TrueOS: anyone using it on a laptop?

Lumina is also a bunch of nasty "Qt stuff", also it is not even a DE, what "Lumina" is:
fluxbox+compton+some Qt applications, panels and pop-up windows.
I guess it's a marketing thing.
With Lumina, TrueOS can boast an "own, integrated" desktop, be a "real operating system", that is "different" from FreeBSD, and allegedly "better" to people for who the DE is "the computer".

Regarding herrbischoff's comments, I have been thinking a while.
Today's desktops involve much more than programmers.
Today artists and psychologists are the actual "leaders" in desktop shaping.
I guess Apple's and Microsoft's payroll budgets only for artists and psychologists working on GUI design is by orders of magnitude bigger than the whole FreeBSD.org's budget.

In this perspective, Lumina, which looks like "programmer art", represents a GUI evolvement stage of before Windows 3.0.
 
In this perspective, Lumina, which looks like "programmer art", represents a GUI evolvement stage of before Windows 3.0.
That at least frames your perspective better. The only hope for maturity many projects have is time, or for the right help to come along. I think it is a leaning towards unethical to make this comparison for an open source project. It is not a fair comparison. However I think the takeaway is that at some point the programmer needs to step back from the interface, and let an artist have it. That I agree with.
 
I have removed it from my system and replaced my HDD with FreeBSD on it.

Not only was my feedback as a first time TrueOS user not appreciated and seen as "nonsense", I was publicly insulted further for my efforts by derogatory remarks of a personal nature from a TrueOS developer.
 
I use it on one PC, can't use it on my laptop. Buggy UEFI won't let me use GPT partitioning and ZFS becomes unbootable on MBR partitioned drive. TrueOS installer does not offer installing using UFS2.
 
I tried on a multiboot, legacy laptop. It wouldn't boot and the boot manager didn't let me get into anything else. At that point, booted with a Fedora live USB, reinstalled Fedora's grub, which wouldn't boot it using chainloader, so at that point I gave up. No offense to it, and perhaps the answer is easily found, but it was an idle curiosity install on my part, so didn't feel like taking the time. At any rate, I think if they are trying to popularize it, or use it as an advocacy item, it should be more easily installed in multiboot situations, including legacy boots, as I suspect there is a large group that, like me, just wipes Windows if buying a laptop and reverts to legacy boot.
 
I tried on a multiboot, legacy laptop. It wouldn't boot and the boot manager didn't let me get into anything else. At that point, booted with a Fedora live USB, reinstalled Fedora's grub, which wouldn't boot it using chainloader, so at that point I gave up.
This is legit but not an easy fix. Patches welcome.
 
Interesting to know. If that's the case, it should, perhaps be more clearly stated on their main pages that it isn't able to boot correctly on a legacy BIOS machine. (But will admit the FreeBSD forums aren't really the place to discuss this, save as a brief introduction to TrueOS for people looking to advocate for FreeBSD).
 
I guess it's a marketing thing.
Today's desktops involve much more than programmers.
Today artists and psychologists are the actual "leaders" in desktop shaping.
I guess Apple's and Microsoft's payroll budgets only for artists and psychologists working on GUI design is by orders of magnitude bigger than the whole FreeBSD.org's budget.

In this perspective, Lumina, which looks like "programmer art", represents a GUI evolvement stage of before Windows 3.0.
That at least frames your perspective better. The only hope for maturity many projects have is time, or for the right help to come along. I think it is a leaning towards unethical to make this comparison for an open source project. It is not a fair comparison. However I think the takeaway is that at some point the programmer needs to step back from the interface, and let an artist have it. That I agree with.

Not all free and open-source projects are ugly, because, thanks to God and GTK developers, Qt is not the only one toolkit in the *nix world.
There are a lot of projects which looks nice and IMO even much better than Windows (which UI is unusable and is a total crap IMO, all versions)
or even MacOS, which IMO is not so "beautiful", just a proprietary stuff with some bright colors, using colored title bar buttons,
and if you like it, this can be easily emulated in many WM-s, many DE-s can be much more nice when using some theming.
 
Interesting thread for sure.

A few of my objections to the project;

1. Tracking -CURRENT does not make for a stable user experience. Which is paramount for a supposedly desktop project. The trade-off of course, is better hardware support. I think it'd be better if they track -RELEASE, and MFC drivers fixes and whatnot.

2. The design ethos for Lumina is nonexistent. I was watching Ken Moore's talk at KnoxBUG recently and a lot of the infrastructural design choices make sense (API based, portability, etc), but he overlooks the user experience, and what the experience should look like. All I hear is "Plug-ins!, Plug-ins!, Plug-ins!". An attractive, standard design ethos should be set, then allow the user to modify their experience. (a la. KDE).

3. They're limiting their scope of support basing their entire project and utilities on ZFS. Do we really need ZFS based file manager? What about embedded systems? IoT? UFS serves better purpose for a lot of different consumer facing markets.

4. C++ is just disgusting.

GhostBSD is looking more like a compelling, general desktop project that doesn't stray too far from FreeBSD. I'm also a fan of MATE as well. :)

My .02
 
At any rate, I think if they are trying to popularize it, or use it as an advocacy item, it should be more easily installed in multiboot situations, including legacy boots, as I suspect there is a large group that, like me, just wipes Windows if buying a laptop and reverts to legacy boot.

Three pages and 59 posts later not a single soul mentioned the biggest problem with TrueOS as supposedly desktop OS. TrueOS is ZFS centric. ZFS requires ECC RAM lot of it. Personally I am not familiar with a single laptop on U.S. market which ships with ECC RAM. I am not even sure if you can put ECC RAM into one (it would have to be laptop with some kind Xeon server processor). Root partition on ZFS only makes sense if you are using mirror for OS installation. While I do have a Dell Laptop from 2008 with mirrored 500GB HDD I doubted many people could effort machine like that at that time $4000. General trend in computing seems to be slow migration towards low energy ARM processors. How many people are using ZFS on ARM right now?

scottro mentioned issue of legacy boot. Legacy boot aside a proper laptop installation involves encrypting everything (FreeBSD by default doesn't even encrypt BSD /tmp partition). Hands up all of you who know how to use Geli, gpart, zpool, and zfs well enough to install vanilla FreeBSD on an encrypted ZFS mirror :) Guess what? TrueOS doesn't even claim to support it. Yet they keep bragging about OpenRC. Moore brothers must be thinking that all BSD users are idiots? There are papers (top of the page 3)

https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/attachments/337_bsdcan-2016-paper-openbsd_rcd.pdf

written by a members of BSD community which clearly explains why OpenRC is more trouble than it is worth. What kind of important service is laptop/desktop computer going to run anyway? None of course. Yet beanpole sale pitch is
OpenRC for service management. Do you like being able to see what services are running on your system? Do you want to setup particular services in failover mode so that they never go down for more than a second or two (such as those pesky nginx/apache + wordpress servers)? If so, then you want TrueOS with OpenRC.
It is not a server or is it? If it is a server system where is a five year support for PC-BSD 10.xxx? He dares to talk about easy upgrading path among major FreeBSD releases after PC-BSD 10.xxx abandonment. Guess what? That is irrelevant for a desktop OS. If you are running FreeBSD desktop after a major FreeBSD release you wipe out your os, do the fresh installation and get your home directory from a backup image. Smooth upgrade between major releases is important to me because I have bunch of file servers with 250TB of live data each and I can't effort to pull everything from the backup (even I can just reinstall OS on brand new HDDs and just import old ZFS pools)

The main selling point of TrueOS is propriety ZFS file system

https://trademarks.justia.com/859/01/zfs-85901629.html

which is the best thing after the slice of bread in a data center but next to useless on a traditional desktop computer.


I will finish this Christmas TrueOS rant by saying that I mean well to IXSystems folks when I say that they should stick to what they know best (selling storage appliances (hardware/software) and possibly expend their offerings into "Services for enterprise"). They would do really well by sponsoring things that most serious FreeBSD users care about (fixing syslogd stack or native sensoring framework). As hard as it is, they should also try to smooth out relation with FreeBSD community (beanpole was complaining of inability to push even bug fixes and port new things from other BSD projects) which they depend on. FreeBSD political landscape is a true minefield and it is not for faint-hearted as otherwise we will not see DragonFly fork (far more suitable for desktop use with a 2 first rate advanced file systems). This desktop thing didn't work well in 2006, 2007, or last year for that matter and is never going to work as it looks too much like a free version of OS X but without multi-billion dollar Apple investment. It is really bad publicity for the company and make them look bad in the eye of the serious users like myself. Having a FreeBSD hackathon where FreeBSD developers are hacking on FreeBSD machines instead of OS X laptops

https://people.freebsd.org/~bz/200805DevSummit/IMG_7796-s.JPG

will do far more for the popularization of vulnerable OS which depends so much on single proprietary technology (ZFS) than semi-functional desktop distribution which eyed Ubuntu for a desktop domination since 2006.
 
Oko Actually OpenRC is my fault. I spearheaded that effort, I did a large part of the work, and convinced the others. It was largely my idea to make TrueOS a rolling release, and I had to do a lot of convincing to make it happen.

It is just funny everyone thinks the "moores" are to blame for most of these choices. I have joked about it alot at the office about how I am glad they are famous, and not me. The reality is is was me a contributor in his spare time that was behind quite a few things people are griping about here. Even the idea to use the name we owned "TrueOS" I pushed for. No one else wanted to go that direction.
 
Oko Also I fully agree about your FreeBSD hackathon idea. It was that very concept which inspired me to start working with the others on what became TrueOS at vBSDcon in 2015. Sadly I do not think it has had as much of an impact as I would have hoped. I am always saddened to see this type of feedback at least. Sorry it disappoints.
 
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Three pages and 59 posts later not a single soul mentioned the biggest problem with TrueOS as supposedly desktop OS. TrueOS is ZFS centric.

Being ZFS centric is probably one of the very few GOOD reasons.

With UFS You do not have data integrity (checksums) and (less important) You do not have online compression with lz4 (on my 500GB drive I get 20% for free).

ZFS requires ECC RAM lot of it.
Lie.

I have run 2 TB mirror (2 x 2TB disks) with 512 MB RAM for years and it was rock stable. I currently run 3 TB ZFS pool in Raspberry Pi 2 which has 1 GB RAM and this one also runs great all the time.

Personally I am not familiar with a single laptop on U.S. market which ships with ECC RAM. I am not even sure if you can put ECC RAM into one (it would have to be laptop with some kind Xeon server processor).

EVERY system benefits for using ECC RAM, ZFS has nothing to do about it, You will get corrupted data on ANY filesystem when You do not use ECC RAM, I do not know why everybody focuses here on ZFS that much.

Root partition on ZFS only makes sense if you are using mirror for OS installation.

I assume that You do not know the concept of ZFS Boot Environments or You have never used it. Its probably one of the biggest reasons to use ZFS on ROOT. With BE You get BULLETPROOF upgrades. I have recently used FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE on my mini-itx server and wanted to try FreeBSD 12-CURRENT, I have created new BE, upgraded to 12-CURRENT and made several modifications in configs, I also tried DRM-NEXT as I had 12-CURRENT onboard. After testing I wen back to 11.1-RELEASE Boot Environment and removed the 12-CURRENT BE as it was no longer needed. You will NEVER be able to do something like that with UFS.

How many people are using ZFS on ARM right now?
I do not know how many, but I do not care how many, I run ZFS on ARM (Raspberry Pi 2) and its even arm32, as arm64 would be better suited for ZFS (or any workload actually). As I said before, runs like a charm.



Having a FreeBSD hackathon where FreeBSD developers are hacking on FreeBSD machines instead of OS X laptops

https://people.freebsd.org/~bz/200805DevSummit/IMG_7796-s.JPG
This is very sad to watch and its one of the MAIN reasons FreeBSD sucks on the desktop.
 
Oko Actually OpenRC is my fault. I spearheaded that effort, I did a large part of the work, and convinced the others. It was largely my idea to make TrueOS a rolling release, and I had to do a lot of convincing to make it happen.

It is just funny everyone thinks the "moores" are to blame for most of these choices. I have joked about it alot at the office about how I am glad they are famous, and not me. The reality is is was me a contributor in his spare time that was behind quite a few things people are griping about here. Even the idea to use the name we owned "TrueOS" I pushed for. No one else wanted to go that direction.

Switching to OpenRC was a sound decision IMHO. It does alleviate a lot of administrative tasks. I do believe it is the successor to rc.d from NetBSD.

I do have one question. Besides having to trail upstream and worry about porting Linux dependencies, why couldn't you guys just just keep KDE, or switch to GNOME 3? Was it lack of interest? Man Power? Philosophical differences?

If i'm not mistaken, OpenBSD had no issues keeping their port updated, and it appears GNOME 3 runs pretty smoothly. There are also groups of maintainers (according to the wiki at least) for each DE as well for FreeBSD, so why not collaborate with them for TrueOS?

It's canonical attempting to reinvent another X server with their Mir debacle; it's just pointless IMHO.

Between GhostBSD, and the FreeBSD/GNOME team, it'd be nice if the effort can be consolidated behind the TrueOS moniker, but a guy can dream..

edit: spelling
 
This is very sad to watch and its one of the MAIN reasons FreeBSD sucks on the desktop.

Regardless of how one may feel about Apple; the reality is that Apple has already solved the problem of BSD Unix (Just Unix in general) on the desktop. It works with no fuss, and you can get work done with it in many use cases.

Other than "it's FreeBSD", or "its Open Source", there has to be a compelling reason for them to trade-off macOS for limited usability to get shit done.

I've said this several times before, i don't think the wider FreeBSD developer community cares about FreeBSD on the desktop, hence why every year in every BSD conference, I see more Macs used. The initiative simply isn't there. Sure a few have voiced their concerns of wanting FreeBSD on the desktop, but from what I can tell most of them are like "meh, I have my Mac, and it works", so to speak.

However, I do think there is room for a horizontally integrated platform for BSD Unix; one that isn't tied to any particular piece of hardware (ie. Vertical Integration). FreeBSD fits that bill.
 
or even MacOS, which IMO is not so "beautiful", just a proprietary stuff with some bright colors, using colored title bar buttons,
and if you like it, this can be easily emulated in many WM-s, many DE-s can be much more nice when using some theming.

Reading this, I realize that there's nothing I can say or do to convince someone holding a belief like this otherwise. If that's what you truly believe, you are probably most at home on a terminal shell. You are someone able to set up their full desktop system from scratch and feel that this is the best way to do things. You are also not the intended target audience for something like macOS. Which makes you part of the problem why open source OSs will never, ever, in a million years become usable by the average user. This kind of mindset keeps artists, designers and psychologists away from most open source projects because frankly, when you are about to donate your time, you don't want to have to debate a bunch of developers about the need for something to be the way you propose. It's frustrating to have to explain everything from zero. You expect cooperation and recognition of your skills, just like every developer does. And when the reply to a structural UI suggestion is "works for me, we should focus on technical issues", you leave for an area where you can effect progressive change and your training and experience is actually valued.

The train wrecks that are WM themes may cater to the "hacker type" personality quite well but are in no way something a regular user would choose given the commercial alternatives. And no, users are not stupid or easily blinded by "some bright colors" or "colored title bar buttons". They recognize what helps them achieve their goals the best. As do you.
 
Switching to OpenRC was a sound decision IMHO. It does alleviate a lot of administrative tasks. I do believe it is the successor to rc.d from NetBSD.
No it was originally until 2010 developed by the Gentoo Linux and NetBSD (in that particular order) developer Roy Marples. The rest of the history

https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc/blob/master/HISTORY.md

I do have one question. Besides having to trail upstream and worry about porting Linux dependencies, why couldn't you guys just just keep KDE, or switch to GNOME 3? Was it lack of interest? Man Power? Philosophical differences?
I can answer that for you. Because actually most FreeBSD developers (unlike Open and DragonFly) use OS X as their desktop system. There is actually no real interest in FreeBSD desktop. No wonder people have smoother experience (with exception of close source binary blob NVidia drivers) with those two other OSs on the desktop (Inter GPU support, WiFi, suspend-resume, touchpad etc). The FreeBSD based desktop is OS X. Let me remind you that original FreeBSD developer Jordan Hubbard was hired by Steve Jobs to develop OS X with the NEXT crew. OS X userland was based of FreeBSD. FreeBSD didn't need other desktop. Until his big FreeNAS Corral screw up he was going around talking how people should be porting OS X's launchd to FreeBSD.



If i'm not mistaken, OpenBSD had no issues keeping their port updated, and it appears GNOME 3 runs pretty smoothly. There are also groups of maintainers (according to the wiki at least) for each DE as well for FreeBSD, so why not collaborate with them for TrueOS?

It's canonical attempting to reinvent another X server with their Mir debacle; it's just pointless IMHO.

Between GhostBSD, and the FreeBSD/GNOME team, it'd be nice if the effort can be consolidated behind the TrueOS moniker, but a guy can dream..

edit: spelling
I respectfully have to notice that you don't know much about the chemistry of various BSD groups. Otherwise you would not be asking that question. Let me give you thumbs up. HAMMER 1,2 or or any other major peace of code written by Matt Dillon will never run on FreeBSD, FreeBSD will never default to LibreSSL and OpenSSH release will always be several releases behind with "backward compatibility" patches which introduce security vulnerabilities. PF will continue to rotten and it will never be updated.
 
Because actually most FreeBSD developers (unlike Open and DragonFly) use OS X as their desktop system. There is actually no real interest in FreeBSD desktop.

If that's the case, in the context of FreeBSD, every opinion regarding macOS as a desktop environment being somehow inferior to [insert_wm_of_choice_here] is basically moot.
 
No it was originally until 2010 developed by the Gentoo Linux and NetBSD (in that particular order) developer Roy Marples. The rest of the history

https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc/blob/master/HISTORY.md

Ah, that's right. Roy had created the initial scripts. I don't where my mind went with that one.
I respectfully have to notice that you don't know much about the chemistry of various BSD groups. Otherwise you would not ask that question.

It'd be a more productive conversation if you'd enlighten those you claim to know nothing about, instead of belittle them. Your posts tend to be arrogantly disingenuous also, so i'll refrain from feeding the troll.

Ironically, you conjure up statements like this;

I can answer that for you. Because actually most FreeBSD developers (unlike Open and DragonFly) use OS X as their desktop system. There is actually no real interest in FreeBSD desktop. No wonder people have smoother experience (with exception of close source binary blob NVidia drivers) with those two other OSs on the desktop (Inter GPU support, WiFi, suspend-resume laptops etc). The FreeBSD based desktop is OS X. Let me remind you that original FreeBSD developer Jordan Hubbard was hired by Steve Jobs to develop OS X with the NEXT crew. OS X userland was based of FreeBSD. FreeBSD didn't need other desktop. Until his big FreeNAS Corral screw up he was going around talking how people should be porting OS X's launchd to FreeBSD.

which couldn't be further from the truth.

Carry on.
 
Not only was my feedback as a first time TrueOS user not appreciated and seen as "nonsense", I was publicly insulted further for my efforts by derogatory remarks of a personal nature from a TrueOS developer.
Trihexagonal
The TrueOS community forums are very different from here: there tends to be a very low tolerance for outright BS and/or trollish comments. You just happened to join in on a thread where one of those people was being called out by the community. Your remarks were quite civil, and if you make your own threads/tickets about any issue(s) that you experienced, your questions will be answered or responded to in the same tone that you use.

@anybody_else:
If you want to debate TrueOS vs FreeBSD, that is your prerogative. However, hijacking somebody else's thread which asked a simple question ("TrueOS: anyone using it on a laptop?") just to throw mud at a project that most of you have admittedly never used is just ridiculous.
If you want a debate about TrueOS, I will gladly debate the merits/features of TrueOS/FreeBSD with anybody here. We clearly have a few popular topics (OpenRC, Lumina, STABLE/CURRENT), and if you want to setup a time/date for a "live" forum debate (with the approval of the forum moderators) I will gladly accept your challenge (sometime after Christmas though).
 
If that's the case, in the context of FreeBSD, every opinion regarding macOS as a desktop environment being somehow inferior to [insert_wm_of_choice_here] is basically moot.
The main difference between OS X and a "primitive" UNIX system like FreeBSD are: the use of launchd instead of rc.d scripts, PLISTS instead plain text files, and most importantly the lack of modern file system on OS X. However the last one should be fixed soon as soon as OS X completely transition to Apple File System (APFS)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

I am not sure how APFS compares to ZFS or HAMMER[1-2] but by reading that Wiki page I gathered it looks darn similar. PLISTS are artifacts of the fact that preferred way of configuring OS X is via GUI. However PLISTS and launchd might be the small price to pay to have up to date PF and really polished desktop where everything just works.
 
Trihexagonal
The TrueOS community forums are very different from here: there tends to be a very low tolerance for outright BS and/or trollish comments. You just happened to join in on a thread where one of those people was being called out by the community. Your remarks were quite civil, and if you make your own threads/tickets about any issue(s) that you experienced, your questions will be answered or responded to in the same tone that you use.

@anybody_else:
If you want to debate TrueOS vs FreeBSD, that is your prerogative. However, hijacking somebody else's thread which asked a simple question ("TrueOS: anyone using it on a laptop?") just to throw mud at a project that most of you have admittedly never used is just ridiculous.
If you want a debate about TrueOS, I will gladly debate the merits/features of TrueOS/FreeBSD with anybody here. We clearly have a few popular topics (OpenRC, Lumina, STABLE/CURRENT), and if you want to setup a time/date for a "live" forum debate (with the approval of the forum moderators) I will gladly accept your challenge (sometime after Christmas though).

For those who are impatient and don't want to wait Lumina to flourish, but still want an out-of-the-box experience. Would you be open to a GNOME 3 or KDE spin of TrueOS, shipped? I do believe in the vision of the project; but Lumina just doesn't do it for me in it's infancy.

Unfortunately FreeBSD doesn't do this (and rightfully so), and i'd like an image i can quickly throw onto a box on a whim.
 
Trihexagonal
@anybody_else:
If you want to debate TrueOS vs FreeBSD, that is your prerogative. However, hijacking somebody else's thread which asked a simple question ("TrueOS: anyone using it on a laptop?") just to throw mud at a project that most of you have admittedly never used is just ridiculous.
If you want a debate about TrueOS, I will gladly debate the merits/features of TrueOS/FreeBSD with anybody here. We clearly have a few popular topics (OpenRC, Lumina, STABLE/CURRENT), and if you want to setup a time/date for a "live" forum debate (with the approval of the forum moderators) I will gladly accept your challenge (sometime after Christmas though).
Let me go step further and propose something even more radical. Why don't you have a live debate with few competent critics (former disenfranchised PC-BSD/FreeNAS server users) and power desktop users on BSD Now. That would at least give you guys some credibility going forward even if might not convince people like myself who got burned in the past. I would love to watch that episode from a live audience :)
 
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