More or less of a community member?

  • Thread starter Thread starter radioactiveflipper8827
  • Start date Start date

Should I be called a user if I virtualize FreeBS

  • Yes

    Votes: 17 89.5%

  • No

    Votes: 2 10.5%
  • Total voters
    19
R

radioactiveflipper8827

Guest
At several points in years past I've been able to have the ability to run FreeBSD on bare metal, however, due to budgeting, time, and special restrictions. I have to use virtualization platforms which in my case means Oracle VirtualBox.

Does the situation explained above give anyone either in the FreeBSD community, in general, think that I'm a little more than I waste of time Virtualization fanboy? Or even worse yet a worthless nonuser because of the sole point that I'm virtualizing on top of Linux?
 
radioactiveflipper8827 said:
At several points in years past I've been able to have the ability to run FreeBSD on bare metal, however, due to budgeting, time, and special restrictions. I have to use virtualization platforms which in my case means Oracle VirtualBox.

Does the situation explained above give anyone either in the FreeBSD community, in general, think that I'm a little more than I waste of time Virtualization fanboy? Or even worse yet a worthless nonuser because of the sole point that I'm virtualizing on top of Linux?
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I'd suggest not worrying about the politics...

If it's your personal hardware, where you call the shots on what's installed, nothing should prevent you from trying to run FreeBSD on it. If your hardware is compatible, great. But if not, there's no shame in discovering that.

I'd say it's a different story if it's a work computer. Then the point is picking the tool that gets the job done. In this scenario, it doesn't matter if the machine runs FreeBSD or not.

If you want/need to make virtualization work, the Forums are a great place to get help.
forums.freebsd.org

Emulation and virtualization

Section for questions regarding all sorts of emulation and virtualization, like bhyve, VirtualBox, qemu and jails. As guest and as host.
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

If FreeBSD is involved in your computing stack (bare metal or virtualized), that does make you a user of FreeBSD.
 
I am intrigued by the true origin of the question. Your almost official user badge here..

freebsd_badgerf.jpg


Edit: freebsd.org has a dedicated VM column in the download, regardless of the reason for use.
 
FWIW I self-identify as a FreeBSD user and I run FreeBSD on a VPS.

(Granted, I also felt brave one day and installed it in dual-boot mode with Fedora Linux on my work laptop. Now I have to press F12 during boot-up to jump into the BIOS to boot Fedora :D)
 
How would you even come up with such a question?

You're a "community member" if you engage in a community. Regarding FreeBSD, that will probably be the case if you're actually interested in the system. If you just run it for some special application need, then probably not so much. ?‍♂️
 
Déjà vu? I'd swear I saw this question not that long ago here..

You can have as many physical or virtual boxes as you want and still be considered not part of the community. That means <0, ∞)
 
zirias@ said:
How would you even come up with such a question?

You're a "community member" if you engage in a community. Regarding FreeBSD, that will probably be the case if you're actually interested in the system. If you just run it for some special application need, then probably not so much. ?‍♂️
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Yeah, 'user' and 'community' is not the same thing... Just like kpedersen pointed out, I may know how to use a Mac, and even use it for work, but I'm not enthusiastic about all those MacBook ads, and I treat Apple Store the same as a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop. And I've seen some fantastic ones in Hilo, HI, shops with skill like that deserve respect! :P
 
I tried to be "apple community member" by reporting various issues in system tools and libraries (and I'm pretty sure I could fix myself if code was open as those were rather simple), but it was ignored so I quit. Same way with Windows, I don't even try to report/engage in discussions, I just use for my needs and hope nothing will break (it does very little, much to my surprise).

And with FreeBSD being involved in community is rewarding even if at the moment almost all of my FreeBSD installations are virtualized.
 
Just asking questions and participating in the forum should be enough to make you a member of the community. But as drhowardfine indicates, it isn't something to be concerned about. Most of the people in this forum are very welcoming and many will help you. What's important is that you use FreeBSD in a way that benefits you and to seek help when needed.
 
yuripv79 said:
I tried to be "apple community member" by reporting various issues in system tools and libraries (and I'm pretty sure I could fix myself if code was open as those were rather simple), but it was ignored so I quit
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lol, this is how it is for everyone in that community and they just deal with it. In some aspects, Windows is better with this.
 
msplsh said:
lol, this is how it is for everyone in that community and they just deal with it. In some aspects, Windows is better with this.
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Back in the day I recall Apple's technical community being more interesting. Early betas, proper developer feedback (and interaction), even open-source projects funded by Apple.

However now it is too clogged up with your typical layman consumer that their hands are completely tied dealing with all these guys that they can pretty much no longer innovate or do anything technically interesting. An example of how a "user friendly" and a "good" bit of software are often mutually exclusive.
 
kpedersen said:
Back in the day I recall Apple's technical community being more interesting. Early betas, proper developer feedback (and interaction), even open-source projects funded by Apple.
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They have early betas. Just not like the 10.0, 10.1 days. Those were out of necessity.

I'm not sure what back in the day means, but I've been to WWDC and even when you could Q&A the presenter, if Apple didn't agree with you, no amount of complaining would change their mind. I think they removed the Q&A because presenters were getting obliterated because they couldn't outright state secret, strategic Apple reasoning.

WebKit is still open source. The just moved most of http://www.macosforge.org/ to github instead of hosting it themselves.
 
msplsh said:
I'm not sure what back in the day means, but I've been to WWDC and even when you could Q&A the presenter, if Apple didn't agree with you, no amount of complaining would change their mind. I think they removed the Q&A because presenters were getting obliterated because they couldn't outright state secret, strategic Apple reasoning.
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I suppose I was overselling it. I have not been to a WWDC but from footage it has seemed to alway be a little like that. A weird end-user fest celebrating Apple rather than challenging any issues

I think it started going downhill much faster after they dropped support for the Xserve and OSX server. Any kind of projects like Open Darwin got canned. They demonstrated that they simply didn't want to prioritise technical users anymore and closed most relevant channels.
 
Interesting video. 2:30 summarizes Apple so well. Basically:

We don't want to innovate awesome technology, we just want to make something we can sell to a consumer
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If people like him didn't hold progress back for so long, we might have even had a cure for pancreatic cancer by now.

(apologies, that *was* below the belt. It was really the chimps clapping at him for saying it who are to blame. Prime example shortly after 1:50 too following the same statement. Quite amusing. One lone fan)
 
kpedersen said:
clogged up with your typical layman consumer that their hands are completely tied dealing with all these guys that they can pretty much no longer innovate or do anything technically interesting. An example of how a "user friendly" and a "good" bit of software are often mutually exclusive.
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I've felt the same for quite a while now and that summarizes a lot of products, forums and technology in general nowadays. Why get a CS degree when there's a bootcamp you can finish in three months? Cause you can start making good money right now. To hell with deep thinking.

Technological deep thinking and innovation are what makes countries great but it seems the ship has run aground.
 
kpedersen said:
dropped support for the Xserve and OSX server. Any kind of projects like Open Darwin got canned. They demonstrated that they simply didn't want to prioritise technical users
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As an Xserve owner, it wasn't "technical" users, it was IT admins. Apple wants to move quickly and IT does not. It became clear quickly after the Xserve launch that the product was for people running one app that only ran on Mac OS X or only running the stuff that came in the box. The way Apple does hardware releases was also not compatible with IT. You can't just not update the product for a year or discontinue it after two. Rackmounting Mac Minis or Mac Pros is the current solution for people who still need this esoteric thing. It didn't catch on because they didn't change their ways to expand their marketshare.

Apple kept Mac OS Server around for way longer, which was easier for them to do and fit more with their stuff. Eventually people moved to different platforms and now it's gone.

kpedersen said:
Open Darwin got canned
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Fun fact, sources for mac OS still get released. Open Darwin was a community effort with infra from Apple. Apple never accepted upstream patches like WebKit does, or put enough engineering effort into making it work OOB, which is why it failed, IMO. Also, per the IT problems above, running Open Darwin didn't make a lot of sense, especially when it ran worse than actual Darwin.
 
msplsh said:
Fun fact, sources for mac OS still get released. Open Darwin was a community effort with infra from Apple. Apple never accepted upstream patches like WebKit does, or put enough engineering effort into making it work OOB, which is why it failed, IMO. Also, per the IT problems above, running Open Darwin didn't make a lot of sense, especially when it ran worse than actual Darwin.
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I believe due to license obligations, Apple has to release sources for parts of macOS / Darwin.

However they stopped providing binary builds of Darwin (which is fair enough), it was more that opendarwin which used to be community lead still had backing from Apple. I.e they hosted the infrastructure and stuff. Admittedly the Apple fans started misusing it for hosting macOS software instead.
 
IDK of anybody "misusing" something like Open Darwin or PureDarwin to host macOS software. The Aqua server has never been open source. I think you're mistaking the project for Hackintoshes.
 
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