Closed Old time FreeBSD user tried to return today

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Former FreeBSD User

I have been a FreeBSD user since, well since before FreeBSD, back when I used a BSD variant called CMUnix in the '82. I brought FreeBSD to my first startup company in the Silicon Valley back in '94. I was even paid to port it to a prototype settop video box around 2000. But I switched to Linux around 2009 when it became obvious that no one gave a damn about NFS mounts hanging; it was a well known problem for years, but no one cared. So it was off to Linux land. These days, Linux is too tied up in political correctness and window dressing. Lennert Poettering and his crew of saboteurs have been working to destroy Linux from the inside out until it becomes only suitable for high school kids and their laptops. Linux user forums are populated with children who grossly overestimate their abilities. There a dozen different distributions that all work differently. And almost everything is tied to that hideous systemd monstrosity. I figure it will be a few weeks before "ls" has a systemd dependency.

Recently I have setup pfSense and FreeNAS boxes, which are both FreeBSD based, so I thought, hey, why the hell not? Especially if FreeNAS uses FreeBSD, the NFS mount hangs must have been addressed. So I downloaded a memory stick installer for FreeBSD 10.3R.

Well shit. The installation of 10.3R was a lot faster and easier than I remembered. Then I realized why: I had only a barebones system with no desktop, no Xorg and very basic functionality. All the post OS installation had been truncated - what's up with that? So I started installing packages and all seemed well. But Xorg refused to work - it kept failing for various reasons. Like "Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices." And all the online documentation is so obsolete, if not outright unhelpful. It's been about 6 hours now of wasted time and I am no closer to a working desktop than I was before I began. Now I find out that the problem is my i5-5300U in my NUC is not supported, yet. Even with Intel's open source Xorg effort to make up for their sorry hardware. Great.

I guess I'll just go back to Linux again. Maybe I'll try the systemd-free devuan.
 
You might want to try PC-BSD if you are looking for an out of the box desktop. FreeBSD is a wonderful toolkit that does what it does very well but it may not be for everyone.
 
Who cares? It's not like nobody would help, just post concise questions. But a story like that isn't of too much interest ...
 
A couple of points, though they've been somewhat addressed above.
Although many of us can and do use it as a desktop, it's harder to do than it is with Linux, especially Linux designed for the desktop. Newer Intel video cards and several wireless cards aren't well supported, if supported at all.

Depending upon what you're looking for in the Handbook, it may be out of date, but there are people who try to fix that when it's noted. Filing a PR for something out of date might get it fixed more quickly than you'd expect. Other parts are still as good as it used to be be.

A lot depends upon what you want from a system, to state the obvious. :) Many who use Linux these days complain about various changes that, while they make it easier to get a system up and running, also make it harder for an administrator to administrate. For example, RedHat abandoned their curses installer, leaving only a crippled version in favor of a GUI. If a video card isn't working well out of the box, people are faced with a black screen, unable to install without editing some parameters. Some of the training wheels that they've welded onto the systems make it harder to fix things when broken, and many things wind up getting tied to the GUI.

So, there's no simple answer. It's not going to be a LinuxMint. UPDATING still puts information about important changes in one place, unlike, again, RedHat, that might mention a change that breaks previous LDAP configs deep in its docs.
As this is a forum for FreeBSD, some people will take your aggravation as an attack--humans are a tribal species, but there's a bit less teenaged angst than you'll see on some Linux forums.

Anyway, if you do decide to continue, it's always best to post specific problems in separate threads. On the other hand, venting can sometimes be cathartic--the trouble is, because we are tribal creatures, the replies may be folks venting back.
 
gofer_touch said:
You might want to try PC-BSD if you are looking for an out of the box desktop.
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GhostBSD is better option IMHO.
But FreeBSD is the BEST :) It's not very difficult to configure it for desktop use, in my opinion, just google some tutorials.
For example --
 
Intel DRM, based on Linux Kernel 3.14, is presently being ported to the BSD's and made its first appearance in DragonFlyBSD. OpenBSD-current is presently running on a Lenovo Laptop with HD 5500 graphics . I suspect that FreeBSD is also making progress and that pre-release code is available somewhere.
Without starting any flame wars, OpenBSD makes for a good desktop.
 
Since it's clear this thread was never "on-topic" to begin with, I guess I'll just ask out of my own curiosity: was there ever a point when a default FreeBSD installation included a complete desktop? I highly doubt that. In any case, the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD for desktop/laptop use is, in a general sense, identical to doing so for Arch, CRUX, Gentoo, Funtoo, Void, Debian netinstall, Exherbo, Alpine ...well, any Linux distribution other than Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, or CentOS, really. Install the base system, reboot, log in, update the package database, install packages, customize/restore configurations, done.

Not every Unix-like OS has gone the way of OS X and Ubuntu, and the primary (maybe only?) appeal of FreeNAS and pfSense is that they do all the heavy lifting for you. FreeBSD does not, and I don't believe it ever did. It does, however, give you more control over everything from the start.
 
ANOKNUSA said:
Since it's clear this thread was never "on-topic" to begin with, I guess I'll just ask out of my own curiosity: was there ever a point when a default FreeBSD installation included a complete desktop? I highly doubt that.
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As a long time user (since FreeBSD 3.0), I can safely say, no, there never was. There was an option in the old installer to install XFree86 and a bunch of other stuff. But that rarely worked. Certainly not out-of-the-box, XFree86 was an even bigger drama to get working. Don't even get me started about having to build/update that monolithic monstrosity.

Install the base system, reboot, log in, update the package database, install packages, customize/restore configurations, done.
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That was the best way to install FreeBSD 3.x and it's still the best way to install FreeBSD. In this respect nothing changed.
 
Yes FreeBSD is supposed to be a free, UNIX. That mean's it's going to look and behave as one. There's enough Windows and OSX knock offs in the world without adding another. I didn't come to this project to get more of that either.

Even if you put a DE on, most of the interaction with the system will still be with the command line. No GUI can give you the complete power of the CL. You'll need to learn the CL if you want this system to be useful to you. Otherwise it's pointless to be using this.

Don't think that political correctness crap couldn't come here, it certainly could, some people here would be right at home with that - if they could get away with it. Fortunately PC is getting a major thrashing lately and the average person is not only seeing it for what it is, but getting quite tired of it.
 
I say to the OP, you obviously have way more skill and UNIX experience than I will ever have. Yet, I've been a happy FreeBSD desktop user for some years now. I suggest that whatever problem you've run into is likely some trivial thing - perhaps due to an assumption carried over from your early experiences. Give it another try - you're sooo close!
 
OJ said:
I say to the OP, [...] Give it another try - you're sooo close!
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And I say, use the help available here. But, although I can understand the frustration leading to that, DON'T post "war stories" about how bad your FreeBSD experience was. It's just not helpful (to yourself and to future readers). But you CAN get help here.
 
Dear OP, don't get offended or discouraged by our initial reactions and demeanor :). We all happily use FreeBSD and it can be set up as a desktop OS easily. Of course, some manual tweaking is required. I trust your extensive programming and UNIX knowledge will help you with that.
 
Why are you even bothered to reply to someone who ported FreeBSD to a prototype settop video box but gave up because of NFS mounts and does not know how to set up X?
 
If you have Intall HDA graphics in NUC, there is good news in 11-CURRENT - new i915 kms graphics driver. So you can wait for 11-RELEASE (July) or go with devel 11-CURRENT (quite stabble on my i5 toshiba notebook). Xorg started correctly without configuration (with kms driver loaded).
 
drhowarddrfine said:
The initial offense was caused by the OP, not us. He should apologize for that first. Then we can help with his blatant errors.
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Yup and If he really used FreeBSD in the past, then he should already know the ropes and what he is expected to do.
 
My personal opinion is the OP was merely a troll. A new member, hasn't came back for replies only heightens that assumption.
Also, having installed FreeBSD numerous times recently for testing things, and requiring Xorg, only took
Code: 
pkg install xorg
That hasn't failed me two dozen times. Please don't feed the troll.
 
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