Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

Just a nerd who wanted a straightforward, mostly logical system that doesn't take up like 20 gigs on a drive. Past couple versions of Windows NT, Osx and most Linux distros seem too overcomplicated for my principles when FreeBSD and OpenBSD work very well while being a fraction of the size.

"Why not a simpler Linux distro?"

Simpler Linux distros still feel a lot more chaotic and less stable for me than BSD. They also feel slower and acpi seems to act up more on laptops from an era when they still made them right.

And don't tell me that something like linux-libre would be a cleaner approach than the without_sourceless option.

"Why not OpenBSD?"

Also cool, but i miss extras like wine support and the linuxulator. Wine allows me to run office 97 and some classic games i grew up with.

"Why office 97? lol"

Ties up to the first point. It only uses a few megs of ram, new office and libreoffice just can't touch that. And i'd believe that 97 ain't spyware if someone told me.

So after this rant: Guess i just want to say thank you for this great os. Daily driver for over a year, only crashed 2 times and it was my fault for the most part. Of course there are smaller problems, i'm wrestling with automount currently and i may make a post if i really can't get it right by myself
 
Espionage724 said:
I have my desktop set-up mostly down enough to be productive and play games (still need to check 2004scape and WoW), but I'm eager to get FreeBSD on my server next! Looks like nginx, php-fpm, and MariaDB are all available, and I expect it to be pretty easy for a first-time BSD server experience :p
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Turns out I ran into issues with both WoW (server, the client's fine) and 2004scape, but I'm confident I'll get em running somehow and have a few new ideas.

About a week later I'm still loving FreeBSD! I reinstalled 2-3 times, tried UFS and ZFS each time, and found I'm pretty content with ZFS's performance to use it (I figured it would be slower due to checkums; I like my NVMe fast). Xfce's still good, hardware seems all good, and the only thing holding up FreeBSD on my server is a bit of procrastination :p (gotta look at rsync flags to back my NAS up to prep its drive for ZFS)
 
Espionage724 said:
Turns out I ran into issues with both WoW (server, the client's fine) and 2004scape, but I'm confident I'll get em running somehow and have a few new ideas.

About a week later I'm still loving FreeBSD! I reinstalled 2-3 times, tried UFS and ZFS each time, and found I'm pretty content with ZFS's performance to use it (I figured it would be slower due to checkums; I like my NVMe fast). Xfce's still good, hardware seems all good, and the only thing holding up FreeBSD on my server is a bit of procrastination :p (gotta look at rsync flags to back my NAS up to prep its drive for ZFS)
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I was converted to ZFS since 2017, when FreeBSD was first on the scene to use it in base. Saves me a lot of headaches by mostly eliminating the need to plan my disk layout. Just the ability to set and fine-tune limits of the filesystem after installation, at my convenience - that got me to really like ZFS ?
 
themessage said:
"Why not OpenBSD?"

Also cool, but i miss extras like wine support and the linuxulator. Wine allows me to run office 97 and some classic games i grew up with.
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Interesting. I definitely rely on Wine, but didn't hear about OpenBSD's support about it and just assumed it could be made to work there. On FreeBSD it was easy to do wine-devel and the pkg32 script.

I don't have any reason to look at any other OS except FreeBSD for now, but I got the vague idea from somewhere that OpenBSD did or offered something out-the-box better with network-related security. There was also some bug report or patch somewhere about gamepads/joysticks that iirc said that FreeBSD's game/joy support was lacking compared to OpenBSD.
 
Espionage724 said:
Interesting. I definitely rely on Wine, but didn't hear about OpenBSD's support about it and just assumed it could be made to work there. On FreeBSD it was easy to do wine-devel and the pkg32 script.

I don't have any reason to look at any other OS except FreeBSD for now, but I got the vague idea from somewhere that OpenBSD did or offered something out-the-box better with network-related security.
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Wine wasn't available on supported versions when i tried it and seems like this is still the case. You are right about the security aspect.

Also add first class zfs support for the reasons i love FreeBSD.
 
Cath O'Deray said:
OT from introductions: there's a FreeBSD situation in which pkg32.sh is too difficult for me to get my head around, despite repeated explanations.
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It seems like it's a way for the user running Wine to install 32-bit apps from pkg, and for Wine it needs 32-bit stuff like ALSA-libs.

I install 64-bit Wine with pkg install wine wine-gecko wine-mono winetricks from su -l

And then from the regular user running Wine apps (not su -l) I install 32-bit Wine and some other deps:

Code: 
'/usr/local/share/wine/pkg32.sh' install wine mesa-dri gstreamer1-plugins-good gstreamer1-plugins-ugly gstreamer1-libav libressl

It seems like wine command with wine pkg (not devel) allows doing things between 32-bit or 64-bit prefixes depending on how the prefix was created with WINEARCH env (WINEARCH=win32 or win64), so this starts Diablo 2 up with 32-bit Wine:

Code: 
WINEPREFIX=~/'.wine/Diablo II' WINEARCH='win32' wine 'Diablo II.exe'

Or this for 64-bit Diablo 3:

Code: 
WINEPREFIX=~/'.wine/Diablo III' WINEARCH='win64' wine ~/'.wine/Diablo III/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Diablo III/Diablo III Launcher.exe'

With wine-devel it seems like the 64-bit Wine becomes unusable (unable to load kernel32.dll or something) if pkg32 was used to install 32-bit wine-devel. With regular wine (non-devel) it seems like wine works with 32-bit and 64-bit stuff fine with WINEARCH (there's a forum post that mentioned this somewhere about it (wow64?) not being hooked-up specifically with devel).

Trying to explain that got more complex than I thought quickly :p I'm not too sure if I fully understand Wine on FreeBSD yet, but it seems using wine and not wine-devel is a good idea at least on 14.1.
 
I installed FreeBSD 14.0 + Gnome on my LG Gram laptop some months ago, and I've been using it since with my Bluetooth headset, Proton VPN, MS Office on a Virtualbox VM, Firefox, Anki card learning system, and whatnot, without hiccups. I love it.

I've also installed it on my desktop computer, on a dedicated disk (I have also a couple Linux distros and Windows 11 installed in this computer). I'm working on installing everything from ports. I want to install Plasma 6. I'm learning a lot about working from a true terminal with tools like tmux, fish, and midnight commander. I'm also reading the FreeBSD handbook.
 
Hello everyone!

Let me introduce myself,
I'm an IT technician dedicated to the world of user support living in Barcelona, Spain.

Since I was a child I love computers (Commodore 64K), and at home I have always liked to tinker and use GNU/Linux as my main computer with a special taste for Arch Linux.

Recently I decided to learn FreeBSD and after reading a little bit I managed to install a usable system for my daily life:



By the way, thanks to this forum. It is a great source of knowledge!
It's a pleasure to be part of this big family and I hope to keep learning a lot from you.

Best regards!
 
I'll chime in.

I moved to FreeBSD about two years ago after using Linux since 1995. I've used every distro, built my own Linux from Scratch, and used Gentoo over a decade. All my key computers for personal use and small business are FreeBSD. I do keep a Wintendo around for gaming. I've used many other UNIX's over the years, including True64, AIX, HP-UX, and OpenBSD.

I've been very disappointed in the direction that Linux has been taking for quite some time with systemd and desktop Linux infecting the whole stack with nonsense. It's high past time that Linux split into server vs desktop.

My last Linux laptop was Gentoo w/ custom ZFS and minimum packages, and it was the last straw when portage wouldn't let me update after 6 months due to circular dependencies. I was tired of having to completely manage a custom solution to get ZFS on Linux. FreeBSD having a tiny core OS (<1GB!!!!) and first class ZFS integration was a huge draw. All the ports cover my workstation usage. I had less issues moving to FreeBSD than I had changing Linux distros.

After that successful change, I refreshed my home server/Lab with a refurbished PowerEdge and installed FreeBSD to replace my NAS. I did some real banging on ZFS on root with SSD to confirm I could mirror my boot sources, and have my data on a separate ZRAID. I'm sold on FreeBSD with ZFS.

If only more applications supported FreeBSD in my professional work. I am a Systems Integrator specializing in IBM solutions. POWER, AIX, PowerHA, IBM Storage, SANs and more. I really wish Intersystems Cache, Oracle, and more of the backend legacy business applications supported FreeBSD instead of trying to shoehorn in Linux. Linux is cheap, and that's about it. You get what you pay for.

In particular the Linux IO stack has me highly concerned on bare metal hardware. SAN multipathing, fsync-gate, and running everything essentially in debug mode all the time (echo 1 > /sys/block/.... anyone?) is not proper in production. FreeBSD's camcontrol, sysctl, and ZFS snapshot integration for upgrades is excellent.

Thanks FreeBSD maintainers for the excellent work you do!

Details on my usage:

My Thinkpad T480 laptop runs bare X11 and tiling via StumpWM with spatial navigation. No desktop environment. SSD and 32GB of RAM is quite cozy. I do prefer wired ethernet, but wireless works too.

Obligatory screenshot: http://demosthenes.org/tmp/screenshot-stump2023.png

I use Emacs for everything from project management to coding. I develop in shell scripts, Perl, and Common Lisp on occasion. Borg for backups, and ZFS send/recv to my server.
I use Virtualbox for virtualization, because I could import previous virtual machines. I often use an Ubuntu VM with audio and USB forwarding for video conferencing and Citrix. It's pretty cool that the USB forwarding works, for smart cards and low bandwidth devices (ie: not webcam).
I prefer mechanical keyboards and full size trackballs. My daily driver is a Kinesis Edge Gaming split keyboard with a Kensington Expert Mouse for that pool ball sized trackball fun. I actually have an IKEA rocking chair with the split keyboard mounted on the arm rests!
I have multiple audio sources on my laptop, including virtual_oss and VM integration with my Yeti USB microphone, and a separate SMSL USB DAC/AMP for my hifi stereo setup from musicpd.
I am active on IRC in #freebsd and many other channels.

My server is a Dell PowerEdge with a 24TB ZRAID. I use zrepl for routine snapshots and borg for offsite backups.
I host normal NAS shares for my family home PC's, as well as Mumble, Minecraft server, Factorio, XMPP with ejabberd, and admin it all with Puppet.
 
I’ve been using Linux since 2006, but I started using computers with MS DOS, then Windows 3.1 through XP until I got to university in 2006. I used mainly Linux and macOS in college, but we also had a lab full of Sun Microsystems workstations that were running Solaris.

Many, many years later, I learned about the differences between Linux, Unix, and BSD. It’s just fascinating! So I wanted to start tinkering with FreeBSD, as I found the documentation to be very clean, friendly, and approachable.

My problem is that, other than my OPNsense router, I don’t really have any hardware to tinker with. My only other computers are my Linux based home lab (just a single machine running a bunch of VMs) and my Intel MacBook Pro, which won’t run FreeBSD due to the T2 chip.

The thing that initially sparked my interest in FreeBSD, funny enough, was Apple. I was looking at job postings for jobs I’m totally not qualified for, but totally interested in. To learn lower level details about operating systems, FreeBSD is so much smaller and cleaner than Linux, it’s a lot easier to wrap my head around. Plus, the history with macOS is interesting trivia.

Anyhow, while I’ve been registered on this forum for quite some time now, I haven’t posted anything. But yesterday’s announcement got me looking at FreeBSD again, especially since my only real option for day to day use is a laptop.

I desperately need a new laptop and I’m hoping my next one will be able to run FreeBSD natively, even if it’s partially broken. I’d love to tinker with it and maybe even contribute something.
 
g++ said:
I desperately need a new laptop and I’m hoping my next one will be able to run FreeBSD natively, even if it’s partially broken. I’d love to tinker with it and maybe even contribute something.
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Brand-new Lenovo stuff plays very nicely with up-to-date FreeBSD. I'm typing this on a ThinkBook 14 G4 with an AMD , which is running 13.2-RELEASE (which was the up-to-date stuff when I bought that laptop!). I did have to swap in an Intel-branded wifi card, which was easy enough.

HP laptops also play well with FreeBSD, I have an old one (HP Folio 13 1035-nr) that has 14.2-RELEASE and is used to play with KDE 6 (not a daily driver). That laptop's internal battery is dead, and its Sandy Bridge i5 can't do a lot at once, but it originally came with an Intel-branded wifi card, and installing up-to-date stuff is not a problem. There's other users on these Forums who have HP laptops with FreeBSD, so YMMV.
 
astyle said:
Brand-new Lenovo stuff plays very nicely with up-to-date FreeBSD. I'm typing this on a ThinkBook 14 G4 with an AMD , which is running 13.2-RELEASE (which was the up-to-date stuff when I bought that laptop!). I did have to swap in an Intel-branded wifi card, which was easy enough.

HP laptops also play well with FreeBSD, I have an old one (HP Folio 13 1035-nr) that has 14.2-RELEASE and is used to play with KDE 6 (not a daily driver). That laptop's internal battery is dead, and its Sandy Bridge i5 can't do a lot at once, but it originally came with an Intel-branded wifi card, and installing up-to-date stuff is not a problem. There's other users on these Forums who have HP laptops with FreeBSD, so YMMV.
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I picked up an hp laptop and replaced the internal wifi with a supported chip. The web cam mic doesn't work and I've never tried the sd card reader or Bluetooth.
 
forums.freebsd.org

Mobile Computing

This forum discusses issues related to running FreeBSD on notebooks, laptops, and other mobile equipment.
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Pinned there:

forums.freebsd.org

Notebook / Laptop compatibility list

If you use FreeBSD on your notebook or want to use it, please take a look at http://laptop.bsdgroup.de It has a extensive list of Notebooks / Laptops / Netbooks and can tell you if FreeBSD is compatible with it or not. Please add your device to this list to help other people making a...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
I had another Debian derivative install commit suicide when release jumping. Unfixable without reinstall as far as I can tell.

It isn't so much that FreeBSD doesn't commit suicide often. Even if it did you could recover thanks to the base system tar-able and pkg_static.
 
cracauer@ said:
Unfixable without reinstall as far as I can tell.
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FreeBSD is not immune to the 'unfixable without reinstall' issue, either. It's called Dependency Hell. www/firefox is a VERY common victim of upgrades, if comments on these Forums are anything to go by. Linux suffers from the same malady. At least on FreeBSD, recompiling is better organized and documented, IMHO. Well, FreeBSD does have fans who have learned to live with that.
 
astyle said:
FreeBSD is not immune to the 'unfixable without reinstall' issue, either. It's called Dependency Hell. www/firefox is a VERY common victim of upgrades, if comments on these Forums are anything to go by. Linux suffers from the same malady. At least on FreeBSD, recompiling is better organized and documented, IMHO. Well, FreeBSD does have fans who have learned to live with that.
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But under FreeBSD with package dependency hell your base system stays working. So you just gather the packahes/ports you need from the broken tree, nuke the whole thing (without the base system) and reinstall packages/ports.

In the Debian derivative system I mentioned login is broken, including ssh login, because pam can't find libcrypt.so.1.
 
cracauer@ said:
But under FreeBSD with package dependency hell your base system stays working.
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This!

Today I tried out KDE plasma, looks smooth but needs intervention to be usable. Also it starts up like a geriatric snail. After installing it, I installed a few extras - which broke the install somewhat. Switching back I found window maker no longer working, some install updated a library which now had a wrong version. Fixing that made plasma not come up at all. Maybe I made a mistake or the dependency info is not entirely correct.

But base was happily humming away and offered a console to fix the situation. Now imagine messing up libc the same way, as happened once on a RPM based Linux I used. You are so up creek without a paddle
 
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