a relevant project running, I would double think about any optional change, and cancel it as soon as it doesn't appear to work perfectly smooth.
 
donallen said:
I am using the firefox package, which is multiple versions ahead of firefox-esr, assuming the version numbers are comparable. That could be the difference in our experiences. I see things grind to a halt a few times/day with 7 or 8 tabs open. I'll give the esr version a try, to see if the situation improves. Thanks.
Click to expand...
FWIW, I'm using the "normal" Firefox package, currently at
Code: 
root@kg-core2# pkg info firefox*
firefox-76.0.1_1,1
and my daily "workload" for Firefox (I always start it with windows and tabs from last time) is (hang on, counting) 93 windows, each with a number of tabs, I think the lowest one is 3, don't know what the highest is, but a quick check of the windows on this workspace shows 29 tabs in one window. I'm sorry for the rough estimate, but so far I haven't found a tool that will give me the total number of windows and tabs for Firefox.
This all on
Code: 
root@kg-core2# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-core2.kg4.no 11.3-RELEASE-p7 FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE-p7 #0: Tue Mar 17 08:32:23 UTC 2020     root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
I also run Iridium as my second browser, but it only have 3 windows, with from 1 to 3 tabs each.
 
tingo said:
FWIW, I'm using the "normal" Firefox package, currently at
Code: 
root@kg-core2# pkg info firefox*
firefox-76.0.1_1,1
and my daily "workload" for Firefox (I always start it with windows and tabs from last time) is (hang on, counting) 93 windows, each with a number of tabs, I think the lowest one is 3, don't know what the highest is, but a quick check of the windows on this workspace shows 29 tabs in one window. I'm sorry for the rough estimate, but so far I haven't found a tool that will give me the total number of windows and tabs for Firefox.
This all on
Code: 
root@kg-core2# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-core2.kg4.no 11.3-RELEASE-p7 FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE-p7 #0: Tue Mar 17 08:32:23 UTC 2020     root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
I also run Iridium as my second browser, but it only have 3 windows, with from 1 to 3 tabs each.
Click to expand...

And you're running all those firefox windows and tabs on a Commodore 64!

Getting serious again for a moment, I note that while we are running the same version of Firefox, you are running FreeBSD 11.3 while I am running 12.1. Our hardware setups are likely to be different, too. So I'm happy it works well for you; it doesn't for me and the different versions/hardware setups could be the explanation.

I'll check out Iridium. I've never tried it.
 
donallen said:
And you're running all those firefox windows and tabs on a Commodore 64!

Getting serious again for a moment, I note that while we are running the same version of Firefox, you are running FreeBSD 11.3 while I am running 12.1. Our hardware setups are likely to be different, too. So I'm happy it works well for you; it doesn't for me and the different versions/hardware setups could be the explanation.

I'll check out Iridium. I've never tried it.
Click to expand...

iridium does not install on 12.1. There's a dependency missing -- noto-basic.
 
I use iridium all the time on both 11.3 and 12.1 to read html mail attachments. It works. On both systems "noto-basic-2.0" lists as a dependency of "iridium-browser-2019.04.73_4".

So there is some problem in your package dependency set. I would install it manually with pkg install noto-basic.

I would also try to figure out why it does not install as a dependency. I'm no expert on pkg, but maybe try pkg update; pkg check. I'm sure others can assist.
 
It needs to be mentioned that the chromium sync thing is a Google thing and Google offers no help whatsoever to FreeBSD and has never responded to requests for help. Any issues with chromium that involve Google is Google's fault.

On a powerful machine, it takes hours to build chromium for debugging. It's no fun at all with zero support. (Obviously I tried this.)
 
donallen said:
Our hardware setups are likely to be different, too. So I'm happy it works well for you; it doesn't for me and the different versions/hardware setups could be the explanation.
Click to expand...

What exactly is your hardware setup, I've not seen it mentioned?
 
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