What are the freebsd O.S. things you don't understand ?

astyle, my stance on this is that this thread could make sense as some open Q&A-session :cool:

Anything else, especially whining about "why is FreeBSD not more like ....", just ignore it 😈
 
Vull said:
FreeBSD ... don't want to support ... DRM services (like Widevine) ...
FreeBSD prefers to support the open-source and free software ...
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You are ascribing agency and intelligence to "FreeBSD" here. I think that's a vast exaggeration. The bulk of FreeBSD development (including preparing ports) is done by volunteers, who work on whatever they feel like working on, without a central authority. A small part is done by paid software engineers, of which a smaller part is paid by the FreeBSD foundation.

I'm sure that if someone paid enough software engineers to implement / port / support DRM-related software such as Widevine on FreeBSD, it could be done. And I'm pretty sure that if that work was offered in the normal process into the source-control system of FreeBSD (into base or a port), it would not be refused. I think what you are seeing here is not that FreeBSD wants to do something and not something else, but much simpler that there is a great lack of manpower and volunteers, and there are just few or none interested in this topic.

Allowing DRM software control of the FreeBSD kernel is perhaps the primary problem... but...
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It is my understanding that driving high-end video cards requires some DRM support, as they simply refuse to operate without it. But I'm not sure about that, as my FreeBSD machine has no graphics (only a VGA text mode console).
 
spiringwriter said:
for me, the system for installing packages is incomprehensible, in other Linuxes, install the rpm package, everything is clear
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Strange, that's a part that I find mostly very easy, and usually much easier than yum, apt and rpm.

One paragraph guide: Find a package? Search the web. Then do "pkg install foo". It will guide you if it needs other packages. Don't like the package any more? Do "pkg delete foo". Then try "pkg autoremove", to get rid of things no longer needed. Occasionally, do "pkg upgrade" and "pkg update". If you can't remember which is which (they both exists and have different function), then just do both repeatedly until they stop changing things.

The one part where pkg gets on my nerves is Python version upgrades: If you install py39, then specific packages like py38-serial may not be automatically upgraded. And the interplay between pkg and pip is sometimes hard to understand. I have written down rules for that in my notes, but I keep forgetting them.
 
yuripv79 said:
I guess there's some confusion between DRM as in "digital rights management" and DRM as in "direct rendering module".
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To clarify my previous post, I was referring to DRM as in Digital Rights Management.

I do believe that FreeBSD has a central guiding philosophy regarding open source software, free software, and what goes in the kernel. Others may feel differently.

There's a lot of things about FreeBSD O.S. that I don't understand, and it's true that this thread is meandering across a wide range of topics. I thought that's what the off topic Forum was for.
 
ralphbsz said:
... I think what you are seeing here is not that FreeBSD wants to do something and not something else, but much simpler that there is a great lack of manpower and volunteers, and there are just few or none interested in this topic... ...
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I'm not particularly interested in the topic of FreeBSD's support for digital rights management. It would be nice, sure, but it's not what I use this operating system for.
 
ralphbsz said:
Strange, that's a part that I find mostly very easy, and usually much easier than yum, apt and rpm.

One paragraph guide: Find a package? Search the web. Then do "pkg install foo". It will guide you if it needs other packages. Don't like the package any more? Do "pkg delete foo". Then try "pkg autoremove", to get rid of things no longer needed. Occasionally, do "pkg upgrade" and "pkg update". If you can't remember which is which (they both exists and have different function), then just do both repeatedly until they stop changing things.

The one part where pkg gets on my nerves is Python version upgrades: If you install py39, then specific packages like py38-serial may not be automatically upgraded. And the interplay between pkg and pip is sometimes hard to understand. I have written down rules for that in my notes, but I keep forgetting them.
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And I took the laptop from my brother, and there are freebsd - for me everything is strange there🧔
 
Is not Intellectual Property still Intellectual Theft?

The Soul of FreeBSD retains its agnosticism, thankfully.
 
smithi said:
Is not Intellectual Property still Intellectual Theft?

The Soul of FreeBSD retains its agnosticism, thankfully.
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🤣 What's the point of intellect if it's not shared? Once again, what about a crowd of ppl who can't think for themselves?
 
spiringwriter said:
And I took the laptop from my brother, and there are freebsd - for me everything is strange there🧔
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Everything looks strange until you read the manual and play with it.

On my profile page, I once laughed about a 'Customizable SIP Trunks' ad. Then I decided to read a bit about it. After some reading, a term that looks funny offhand - it began to make sense. FreeBSD is like that, too.
 
astyle said:
On my profile page, I once laughed about a 'Customizable SIP Trunks' ad. Then I decided to read a bit about it. After some reading, a term that looks funny offhand - it began to make sense. FreeBSD is like that, too.
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Oh I remember that one 😂 that was more a "domain specific language" kind of issue. But maybe, FreeBSD also has some of them. Just thinking about the word "port". It really can mean very different things depending on the context. To know the meaning in FreeBSD, you must know FreeBSD (ok, other BSDs as well). ;)

There's a reason that DDD (domain-driven design) defines that "language boundaries" are what you should use to identify bounded contexts ;) If a word has different meanings, you probably have different contexts, simple as that....
 
zirias@ said:
There's a reason that DDD (domain-driven design) defines that "language boundaries" are what you should use to identify bounded contexts ;) If a word has different meanings, you probably have different contexts, simple as that....
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Data Display Debugger used to be in Ports as devel/ddd :p These days, there's www/dddbl, which is Definition Driven DataBase Layer. ;)
 
ralphbsz said:
And the interplay between pkg and pip is sometimes hard to understand. I have written down rules for that in my notes, but I keep forgetting them.
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I have the same complaints about Perl, PHP, Ruby... even golang and Rust have the same problem. Not a FreeBSD-specific problem (Linux distros suffer from that too, it's part of dependency hell), but I think that Ports Collection does have a good potential for cleaning up that mess.
 
cracauer@ said:
Don't understand:

I have a 14-current install not reboot cleanly after unclean shutdown, it has fsck fail and drops to single user mode. I says
"Forced mount will invalidate journal contents" as the reason for the failed fsck. Obviously it is UFS with journal, I just never had a failure like this. What's wrong with the journal that it won't do background fsck?
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Soft Updates is *supposed* to prevent UFS corruption, except for losing track of deleted files. UFS journalling and background fsck are two alternate ways of recovering that lost space. You don't expect journalled UFS to be background checked.

If a journalled UFS filesystem causes a drop into single user mode, and there's no specific error about the journal, I guess it must be a soft update failure. I suspect the warning about a forced mount is just a confusing warning about what not to do next.
 
bob2112 said:
Soft Updates is *supposed* to prevent UFS corruption, except for losing track of deleted files. UFS journalling and background fsck are two alternate ways of recovering that lost space. You don't expect journalled UFS to be background checked.

If a journalled UFS filesystem causes a drop into single user mode, and there's no specific error about the journal, I guess it must be a soft update failure. I suspect the warning about a forced mount is just a confusing warning about what not to do next.
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Hmmm. I had this twice now. One time a `fsck -y` had the system operate as before with no sign of trouble (except for the fact that it didn't reboot on its own). The second time is shredded the filesystem to the point where it was subsequently no longer recognized as an ufs2 :)

Both cases were on USB, once with USB->SATA, the bad time with a M.2 in an external case.

I'm moderately concerned about this since it is a risk to machines operating on their own, and without serial console.
 
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