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

fernandel said:
From PC DOS - OS/2 - Linux - FreeBSD from version 6.? - no servers just desktop computer - from StarOffice to LibreOffice, R and some Python for work, GIMP from first version and for me it works.
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Nice, try suspension and see whether it works.
 
vigole said:
Why? I've read that. There's lots of science-talk in book, but I only found this: °C=(°F-21)*5/9. I think he's learnt that from the 2nd example of K&R 2nd.
No rigorous analysis, just random thoughts. Very psychological, very typical!
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I did not understand your criticism, care to elaborate?
 
mzs47 said:
Nice, try suspension and see whether it works.
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Repeating from above:
  • OpenSource OS's rely on hardware & BIOS to conform to the published standards.
  • Unfortunately, some standards are written ambiguously. Note the frequency of version & revision updates to get an estimate. Naturally, this is a source of failures.
  • To run reliably on non-conformant HW & BIOS implementations, they need so called quirks to cope with the incomtabilities.
  • 1000's of professional software engineers are paid to write those quirks for other OSs, in contrast only a few volunteers (many of them beeing professionals, too) are writing quirks for FreeBSD, plus some paid ones at companies that leverage FreeBSD, e.g. Netflix or NetApp.
  • Many hardware is conformant, but most BIOS implementations are not. In particular, the vast majority of ACPI implementations do not conform to the published standards. On modern hardware, power management is done via ACPI. It's ancestor APM was even much more of a disaster.
  1. You need compatible hardware to run FreeBSD
  2. You need a standard-conformant BIOS to run FreeBSD
  3. You need a standard-conformant ACPI to run FreeBSD
2nd, You might have a misconception of what FreeBSD is?

My laptop, that seems to be more compatible than average, can suspend/resume & hibernate without any problems. In fact, FreeBSD makes a very good base for a desktop system; IMHO far better than any other open source OS that I'm aware of. YMMV...
 
Mjölnir said:
Repeating from above:
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I will still wait for the user's response, anyways, to your comment - In short, it is not ready for the desktops and only for few laptops(those that have the privilege of getting supported) and mostly for servers(these don't need this feature).

It is a different topic why FreeBSD does not have what Linux kernel has today, what we have today is not overnight.
Please do keep in mind that Linux's origins and much of the years were not this good, but after getting adopted by the users(and later orgs), it rose in prominence. This is much like how Toyota started in budget market and later entered the premium market.

Further, if there are no users asking, then we won't see participation for FreeBSD like below, again the below changes started after a major user asked the vendor.
I think somewhere this downward spiral started and is hard to break at this stage(not impossible).

Intel Has Been Recently Ramping Up Their FreeBSD Support - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com
 
mzs47 said:
I will still wait for the user's response, anyways
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I do not know a Linux distribution that satisfies me, that looks like classical unix/BSD + X11. And that is what I expect for my desktop. Of course you can configure a Linux distribution like that, but configuring is
work, and keeping the configuration is also work.

Why this whole discussion that from time to time arises again and again?

Windows is good, MaOS is good, Linux is good, *BSD is good. They are different and good for different people.
 
OSs are all unique in their own way, but do remember that an OS has some common functions. Maybe I was not clear enough and so people are conflating with the statements like "how xyz not like __".

If FreeBSD community is ok with not getting users and remaining a minority, so be it. But the picture I get from many reviews, projects was quite opposite.
Btw, some of you had very reasonable points, thanks.
 
mzs47 said:
[...] Btw, some of you had very reasonable points, thanks.
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Feel free to send in patches to increase the OS's kindlyness to users. E.g.
  • Some (many?) manpages are written in a language that is too complicated for non-techies. OTOH, they should provide precise & accurate information, so it's a very difficult task to fulfill two contrary requirements. The goal to use an easy language should of course not apply to sections 2, 3 & 9 of the manpages, and to a lesser extent to sections 4, 5 & 7.
  • Error messages. A recent example: that error message in ext2fs(5): "WARNING: Can not mount %s due to unsupported mount flags (%s)", device, "needs_recovery"
    It would be much nicer to write "WARNING: Can not mount %s.\nREASON: The filesystem on %s was not cleanly unmounted.\nSOLUTION: Please run: 'fsck %s' on the host owning that filesystem.", device, device, device instead (by default, ext2fs(5) mounts read-only, thus the fsck(8) shouldn't be done on FreeBSD).
The above topics do apply to many other UNIX-like OSs, too.
 
Mjölnir said:
Some (many?) manpages are written in a language that is too complicated for non-techies. OTOH, they should provide precise & accurate information, so it's a very difficult task to fulfill two contrary requirements. The goal to use an easy language should of course not apply to sections 2, 3 & 9 of the manpages, and to a lesser extent to sections 4, 5 & 7.
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This. I agree. It would be nice if manpages had a simple column or row menu (AIX SMIT-like?) for quickly navigating between each sections too. 'Cause I'm lazy.
 
Sadly FreeBSD doesn't even seem to be for servers any more.

forums.freebsd.org

FreeBSD was once "the power to server" but in an AWS world we have fallen way, waaay behind and there seems no interest to fix it!

I have been with FreeBSD since 386BSD 0.0new and always was going for FreeBSD as my first choice for every server I built. Device drivers being a little later than for Linux was OK. Somehow I muddled through. But now I feel like a stomach punch. The future of serving is AWS and the like...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

I might be spamming a little bit, but there is a consistent disregard of this urgent issue on this forum and I haves seen nobody respond to recent bugzilla submissions I made with entire new feature patches (granted not about the performance). But my point is that somehow FreeBSD seems severely ill, neglected or something. What is going on?
 
gschadow said:
I haves seen nobody respond to recent bugzilla submissions I made with entire new feature patches (granted not about the performance).
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You mean this one? Nobody likes kernel patches coming seemingly out of nowhere. You should cc a few committers working on that code or ask for opinions on the corresponding mailing list. Make sure to learn how to use Phabricator.

Also, your style is kind of difficult to read. All this text would greatly benefit from being 2/3 shorter.
 
gschadow said:
Sadly FreeBSD doesn't even seem to be for servers any more.
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This falls in AWS (and DigitalOcean's or ___ "cloud" provider's) bucket, something that the FreeBSD project cannot control.
I have used FreeBSD on AWS and DO, and _few_ features are not on par with GNU/Linux, like some features are not available, but it ran well.

So you will have to question AWS evangelist who blogged how FreeBSD is "well supported" since long on AWS and much before Azure announced it.
I did this(links below) and questioned the lack of OpenDistro that AWS is sponsoring.
Please do your bit, especially as a paying user - Raise a support request from within AWS account, that will have much impact and as more paying user ask they need to respond.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1186220914540548096
View: https://twitter.com/mzs114/status/1186220914540548096

github.com

Packages for FreeBSD. · Issue #30 · opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-build

FreeBSD has stock ELK 6, OpenDistro would be a good alternative for it, FreeBSD has OpenJDK 8 and 11 in the stock repositories so getting OpenDistro run on it should be straight forward. I can help...
github.com github.com
 
The group answer is not necessarily the correct answer {ad populum fallacy}.
The most correct answer is that of fewest assumptions {the group answer is that of fewest rejections}.
The correct answer, for an individual, is whatever they choose for themself.

Some people like automatics, some people like manual transmissions.
I don't think FreeBSD will ever be ready for all desktop users, nor do I think it should be.
 

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richardtoohey2 said:
Thanks - but not sure after reading that thread if it was Nvidia or X or FreeBSD or a combination of all of them that made it a bit of a mission!

I vaguely remember installing Mint on machine with Nvidia and needing a bit of help from a famous search engine to get it going.

Anyway, think I'm dragging this off-topic! As with most things, YMMV.
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sorry for the delay, had a death in the family, haven't been on here in a while. but yes, I actually figured that issue out, it was the Dell AIO. frustrated with the system constantly giving me gui issues, even though xfce had a day or two where it worked fine, I tried elementary then ubuntu, both of which would not draw gui correctly.

after talking with an expert (family friend), he said to me "oh, it must have an intel hd xxxx". going back to my cli, yes, he was correct. something about it gets too hot with specific os's and drivers, and he told me to install Windows and it'll give no issues. He was correct. So I was telling my mom about his advice, confused obviously, and she says, "wait, can I have it? if so, can you get this ugly beast out of my living room?" I had given her my old gaming system when I upgraded as she needed a pc for keeping books for the farm. So I went from a Dell AIO giving me nothing but issues to putting FreeBSD on my laptop (non-gui) and using my Windows+Docker+Ubuntu WSL2 as a solo system, then I took Fedora and put it on the old gaming hardware. Now I have a FreeBSD server, Fedora Workstation, and this PC, but I only use this more powerful desktop to control all three via vscode.

The past couple of days have been busy ones and I am just getting back into the saddle. Needless to say, that old Dell gave me a headache, but before I installed FreeBSD for real, I installed it from memory with xfce. It flew like nobody's business. I still back the claim that nvidia is causing issues, note that on my Dell laptop, an AMD system, xfce and gnome worked perfectly. Gnome was a headache on the nvidia system, but only with the window drawing for the terminal and file manager. everything else seemed okay, but it was still off-putting.

I am learning more and more every day. Eventually, I will have some expert knowledge on FreeBSD, but until then, I'll just instigate here and there for fun (no, seriously kidding!). Yeah, those nvidia drivers, i don't understand them, they work fine on Fedora, but not on FreeBSD. meh.

It doesn't matter at this point. I now have the perfect setup for development training and operations. Is there nothing vscode can't do? Honestly, how did MS do it? What a wonderful piece of software.
 
I run freebsd on an 8 yrs old laptop with 12G ram and a dual gpu system built in aka optimus card. It runs gnome, xfce, lxde, kde, plasma5, openbox, i3. No issues. Suspend works. 3k video on mpv works with hardware rendering. Other basic stuffs works. Its been on freebsd since 2017. I am no programmer, just average user who does not mind learning the hard ways. I learn and configure xwindows by reading from post onlines. Through trials and errors. Its fun and frustrating too.
 
diortemew said:
It doesn't matter at this point. I now have the perfect setup for development training and operations. Is there nothing vscode can't do? Honestly, how did MS do it? What a wonderful piece of software.
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Thats an easy one. They didn't do it. It is really just a modified version of the open-source editor called Atom.

https://atom.io/

You can see the similarities. VSCode also still references "Atom" in many places.
 
kpedersen said:
You can see the similarities. VSCode also still references "Atom" in many places.
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Funny, looking at the vscode webpage, many of the "features" are things that have been available in Emacs for a while. I see we have a port for vscode, but nothing for Atom editor.
 
gschadow said:
Sadly FreeBSD doesn't even seem to be for servers any more.
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It serves me very well or I would not be using it as a Desktop Oriented Operating System on 7 laptops
gschadow said:
But my point is that somehow FreeBSD seems severely ill, neglected or something. What is going on?
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Nothing.

You're a stranger in a strange land and wondering why the yellow brick road doesn't remind you of the way it looked outside Penguin Park Place back in TuxTown.

Just close your eyes, no peeking, click your heels together 3 times and say "This is my new Home". Now you can open them.
penguinpicknik.png



That was just a little Shock Therapy.

And probably why I made an account at the Kali forums to submit some wallpapers for review and never recieved my confirmation letter so I can post to offer them. The only posting I would be doing there since I don't ask questions.

So I'll put them up for Demonica, since that is one of her forms, withdraw my good will offer and honor the Goddess of Death, Time and Doomsday by giving them away to those who long for the embrace of the Dark Mother.

That poor misguided guy who freaked out about me being a fan of Kali will go apoplectic.
 
To the opening post:

mzs47 said:
… suspend to memory(RAM) not working on a Ivy Bridge desktop with HD graphics(~ 8 years old now). … suspend to RAM is really required in this case …
Click to expand...

– and:

mzs47 said:
… some mixer related message when I try to suspend. …
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mzs47 please see <https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/80412/post-519408> and <https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/80412/post-520160> under forcing off the computer – endlessly waiting for sound application to exit at sleep/suspend time
 
I wish I were able to bring the amount of improvements that I used to bring. With some obvious problems fixed, it's a bit more difficult to make improvements.

Usually, when I leave something and come back, things get easier. On the other hand, it may take me learning C: debugging and/or programming. Maybe taking up a port, or learning how to make everything more ready for commits, because ports that don't have maintainers can get ignored.

I used to point things out, and they were like, oh!

I have simply wrote documentaion on the forums or another wiki. Perhaps my mind is tired right now. I need to learn how to and get comfortable with directly adding documentation differences to FreeBSD docs, especially that they made it less complicated.

The way the handbook used to be was, it was numbered from the start, so if someone made an update before another person did, the whole diff had to be changed. Now, it's a lot better, because they're numbered from the beginning of each chapter. I believe that the dependencies for uploading suggestions were fixed. Markup was simplified, but that isn't an issue to me. Perhaps it was also made made simpler in other ways.
 
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