# Is suspend ever going to work with FreeBSD.



## s5e (Mar 22, 2018)

Few times a year I test FreeBSD with my laptop and every time there's same fault. FreeBSD do not resume from suspend. 
This makes FreeBSD unusable with laptops and it stays server OS forever.

I there was fully supported laptop available, I would buy it instantly.


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## aragats (Mar 22, 2018)

It depends on hardware, however, you haven't provided any info.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 22, 2018)

Unfortunately, if you use Nvidia GPU with FreeBSD, suspend won't work for you.
The only possibility to have a working suspend on FreeBSD, is to use crappy Intel integrated graphics.
I'm not sure about AMD, because I've never tried to use it.


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## aragats (Mar 22, 2018)

ILUXA said:


> crappy Intel integrated graphics


What's wrong with Intel? (-;


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## s5e (Mar 22, 2018)

Well, I have Intel based laptop. HP and Macbook Air. Both have same problem. Resume do not work.

*HP Envy 13-d004no*


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## aragats (Mar 22, 2018)

HP Envy is Skylake, according to FreeBSD Graphics page, it's supported in FreeBSD 12-CURRENT.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 22, 2018)

aragats said:


> according to FreeBSD Graphics page, it's supported in FreeBSD 12-CURRENT.



I've read somewhere here, on FreeBSD forums, that graphics/drm-next-kmod should be available also on 11.1-STABLE now. But I didn't test it yet with 11.1-STABLE. On 12-CURRENT it used to work fine. I'm using Devuan testing (Ascii) on my laptop now, and I like it pretty much.


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## kpedersen (Mar 22, 2018)

FreeBSD's support for suspend works on many more laptops than Mac OS X. The reason why people don't complain about Mac OS X is because they pick the correct hardware. So the equivalent to something like a MacBook for FreeBSD is a Thinkpad. I personally use an X200 and it works great.

Check for exact models here:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/SuspendResume


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## Phishfry (Mar 22, 2018)

I use S3 power state for the lid on my Dell E6430, E6420's.
These are SandyBridge and IvyBridge without Optimus.

I can close the lid and it sleeps, open the lid and it resumes. Wireless network hiccups for a minuite and then all is good.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 22, 2018)

since many years i use all Unix(s) (linux, openbsd and now freebsd) in my laptop as *virtual machines*. It is the only way i can survive all kind of driver problems. I higly reccomend this way to all people working mainly on laptop, as i do. (sorry for no-case text, i am writing on phone)


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 22, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> I can close the lid and it sleeps, open the lid and it resumes.



It is a magic, IMHO.
And while I'm not afraid of devil, or satan, I'm afraid such things very much.


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## kpedersen (Mar 23, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> since many years i use all Unix(s) (linux, openbsd and now freebsd) in my laptop as *virtual machines*. It is the only way i can survive all kind of driver problems.


I used to do that and it worked well. However since Windows 8, I simply refuse to put a Microsoft OS online. It isn't that I don't trust them, they have after all, been very open and honest with how they digitally fsck over their users. Unfortunately I still cannot accept being fsked over (I must be strange or something!).
The only way I will do it is by isolating the host machine and only letting the guest running FreeBSD access the network. Unfortunately this tends to be quite a faff and over WiFi this is very flaky but once it matures (if it ever does), then I might very well do the same again.

Also when it comes to things like peripherals (usb sticks, webcams, usb wifi, etc) getting them to the VM in a practical manner is often tricky. Suspending whilst these are attached to the VM rarely works any better than suspending FreeBSD running natively on the correct hardware.

Basically, the year is 2018 and our computing experience absolutely sucks! Can't wait for 2019; that will almost certainly be worse


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## JAW (Mar 23, 2018)

I've recently been using FreeBSD on my MacBookAir daily on the train, admittedly suspend/resume doesn't work, but when you can boot and power down in a few seconds I don't find I'm missing much.


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## aragats (Mar 23, 2018)

JAW said:


> I've recently been using FreeBSD on my MacBookAir daily on the train, admittedly suspend/resume doesn't work, but when you can boot and power down in a few seconds I don't find I'm missing much.


It depends on what you use it for (-;
Almost two years I used my ThinkPad suspending twice a day: taking home and back to workplace. I worked on 2-3 projects and could not close all my windows/terminals/virtual machines.


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## Snurg (Mar 23, 2018)

aragats said:


> It depends on what you use it for (-;
> worked on 2-3 projects and could not close all my windows/terminals/virtual machines.


Exactly this is my problem, too.
And S3 suspend is just not sufficient (if it works at all on FreeBSD):

For laptops: If the battery is already low, you cannot depend on the sleeping machine survive long enough until you can connect it to an AC outlet again.
For desktops: Sometimes you want to reconfigure the AC wiring.
For servers or number-crunching: If the UPS signals blackout and batteries go low.
This is the reason why many people need an OS that reliably does not only S3 suspend (sleep), but even masters S4 suspend (hibernate).
And this in turn is why I am phasing out FreeBSD as desktop and laptop OS in favor of Linux.


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## Crivens (Mar 23, 2018)

Suspend is a hit&miss, sadly.

Maybe we need a better infra structure to debug it?


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## Eric A. Borisch (Mar 23, 2018)

I’ve got suspend and even hibernate (admittedly via a hardware/firmware assist) runing on my x230.

But as I’ve said elsewhere, if I were directing FreeBSD’s priorities, suspend/resume/laptop+desktop focused tweaks would not be high on the list.


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## Phishfry (Mar 23, 2018)

Magic happens here:
sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 23, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> Magic happens here:
> sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3



It was a joke. I know this spell for a lot of time, it works OK with my T420.
But it never won't work if you use Nvidia GPU.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 25, 2018)

Snurg said:


> Exactly this is my problem, too.
> And this in turn is why I am phasing out FreeBSD as desktop and laptop OS in favor of Linux.



Hi Snurg ! 

Some warnings before you switch to Linux as  Desktop, I come from that situation.

1] It all depends on the Linux, probably one of the few distribution putting a lot of attention to the Desktop experience is Ubuntu. In Debian, you will have troubles, and you will need to spend a lot of days in chats, and mixed resources reading, and doing a lot of try&pray undocumented stuff. 

2] When I crossed my fingers and moved to FreeBSD for the Desktop I was motivated by the following situation. I was trying to control a network of BeagleBone(s) from Linux and I was in complete despair. Things were not working well and I was not able to sort them out. So, I started another virtual machine with OpenBSD, from Linux I was doing ssh to OpenBSD and from OpenBSD controlling the various BeagleBones. 
=> in OpenBSD stuff worked.
=> I tried to move my Desktop env. to OpenBSD, not satisfactory, in my OpenBSD notes there is written "Impossible to watch Youtube video tutorials" => un-usable as desktop. [notes taken on release 6.0] 
=> After a while I tried to move the desktop to FreeBSD, ok, more or less I have the same stuff I had working in Debian. But here things are much more controllable and understandable. 

Conclusion. For my experience there is not a silver bullet OS for Desktop. All of them will satisfy and displease you under different points of view, it is only a matter of time. 

Extra. 
Take OSX, which is superlative under many points of view as a Desktop OS. Once you focus on programming it will start to get into your way. [*] you can't open two independent copies of the same process e.g. Emacs [*] it has its annoying way of managing automatically network interfaces [*] racoon (VPN) => nightmare [*] one day Apple wakes up and decides you can't use any more a matrix of desktops, the must be in a single row [*]  Another days Apple decides that a desktop containing a full screen window does not obey the same sorting rules applied to other desktops ... after a while I got sick of it. 

For this reason, I suggest you to take a different approach, choose an OS which is able to resolve 99-100% of your hardware. Then install run VMWare or VirtualBoX and run a OS you love in there. 

When I was about 20 I spent 1-2 months to have Debian working in white Apple Macbook, wiping immediately out that crappy macOS running buy default in that epoch. Architecture was not even x86 ! It was a tremendous effort, nothing was working ! ... These are the kind of thing you can only do at first years of university


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## Oko (Mar 25, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> 2] When I crossed my fingers and moved to FreeBSD for the Desktop I was motivated by the following situation. I was trying to control a network of BeagleBone(s) from Linux and I was in complete despair. Things were not working well and I was not able to sort them out. So, I started another virtual machine with OpenBSD, from Linux I was doing ssh to OpenBSD and from OpenBSD controlling the various BeagleBones.
> => in OpenBSD stuff worked.
> => I tried to move my Desktop env. to OpenBSD, not satisfactory, in my OpenBSD notes there is written "Impossible to watch Youtube video tutorials" => un-usable as desktop. [notes taken on release 6.0]
> => After a while I tried to move the desktop to FreeBSD, ok, more or less I have the same stuff I had working in Debian. But here things are much more controllable and understandable.


As a hard core OpenBSD user (I use FreeBSD only at work for ZFS file servers and Jails) nothing makes me more worm and fuzzy than the posts like these. It an indicator that for foreseeable future OpenBSD will remain no nonsense community of highly skilled professionals and serious hobbyists. I don't go to BSD and Linux conferences often but when I go one remarkable think about OpenBSD guys is that we eat our own dog food. I have never meet an OpenBSD developer or a power user like myself whose laptop was not running only OpenBSD (no dual boot no VM, no nonsense, nada, just pure OpenBSD UNIX). All of us use OpenBSD to give presentations with VGA, DVI, HDMI projectors.

You can ask admins to show you fingerprints of the browser from which I am posting this replay. For the record since early 2007 never had anything but OpenBSD on my desktops (used Solaris, Irix, Tru64 before that) and watching classical music on youtube all the time.



Nicola Mingotti said:


> For this reason, I suggest you to take a different approach, choose an OS which is able to resolve 99-100% of your hardware. Then install run VMWare or VirtualBoX and run a OS you love in there.


In another words you are one of those guys who has being using that "other OS" all these years but feel competent enough to give advise to incoming FreeBSD users. No shit...


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 25, 2018)

Oko said:


> As a hard core OpenBSD user (I use FreeBSD only at work for ZFS file servers and Jails) ....
> In another words you are one of those guys who has being using that "other OS" all these years but feel competent enough to give advise to incoming FreeBSD users. No shit...



Absolutely not ! Indeed Snurg knows this very well, I am a beginner in FreeBSD. And in another occasion, my reccomandation was to use Linux. Zero fanatism one my side. I support what i think works and creates less problem overall.


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## ralphbsz (Mar 25, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> I was trying to control a network of BeagleBone(s) from Linux and I was in complete despair. Things were not working well and I was not able to sort them out. So, I started another virtual machine with OpenBSD, from Linux I was doing ssh to OpenBSD and from OpenBSD controlling the various BeagleBones.



Please explain what you mean by "control network of BeagleBone": What OS were the BeagleBones running, and in what fashion were you controlling them?  What part didn't work in Linux?  How did OpenBSD improve matters?  I'm interested in the details; I don't have a network of BeagleBones, but a much smaller system: one FreeBSD server, one Linux Raspberry data acquisition node, and two more RPi on the workbench waiting to be outfitted, programmed and deployed.

By the way, this question has nothing to do with desktop usage and suspend.


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## Sensucht94 (Mar 25, 2018)

Oko said:


> As a hard core OpenBSD user (I use FreeBSD only at work for ZFS file servers and Jails) nothing makes me more worm and fuzzy than the posts like these. It an indicator that for foreseeable future OpenBSD will remain no nonsense community of highly skilled professionals and hobbyists. I don't go to BSD and Linux and conferences often but when I go one remarkable think about OpenBSD guys is that we eat our own food. I have never meet an OpenBSD developer or a power user like myself whose laptop was not running only OpenBSD (no dual boot no VM, no nonsense, nada, just pure OpenBSD UNIX). All of us use OpenBSD to give presentations with VGA, DVI, HDMI projectors.
> 
> You can ask admins to show you fingerprints of the browser from which I am posting this replay. For the record since early 2007 never had anything but OpenBSD on my desktops (used Solaris, Irix, Tru64 before that) and watching classical music on youtube all the time.



Well said Oko. I have friends in IT, computer science, and a sysadmin friend all of which are forced to use Linux by University/employer. They escape to Windows/macOS every time they can and be it far from them to use Linux on desktop (some of them are gamers, some other just like spyware).

When they see an amateur like me comfortably using some *BSD on my laptop, I can perceive the suprise in their eyes, as well as bit of envy  and self-esteem drop for not having been 'as brave', but above all, I can sense them making laugh of me considering that to be just ridicolous, and my behavior pretentious.

I just don't care; I think that if you like an OS, its structure, documentation, goals, community....you'd better just use it, or you'll always feel  unsatisfied with your PC. And that would be unfortunate, as decent hardware still costs enough nowadays.....FreeBSD devs using macs is pure nonsense to me: even if I were into FreeBSD  developement only to work on Kernel or server-targeted stuff, I'd still use it on desktop, since FreeBSD is a general purpose OS per definition, and if I chose to support a project, I'd do my best to help support all its goals, especially in official public/press conferences, for me it's just everything or nothing

Not here to argue about why I prefer FreeBSD over OpenBSD on my laptop (it's practically sure they  respectively meet different needs for our desktop usage), but I'll share another experience of mine, which involves using FreeDOS on one of my laptops for 2 years. I had come to like FreeDOS (software, devs, community, documentation), and used to be quite active on the freedos-user mailing list. I decided to put it on my desktop (no dual boot no VM, no nonsense, nada, just pure 16-bit DOS) and that was purely to support the project (well, and to play games during time off). I created a couple of batch files to render pdfs and docs with ghiostscript, and display them in series with some dos image viewers. Actually I did a lot more on it, even started learning programming. People were scared to see my laptop, I laughed meanwhile a lot, just had a lot of fun


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 25, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> Please explain what you mean by "control network of BeagleBone": What OS were the BeagleBones running, and in what fashion were you controlling them?  What part didn't work in Linux?  How did OpenBSD improve matters?  I'm interested in the details; I don't have a network of BeagleBones, but a much smaller system: one FreeBSD server, one Linux Raspberry data acquisition node, and two more RPi on the workbench waiting to be outfitted, programmed and deployed.
> 
> By the way, this question has nothing to do with desktop usage and suspend.



These are the step I followed and their motivation, at the best I can remember. 

1] BeagleBone Black is different respect RPI, it comes with Linux preloaded in built in memory.
2] BBB comes with the possiblity to connect via USB as if it was a network device, address
by defaul si 192.168.7.2, by heart.  
3] If you try to connect to it via OSX 10.11.6 (even installing the suggested drivers) you will 
go crazy. Sometimes it works sometims it does not (experiments took place several months ago) 
4] I found problems connecting event to buitin serial via OSX.
5] About 8 months ago I had (3 BBB, 2 RPI, 2 Soekris, 2 Alix) available to deploy. 
6] Since OSX was driving me crazy (in trying to connecto the them) I had two solutions to try [1] OpenBSD [2] Linux. Linux because it was my Desktop OS (running in VMware inside OSX). OpenBSD because i used before it in other servers and I liked the documentation. Expecially I appreciated it when I set up a VPN server. 
7] OpenBSD resulted in a perfectly stable serial connection
8] OpenBSD resulted best solution (for documentation and stability) for :
8.1] setting up a NAT, for the embedded systems
8.2] Setting up the routing rules, firewall, DHCPD, and SFTPD (that was mainly for Soekris and ALIX) 
8.3] I tried to do the same stuff in Debian (which was my default VMWachine) it was much 
more difficult to set up and documentation was super scattered. I was never sure 100% 
what i was doing was correct.
9] => At some point I decied all embedded stuff that needed  maintenance or a different configuration should have been connected directly to my laptop (and old macbook) and controlled via serial by the OpenBSD VirtualMachine; their network managed, again, by the OpenBSD VM. 
10] Next, when I was able to control well the BBB, that means GPIO, PWM,
ADC and PRUS; I decied that it was my preferred platform for small embedded and automation. I abandoned the RPI.
11] One day I decied to make a Wifi Router for the office with a BBB. Since networking in OpenBSD has always proved to me to be better organized than in Linux I wanted to make int in OpenBSD. I tried to install OpenBSD in BBB, but USB was not working, that made it un-usable, since USB is necessary for the USB-Wifi dongle. 
13] I looked for alternatives, FreeBSD popped up, I never used it before (this was 
approximately last December)
14] FreeBSD-11.1 boots well in BBB, and it has USB support
15] FreeBSD is well documented as OpenBSD 
15.1] I must say, respect to OpenBSD, FreeBSD is less "ready to deploy" when I finish the install, 
e.g. there is no "mg" (fundamental, I am of the church of Emacs, you say what you want)
nor "dhcpd", and I don't like much "csh". But, that are no issues. I install what i need. 
16] I made my Wifi Router in FreeBSD and i am using it right now to write this message. It works very well, and it is very stable. Far superior to what I can buy at a comparable price in the local electronics store.
17] I was very enthusiastic, i started to consider to try FreeBSD even as a desktop environment.
18] Those are the days I discovered this forum, and the first people I met, were in the 
Embedded Forum, of course. So Snurg, aragats , Trihexagonal , Phishfry are
the first friendly names I remember.
19] After a few months of experiments I am using only the FreeBSD virtual machine, I moved
the Debian in an external disk. I use this system for about 12 hours a day.
20] Now I don't need a separate VM to control one, two, or more embedded systems
let them be connected via USB-serial or Ethernet. I can do it all from my desktop VM, which
is very practical.
21] FreeBSD recognizes well USB-over-ethernet coming from BBB, which is great.
22] There are some issues in FreeBSD as a desktop, one of which IMO are unstable browsers, another can be power saving (I don't need it, because I run in a VM). 
23] Having tried many other systems, what FreeBSD lacks it gains in consistency and documentation. That is my impression and my point.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 25, 2018)

Oko said:


> I have never meet an OpenBSD developer or a power user like myself whose laptop was not running only OpenBSD (no dual boot no VM, no nonsense, nada, just pure OpenBSD UNIX). All of us use OpenBSD to give presentations with VGA, DVI, HDMI projectors.
> .



When I see this kind of writings I understand I am reading somebody working in academia.

If you do no work in academia you realize soon that you *need* Microsoft Office.
Often you can go with LibreOffice, not always. In Finance expecially, Office is
the holy grail.

You many need Inventor or some other professional CAD software wich is ONLY for Windows.

If you need to digitally sign a document for the burocracy (at least in Italy) you need a software which is provided by some boureau (Camera di Commercio or the like) which is only for Windows and OSX.

If you want to program Android you do it from Windows, Linux or OSX. AFAIK there is not solution to do it in BSD (besides the Linux compatibility layer which I never tried). [using Android Studio, which is the only way Google documents the procedues in its pages, AFAIK]

Then there is Matlab, which is extremely popular in the Engineering environment. Yes, there is Octave, but try to run a special solver like CVX, and it will be the end of happiness.

If you need to comunicate to special purpose devices, chances are very high the driver will be Windows only.

These are only the first silly examples that come to my mind.

Virtual Machines are freedom ! You can be using UNIX 90% of time, and still be able to comunicate with the world which, like it or no, uses mainly Windows.

I don't like to make names, but when I was in the first years at university I saw one of the fathers of Unix using Windows at his desktop comptuer !
At the moment I did not understand, and I was almost ashamed, "How can the professor use that crap ?" . The point is sometimes you need that crap.


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## aragats (Mar 26, 2018)

Oko said:


> no dual boot no VM, no nonsense


So why FreeBSD have *bhyve* as a part of its base system if it's nonsense?..


Oko said:


> For the record since early 2007 never had anything but OpenBSD on my desktops


I use FreeBSD on all my desktops for several years, so what? In real life we have to go to work and deal with other OSs. However, even on my work desktop I use FreeBSD, but also a "nonsense" Win7 running in bhyve as an official domain member workstation assigned to me by the IT department. I run another "nonsense" Debian as another bhyve guest since currently I work on an embedded Linux project and have to cross-compile stuff.
Any kind of fanaticism is not productive.


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## Oko (Mar 26, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> When I see this kind of writings I understand I am reading somebody working in academia.
> 
> If you do no work in academia you realize soon that you *need* Microsoft Office.


I do work in academia and what fits my needs arguably doesn't fit the needs of most casual computer users. In mathematics/applied-math, physics, astronomy (all subjects I worked)  since circa 1982 papers are written using TeX. My papers are edited using nvi().

I also run a rather large computing infrastructure used by 100+ AI/Machine learning researchers (few of them French). My lab's infrastructure is very heterogeneous. On large computational nodes/clusters I run Springdale Linux because among other things we do need TensorFlow, Caffe, CUDA, and MATLAB (we have all toolboxes). Our large file servers (think in couple hundred TB of data each) run FreeBSD. Some infrastructure servers like Gogs/Git, Jenkins, Hugo, MMonit, sftp run out of FreeBSD jails. Having our code on ZFS pools gives us a peace of mind. The beckend network servers run OpenBSD (think PF, DNS, LDAP,  OpenVPN, LibreNMS, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, syslog-ng, Squid, shell gateways). We have a dozen and so professional developers with Springdale workstations. Everyone else is free to use whatever they fancy.

For the record our main PR grant guys all run Windows including running it of Apple hardware. Oh we did have to virtualized bunch of our own proprietary machine learning analytical tools (Xen Dom0 of Alpine Linux).

If you care I will also tell you that I am very familiar with Pittsburgh Super Computing center and many other large computational clusters around the town. Pittsburgh Super Computing Center is for example built using OpenStack . Uber guys for example use FreeNAS for their data storage.




aragats said:


> So why FreeBSD have bhyve as a part of its base system if it's nonsense?..


I am guessing somebody thought that it is a good idea for a server OS to have available full type-2 hypervisor in the case you need to virtualize something. The fact that I use Xen Dom0 for such things should be telling you something. I fail to see how things like Bhyve and Xen would be useful to desktop users. I see the value of VirtualBox for a web developer.



aragats said:


> I use FreeBSD on all my desktops for several years, so what? In real life we have to go to work and deal with other OSs. However, even on my work desktop I use FreeBSD, but also a "nonsense" Win7 running in bhyve as an official domain member workstation assigned to me by the IT department. I run another "nonsense" Debian as another bhyve guest since currently I work on an embedded Linux project and have to cross-compile stuff.
> Any kind of fanaticism is not productive.


Please see above with home many different technologies I deal right now. I could care less what anyone uses on their computers. Technologies come and go. If you told me 1995 that Solaris desktop will be dead I would call you insane. I never really wanted to plug into a religious  discussion about suspend/resume or FreeBSD desktop (I which I tried long time ago). The point of my post is that people who don't run FreeBSD on the desktop (which is always a good idea if you running bunch of FreeBSD servers) have nothing to contribute to this tread (that includes me and the French gentlemen to whose post I replied). Dual booting OS or running it in the virtual machine also doesn't count  Anything short of that is dis-genuine towards people who are interested in FreeBSD desktop.


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## gnath (Mar 26, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> Magic happens here:
> sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3


May be a good idea to incorporat in the handbook also.


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## Phishfry (Mar 26, 2018)

For real world Laptop usage you want the setting in your sysctl.conf
`echo "hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3" >>  /etc/systl.conf`


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 26, 2018)

Oko said:


> The point of my post is that people who don't run FreeBSD on the desktop (which is always a good idea if you running bunch of FreeBSD servers) have nothing to contribute to this tread (that includes me and the French gentlemen to whose post I replied). Dual booting OS or running it in the virtual machine also doesn't count  Anything short of that is dis-genuine towards people who are interested in FreeBSD desktop.



I will answer only to this point because it may be useful to other people beginning on FreeBSD (Desktop) who may find themselves stuck in bag of hardware troubles. 

Take this example, which I know well since it is my case on the Desktop. 

1] I have two old Macbooks Pro. One runs OSX, inside that I have a VMWare Virtual Machine in which I run FreeBSD-11.1. It works well, it is 3-4 months I am using it intensely.

2] A couple of weeks ago I tried to wipe out OSX from the other Macbook and install only FreeBSD, on the metal this time.

3] The result was a wild world of hardware problems, starting from the fact the the system will not boot If I don't keep Alt pressed and select the main disk as bootable. Second: Wifi hardware is not recognized, Third: 3D acceleration is not working. 

4] All these problems are probably solvable, after 2 days of experiments I estimated I would need about 2-3 weeks to fix them, at least. 

5] I don't have 1 free month to spend on this issue.  

6] So, I need to use FreeBSD in a Virtual Machine, or leave this OS to people who have been more lucky with hardware. 

7] If somebody reamains stuck on a perceived unsolvable hardware problem I reccomend to follow the same path, don't give up, just use a Virtual Machine, I tried, it works (except 3d acceleration, if your host is OSX).


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## kpedersen (Mar 26, 2018)

I agree that sometimes native Microsoft is the only way. It is unfortunate that most of the world still obsesses over Windows. Luckily I can still just about get away with virtualizing the "other way". I.e run a FreeBSD host with Windows as a guest. Which is lucky because as mentioned before I simply refuse to connect a Windows machine to the internet. My only other choice would be to run Windows offline or faff with GNU/systemd. So I really have no other choice haha.

For the record I currently work around 50/50 in academia / commercial due to various knowledge transfer partnerships we run in our faculty and through contracting.

Below are some tricks I use:



Nicola Mingotti said:


> If you want to program Android you do it from Windows, Linux or OSX. AFAIK there is not solution to do it in BSD



At work we write a fair amount of Android programs but entirely in C/C++ (i.e native-activity) using simply a gcc-arm-android cross compiler. Rather than use the Linux / Windows binary from the android-ndk or Intel, I grab the one from FreeBSD ports lang/gnatdroid-armv7 or lang/gnatdroid-x86. The rest is just using the Jar tools from java/openjdk.



Nicola Mingotti said:


> If you do no work in academia you realize soon that you *need* Microsoft Office.



Much of academia is also centered around Microsoft Office too 
However this one can run inside a VM with no problems. Even better though however, *finally* the "Cloud" has actually been useful. Every company I work with stupidly uses Office 360. I can run that piece of crap in a firefox web browser quite happily like a normal conforming employee haha 

Camera di Commercio, MatLab, and USB device drivers should all work pretty well on Virtual Box (USB is limited to 1.1 speed on FreeBSD).

The CAD software can be an issue in a VM. I always thought 3D GPU passthrough was quite good on a Mac but perhaps not. It is not great on Windows either. GPU passthrough is currently at about DirectX 10 / OpenGL 3 capablilities. For much CAD software that is OK. Others you can either look at using Wine or simply render in software (i.e not too much of CAD is realtime).
My PhD is actually on an alternative method of GPU passthrough for this very reason. So stay tuned


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 26, 2018)

kpedersen said:


> It is unfortunate that most of the world still obsesses over Windows.


I'm sure I've talked about this before. The restaurant chain I'm a part of uses Windows for our POS system and we have nothing but non-stop issues and every "upgrade" or change to the software or the system is met with dread. I still fail to understand why serious business and professional people use Windows for mission critical operations any more than you would find NASA or CERN doing so.


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## aragats (Mar 26, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> I still fail to understand why serious business and professional people use Windows for mission critical operations


I guess, because that's what they learned from the very beginning, for most of them Computers ≈ Microsoft.
Even when they have to use a different OS, they still think in MS terms. E.g. I have to deal with a commercial device running embedded Linux, but its developers wrote the main application in C# and supply a huge amount of MS DLLs to run it. They think they can develop *only* in Visual Studio!


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## Crivens (Mar 26, 2018)

I hear you. Last year was spent with undoing what a bunch of inexperienced java developers did to an embedded C++ system. 

But back on topic, I think I will check again what process checkpointing requires. My preference would be to have a device to obtain snapshots of processes and maybe the complete system, which might then be loaded again.


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## Oko (Mar 26, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> people use Windows for mission critical operations any more than you would find NASA or CERN doing so.


Few NASA and CERN labs I am familiar with use OpenBSD for the firewalls and FreeNAS for file servers. Cern is heavily vested in OpenStack which is a pile of crap IMHO. I don't know enough about the architecture of NASA infrastructure to speak. When it comes to computing it is all Red Hat and Ubuntu. More Red Hat on larger clusters more Ubuntu on the individual smaller machines.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 26, 2018)

kpedersen said:


> ...  Luckily I can still just about get away with virtualizing the "other way". I.e run a FreeBSD host with Windows as a guest.



Oh, if you can do that, super, almost all problems are solved, except, as you mention, the CAD issue.



kpedersen said:


> For the record I currently work around 50/50 in academia / commercial due to various knowledge transfer partnerships we run in our faculty and through contracting.



So did I, for years, but not currently




kpedersen said:


> At work we write a fair amount of Android programs but entirely in C/C++  ...



This surprises me, I ruled out C++ from the beginning, there are already a lot of issues in compatibility between different kind of devices sticking to Java.
So I have two questions for you,
1] For what reasons did your group decide to use C++ for development ?
2] Do you know if it possible, or somebody tried successfully to run Android Studio in BSD ? I found only this negative reference. By now, when I need Android Studio I use OSX. 



kpedersen said:


> Even better though however, *finally* the "Cloud" has actually been useful. Every company I work with stupidly uses Office 360. I can run that piece of crap in a firefox web browser quite happily like a normal conforming employee haha



AFAIK, this is unfortunately not true. OSX MS Office and Office 360 they are not fully functional MS Office. They lack ability to program in VBA. I did some programming in VBA for Excel a few years ago.



kpedersen said:


> My PhD is actually on an alternative method of GPU passthrough for this very reason. So stay tuned



Good luck for your Phd ! I finished mine a few years ago


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 26, 2018)

OT.

*Why does Windows still exist ?*

*BIG CAVEAT,* some of these things are facts, some are simply things I am convinced to be true, other are "voices" I collected over the year Don't take this stuff too much seriously !!! 

1] Windows comes pre-installed on hardware. Very important, that ensures that your computer should work out of the box !  I read somewhere (I don't know if it is true) that Microsoft pushes hardware producers not to pre-install Linux (or other) in their machines. Indeed, you don't see many around ! 

(again i don't know if this stuff is true) 
Another example of how Microsoft is using its power. I asked one day to a CAD seller why the hell their company was not building an image for OSX. He told me, that as far as he knows, they started to move in that direction but in response, Microsoft started to write its own CAD !  So the CAD company pissed in its pants and stopped immediately the move toward OSX.

2] Windows was first to arrive in people hands. Something like Facebook, it arrived first, it is very difficult for competitors.

3] Windows is just a vector for applications. Non-programmers, don't buy a computer for Windows, they buy it for Word, to (e.g.) type there their Master thesis. (except a few rare cases in a few parts of Science, heavily math related subjects, where LaTeX is the de facto standard) . 

4] The "who do i sue?" factor. Company likes to write contracts and if something does not work as expected they go to the lawyer. 

5]  Microsoft is very good at placing its software to Engineering faculties.
Once you trained a generation of Engineers you are pretty much sure 99% of products will be built with those tools. 

5.1] Microsoft is very good at "convincing" governments. Take for example
the "European Computer Driving License" ! 

6] The "substitution principle". Would you hire an extremely talented computer programmer or Unix system manager for whom you know well that in your geographical are it is almost impossible to find a substitute ?  Probably not, you 
need  to ensure continuity and support to your products. 

In Microsoft world everybody can be changed with somebody else, there are not sh/csh/bash/ksh scripts nor complex configuration files, to configure their servers you just need to know where to click.  
[ok, here I am boldly oversimplifying, I hardly spent more than 3 hours of my life configuring Windows servers, so actually i don't know if this is true]


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 26, 2018)

Oko My point was that you won't find Windows on the next Mars rover.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 26, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Oko My point was that you won't find Windows on the next Mars rover.



That would be funny, the first thing Martians would see of our culture would be the "blue screen of death" ... At least, they would come to Earth trained for our ATM machines


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## kpedersen (Mar 26, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> This surprises me, I ruled out C++ from the beginning, there are already a lot of issues in compatibility between different kind of devices sticking to Java.
> So I have two questions for you,
> 1] For what reasons did your group decide to use C++ for development ?
> 2] Do you know if it possible, or somebody tried successfully to run Android Studio in BSD ? I found only this negative reference. By now, when I need Android Studio I use OSX.


I must admit I don't find the large number of different android devices to be a problem. At the end of the day there have been far more different kinds of i386, amd64, PPC, etc.. devices, GPUs and monitors than phones and we all know that desktop software is "easy" to make. Screen size and GPU support (OpenGL|ES / OpenGL|ES2) is perhaps the only annoyance I face in Android and the solution to that makes no different whether Java or C++.
I think where we find it easier is that we deal with OpenGL and UNIX sockets directly (for entertainment software), perhaps if we had to use the Java GUI system or interface with more complex Java libraries, C++ would become awkward.
Android's old ant and gradle build systems are also a big no-no. They break / change too much. We try to stick to standard Makefiles and (in rare instances cmake). Androids awkward tooling (Eclipse CDT and IMO Android Studio) I feel is one of the only reasons why people find Android development any harder than Linux (same goes for iOS and Xcode with Objective-C++ I suppose)
We are looking at using Qt for Android for our next project (again so we can avoid Java). Perhaps I will have good experience to tell you in a few months 




Nicola Mingotti said:


> AFAIK, this is unfortunately not true. OSX MS Office and Office 360 they are not fully functional MS Office. They lack ability to program in VBA. I did some programming in VBA for Excel a few years ago.


Ah that is true. VBA has luckily not reared its ugly head for quite a few years now. I think it is because the businesses I work with know it doesn't work on Office 365 haha. I am not complaining.



Nicola Mingotti said:


> Good luck for your Phd ! I finished mine a few years ago


Heh congrats. Mine is dragging on and on


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## Oko (Mar 26, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Oko My point was that you won't find Windows on the next Mars rover.


Let me run upstairs and make sure they are not doing something stupid


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## ralphbsz (Mar 26, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> Why does Windows still exist ?


You forgot the most important factor: It works without any hassle or effort for normal everyday consumer tasks.  Go to a discount store, or to a computer store, buy a computer, take it home.  If it has Windows or Mac OS installed, it will immediately work, without any installation hassles, and with minimal setup that you are guided through.  If it is a laptop (and nearly all computers are today), you can close the lid, put it in your bag, take it to work, open the lid, and it will work again.  It might prompt you for what wireless network to use, and to enter the password.  We all argue here how to get suspend to even work on FreeBSD, and setting up Wireless on Debian is a nasty difficult task (BTDT), while on Windows and MacOS one simply takes these things for granted.

Need a web browser?  Click on it.  If it has a CD or DVD drive and you want to watch something: stick it in, it works.  Want to look at pictures from the digital camera?  Take the SD card (CF card, ...) out of the camera, plug it into the laptop (probably with a little USB adaptor), and you have the pictures.  And both Microsoft and Apple will make it easy to upload the pictures to your cloud account.

Need to work on office documents, in a fashion that's 100% compatible with the software that has 95% market share?  Pay about $100 (plus or minus), wait for the download to finish, and you have MS Office installed.  Done.  Again, minimal hassle.

In a nutshell, the reason Windows and MacOS dominate consumer computers (and I count myself as a "consumer" when it comes to the machine that is currently sitting on my lap): they are easy to use, all the way through the lifecycle starting with buying the device in the store.



> 3] Windows is just a vector for applications. Non-programmers, don't buy a computer for Windows, they buy it for Word, to (e.g.) type there their Master thesis.


And Word (and Excel and Powerpoint) are not the only issue here.  At least for MS Office, you have the choice between Windows and MacOS.  If you are into serious diagrams, Visio is the undisputed market leader, and that forces you into running Windows.  And many minor applications only exists in Windows version, for example, the software required to configure and manage PCS UPB light switches (a successor technology to X-10), or the software configuration utility for Omaga Engineering industrial controllers.  When it comes to unusual and rare engineering and scientific applications (typically very expensive), all software is available for Windows, about a third or half is available for the Mac, and a very small fraction is available for Linux, and I have yet to see FreeBSD specific ports.  This is the reality of having to use specific software.

Now, if all you want to do is browse the web, write office-style documents (ignoring 100% compatibility with Word/Excel/Powerpoint format), and not run outside software, then this argument doesn't apply.



> 5]  Microsoft is very good at placing its software to Engineering faculties.
> ...
> 5.1] Microsoft is very good at "convincing" governments. Take for example the "European Computer Driving License" !



Microsoft doesn't have to do any convincing or placing.  The fact that it has about 90% market share on the desktop does all the convincing automatically.

The problem with the proposal that Linux (or FOSS in general) could achieve world domination on the desktop is: In order to achieve world domination, you have to first achieve world domination.  Microsoft got there first, and the feedback mechanism that rewards the market leader makes sure it remains in the dominating position.  Apple managed to carve out a small niche, through a combination of unbelievably good engineering and relentless effort to put out the best product, and a small but fierce community of fan-boy consumers, and the admission that its niche is and remains small (and profitable).  Mac OS is not after world domination, they aren't stupid enough to try.  On the desktop, nobody else has a chance for the foreseeable future.



> In Microsoft world everybody can be changed with somebody else, there are not sh/csh/bash/ksh scripts nor complex configuration files, to configure their servers you just need to know where to click.
> [ok, here I am boldly oversimplifying, I hardly spent more than 3 hours of my life configuring Windows servers, so actually i don't know if this is true]


While it is true that administering individual computers and small workgroups using Microsoft products is much easier, by the time you get to large installations that becomes untrue.  For example, I've heard horror stories about setting up Active Directory and integrating it with a corporate LDAP.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 26, 2018)

Oko said:


> I don't go to BSD and Linux conferences often but when I go one remarkable think about OpenBSD guys is that we eat our own dog food. I have never meet an OpenBSD developer or a power user like myself whose laptop was not running only OpenBSD (no dual boot no VM, no nonsense, nada, just pure OpenBSD UNIX). All of us use OpenBSD to give presentations with VGA, DVI, HDMI projectors.


This is what I really dislike very much about FreeBSD community, many of them are "proud macos users" ,
also they use Шindow$ and Macos®© for their presentations... It is such a *shame* IMHO. When I see such things,
I'm shocked very much, they aren't able to find the man who can configure nice WM on FreeBSD???
Or they just forgot how to use it nowadays, because macos is easier to use?
So maybe there is a need to create a thread with little "how to" for them, somewhere here, on FreeBSD forums? 

I don't use OpenBSD on my desktop just because there is no wine version for OpenBSD,
but sometimes I like to play in few favorite old windows games.
The same thing is also with DragonFlyBSD, no wine version (and no nvidia drivers as well).
NetBSD isn't bad, it has its wine version (pretty old, last time I checked it was 1.6 and no nvidia drivers as well),
also it isn't very stable IMO, as well as DragonFlyBSD.

The most funny thing is that FreeBSD is best for desktops from all BSD-s, when comparing with GNU/Linux.


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## kpedersen (Mar 26, 2018)

I don't mind that consumers use Windows. However it is annoying when admins, developers and power users *love* windows so much that they are completely blinded for better solutions. You see it a lot with other products too for example:

Visual Studio - Some of my students kick and scream if they have to use anything else. I even had one start to cry whilst mumbling "Visual Studio" when I announced that assignments had to use cmake. Some developers don't even know that you can develop C++ programs using anything else.
Unity - Game makers fricking love this before they have even used it. Some will even start a large scale project with this before even looking at the requirements to see if Unity even supports the darn platform they need to build for. All because of smart marketing.
Google hangouts, Slack, discord, whatsapp - All terrible implementations that disappear each year and yet they are always more advertised than IRC.
When you mention alternatives, they look at you and either arrogantly say, oh that's "too old school" or no we need to use "professional products".

And yet Windows is designed for consumers, Visual Studio up until recently could only output code for consumer platforms, Unity has never been used in a AAA commercial game and things like Slack cannot even be hosted internally on an enterprise network. All consumer junk


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 26, 2018)

ILUXA said:


> This is what I really dislike very much about FreeBSD community, many of them are "proud macos users"


Mac OSX is Unix. Mac hardware is also very good. Installing FreeBSD on a Mac is the best of both worlds unless you want to build your own. It's why there is a CERN presentation photo on the internet showing a room full of Mac notebooks.


ILUXA said:


> So maybe there is a need to create a thread with little "how to" for them, somewhere here, on FreeBSD forums?


There are several. Just learn how to use the search button at the top. It isn't hard. Especially for the technically adept among us whose sole purpose in owning a computer isn't to play games and can install a WM without a HOWTO.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 26, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Mac hardware is also very good


Where did you see something about "mac hardware" in my previous post???
Every piece of hardware is OK until it is working fine IMO.
I wrote about macos - an operating system, that it is in use by many members of FreeBSD team, also some of them are macos fanatics.
Also they use it (and sometimes even Windows) on their presentations, meetings, etc. (It is really true, try to watch some FreeBSD members interviews, or some presentations, meetings, etc on youtube.)

And in my personal opinion it isn't great, to develop one fully working operating system, but to use completely different OS almost everywhere.

PLEASE, don't twist my words.

Also, last my quote in your post was just a joke, I also added smile there, which was removed by you while you quoted my post.



drhowarddrfine said:


> technically adept among us whose sole purpose in owning a computer isn't to play games and can install a …



And yes, I don't think that to play games on your desktop computer is something bad, it is pretty OK IMO,
but maybe such superb "technically adepts" like you don't play games, I don't know, but I don't care, if to be honest.




drhowarddrfine said:


> Mac OSX is Unix.


EulerOS from Huawei (it is a chinese RedHat based GNU/Linux distro ) is also certified like macOS as "UNIX 03". And what???
It makes it better operating system? No, it is just a matter of money.











BTW, why they don't use EulerOS on FreeBSD presentations instead of macOS, at least it is not proprietary, it seems


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## Eric A. Borisch (Mar 27, 2018)

We’ve been through this before. FreeBSD (“the power to serve”) is largely focused on being a server operating system. Much like many people may have a sports car for the weekend and a van for the soccer game, and and maybe even a truck for deliveries, operating systems don’t need to be one size fits all.

A FreeBSD developer using a Mac laptop (which has lots of ~FreeBSD guts) system shouldn’t be surprising or upsetting. Yes, you can run a FreeBSD desktop or laptop (I have one of each) but let’s not complain about developers using whatever they find makes them most productive.

If you want a (more) desktop-focused FreeBSD, you’re in luck: https://trueos.org/


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 27, 2018)

Eric A. Borisch said:


> https://trueos.org/


Unfortunately it is unusable IMO.






And while definition of "The FreeBSD Project" includes word "desktops", 
(nobody wrote there "use macOS instead") personally I really do not understand why it is not in use
by its developers, on their presentations, meetings etc, while it is really pretty easy to do so,
5 minutes are only needed to install Xorg and WM.

My guess it is because FreeBSD project is heavily influenced by Apple, 
and that guys aren't interested in Free desktop OS-es, like FreeBSD or GNU/Linux are.
And I really dislike this situation very much, because I like FreeBSD much
and I hate such evil, ugly, disgusting moneymaking corporations like Apple and Microsoft.
There is no big difference between macOS and Windows IMHO, both are proprietary OS-es for masses.

For example, try to connect your iphone to FreeBSD (or to any other Free OS) laptop and try to upload some music,
it is impossible, why? Because Apple (as Adobe, for example) do not support their products on Free operating systems.
Why? I think it is obvious why.


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## shkhln (Mar 27, 2018)

Eric A. Borisch said:


> If you want a (more) desktop-focused FreeBSD, you’re in luck: https://trueos.org/


Do they have working suspend/resume (title of this thread)? Also, pretentious name and awful logo.



ILUXA said:


> The same thing is also with DragonFlyBSD, no wine version.



There won't be, no 32-bit compatibility in the kernel.


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## ralphbsz (Mar 27, 2018)

We've been over this multiple times now.  You are refusing to let reality interfere with your fantasy world and fanaticism.



ILUXA said:


> ...I really do not understand why it is not in use by its developers, on their presentations, meetings etc, while it is really pretty easy to do so, 5 minutes are only needed to install Xorg and WM.



I don't know, I'm not a FreeBSD developer.  My educated guess is: They use whatever desktop OS they are most productive with.  Would you prefer that they use something they are less productive with?  Do you want a FreeBSD developer waste his time installing a desktop OS he doesn't actually wish to run?  Just to make a political point, or just to make a fan-boy happy?



> My guess it is because FreeBSD project is heavily influenced by Apple,



You keep spouting that nonsense, without offering any evidence for it to be true.  Are there a lot of FreeBSD committers and developers that are Apple employees?  Is Apple paying a lot of the expenses of the FreeBSD foundation?  Do lot of developers get orders from Apple?  None of those things are true.



> And I really dislike this situation very much, because I like FreeBSD much


Then please stop spreading lies about it.



> For example, try to connect your iphone to FreeBSD (or to any other Free OS) laptop and try to upload some music,
> it is impossible, why? Because Apple (as Adobe, for example) do not support their products on Free operating systems.
> Why? I think it is obvious why.


Yes, it is obvious.  If you look at the market share for desktop operating systems, all free operating systems together are about 1% or so.  Of that, the lion's share is Linux.  The market share of FreeBSD on the desktop is a tiny fraction of a percent.  It is simply not worth it for a corporation (in particular for one such as Apple, which is interested in its products to be close to perfection) to release its consumer software (such as iTunes) in FreeBSD versions.  Note that iTunes is available for Windows ... not because Apple loves Microsoft (nothing could be further from the truth), but because Windows has a big market share on the desktop (around 90%).

If you think Apple is directly benefiting from current FreeBSD development, think again.  As far as I know, Apple has stopped taking kernel code from the *BSD branches somewhere in the mid-1990s.  That's a long time ago.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 27, 2018)

I don't want to argue with you, it is not my point, all what I wrote — is only my personal opinion. 
My point was, that it will looks much better, if FreeBSD will be used on FreeBSD events IMHO, 
and not macOS, because for now such FreeBSD events (presentations, meetings, etc),
or interviews with some FreeBSD developers, *advertise macOS and not FreeBSD*.
And advertising is the engine of trade, what is pretty good for Apple. I'm quiting this thread
because I've already wrote all that I wanted to say.

P.S.:


ralphbsz said:


> all free operating systems together are about 1% or so


It will never change if every company will ignore such operating systems.


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 27, 2018)

ILUXA said:


> My guess it is because FreeBSD project is heavily influenced by Apple


That would be a pretty outrageous guess on your part. Particularly since it is Apple's OSX that includes portions of FreeBSD's user space inside.


ILUXA said:


> I hate such evil, ugly, disgusting moneymaking corporations like Apple and Microsoft.


That is a socialist viewpoint. One needs a strong reason to create and motivate a company to do large things and money is the biggest motivator in a capitalist society but that will be the end of my political commentary. You can't make everyone happy with a mass produced product and any attempt at doing so will doom it to failure.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Mar 27, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> That is a socialist viewpoint.


If you don't like Apple and Microsoft, doesn't mean you're a communist, at least in my country 
It is just two ugly companies, which produce ugly goods IMHO. For example, I like Nike,
they produce nice air force 1 trainers  with help from hungry vietnam kids


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## Snurg (Mar 27, 2018)

Crivens said:


> Suspend is a hit&miss, sadly.
> Maybe we need a better infra structure to debug it?





Crivens said:


> But back on topic, I think I will check again what process checkpointing requires. My preference would be to have a device to obtain snapshots of processes and maybe the complete system, which might then be loaded again.


Maelstorm made a very good proposal in 2012.
However, there was little forthcoming from the core devs, so he had to mothball the project.

I would be more than willing to join an interest group of people interested in making suspend/resume work on FreeBSD.
But I guess there would be needed more people like you that are not "outsiders" to the developers, or even put under moderation/pre-ban as evil guys like me, just to have a critical mass.



Oko said:


> ...remarkable about OpenBSD guys is that we eat our own dog food. I have never meet an OpenBSD developer or a power user like myself whose laptop was not running only OpenBSD (no dual boot no VM, no nonsense, nada, just pure OpenBSD UNIX). All of us use OpenBSD to give presentations with VGA, DVI, HDMI projectors.


Indeed - if the FreeBSD devs would eat their own dog food and use their OS on bare metal instead only in VMs, the UX on Mac hardware won't be that horrible like Nicola Mingotti described very well.
The reason why I switched to Linux instead of OpenBSD for desktop use are: no ZFS, in parts very old software base (KDE on OpenBSD is still 3.5...), no nouveau, Bluetooth and all that funky stuff.



Nicola Mingotti said:


> It all depends on the Linux, probably one of the few distribution putting a lot of attention to the Desktop experience is Ubuntu. In Debian, you will have troubles, and you will need to spend a lot of days in chats, and mixed resources reading, and doing a lot of try&pray undocumented stuff.


Ubuntu is good, of course. But I feel it is overdoing, damaging ones' configuration in the attempt to be helpful. I tried it out a few years ago, but it hibernates less reliably than Debian.

So I installed Debian, with all DMs it offered checked, and SDDM as login manager (because systemd loves it).
Then I disabled graphical login and autoupgrade, installed FVWM, upgraded to kernel 4.15.4, installed zfs-initramfs (consider that as zfs meta package) and set up ZFS pool. Then copied data over from FreeBSD machine. I have made small (100GB) system partition using ext4 and separate boot partition easy to backup as whole (just dd it to other disk or other identical partition and change its label+UUID, as makeshift alternative to boot environments).
Hibernate works excellently with systemctl hibernate (yes, systemd...)
It is quite easy, but this is probably because I have been using Linux for desktop long time already until suspend/resume was introduced on FreeBSD.



Nicola Mingotti said:


> You many need ...  software wich is ONLY for Windows.


I have a Windows HDD which I use for firmware updating, just plug it in and run the updater, and remove it afterwards.
So it's true that everybody needs Windows, including me 
By the way, hibernate isn't enabled by default even on Windows. Just because of all those exotic hardware that can break it.


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## dch (Apr 5, 2018)

wrt 22, I'm using firefox daily & continuously, and iridium (keeping work and general stuff separate), on laptop & desktop both running 12.0-CURRENT, with no issues.
I think webrtc is the only thing that I'd *really* like to work in a browser these days. So what is "unstable" for you?

For power, https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption has helped me a lot. My laptop gets ~8h with either scfb or intel graphics i915kms drivers running, I notice that wifi & screen brightness are the 2 remaining biggest impacts.  What settings have you tried? this is more than enough for my general usage.

suspend/resume BTW works perfectly for me for > 1 year, albeit using 12.0-CURRENT to get working i915kms drivers, apart from a breakage somewhere after r330408 that I am currently too busy to hunt down exactly where it is but I'll get there eventually.


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## Snurg (Apr 7, 2018)

dch
The Intel 915 driver works fine with sleep (S3 suspend). Which is the reason why the thinkpads work fine with FreeBSD.
What is annoying is the fact that there are no Intel graphics cards. It's all onboard stuff.

Nvidia -> broken by vt/vesa.ko since the introduction of the latter. When removing vt/vesa from kernel, wakeup failed with newer nvidia drivers, and never was really reliable. Resuming would fail once in every ~10 restarts.  If virtualbox is running, it always fails.
radeon -> tried once, bad experience, just too many issues, including resume not to work.

For my part, I am very satisfied with having migrated to Linux on my main workstation. _systemctl hibernate_ (S4 suspend) just works, no matter whether vbox is running (nvidia card).
But I'd go back to FreeBSD the day when there is a working hibernate. (Even in spite of the three-letter thing which never must be called by name to avoid to be put under moderation on this forum.)


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## Beastie7 (Apr 7, 2018)

s5e said:


> Few times a year I test FreeBSD with my laptop and every time there's same fault. FreeBSD do not resume from suspend.
> This makes FreeBSD unusable with laptops and it stays server OS forever.



Yes.



Snurg said:


> Maelstorm made a very good proposal in 2012.
> *However, there was little forthcoming from the core devs*, so he had to mothball the project.



This says it all folks. Time to move on.


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## PMc (Apr 7, 2018)

Just tried to read this thread.
I don't understand one point: You're talking "desktop", while actually you seem to say "laptop".
FBSD works fine on desktop (even S3 works flawlessly), and there have been big efforts in the past to make this possible (e.g. getting the intel embedded graphics to work).
Laptop is a different thing, everything is nonstandard there and intended to be fixed by the BIOS and included drivers. Once I considered to install FBSD on laptop, but then decided it's not worth the effort.

If I were to buy a laptop now, I probably would choose Apple (at least thats what I recommend to others). These guys did the one thing that makes sense (which, btw, anybody of You could have done as well): they took the berkeley stuff and wrote the missing GUI in a way like the typical stupid, snobbish consumer does expect it.


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## freebsdinator (Jul 28, 2018)

ILUXA said:


> Unfortunately, if you use Nvidia GPU with FreeBSD, suspend won't work for you.
> 
> 
> The only possibility to have a working suspend on FreeBSD, is to use crappy Intel integrated graphics.
> I'm not sure about AMD, because I've never tried to use it.



I've had good luck with NVIDIA with one trick. When you're in X, go to the command with ctrl-alt-f1. Close the lid then it will suspend. When it's time to resume, open the lid, hit ctrl alt f9 to go back to X. It will reset the video.

I've only done this on one machine using the legacy NVIDIA driver.


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## wesbl (Aug 13, 2018)

I7 7700 Integrated graphics on a fanless desktop built by me.

Suspend seems to work but after wake I have glitches and I can't see anything.
The desktop still working, I can run commands but I see only a fullscreen rainbow glich.

Any advice? Thanks


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