# TrueOS: anyone using it on a laptop?



## lonestar (Dec 17, 2017)

I've been running FreeBSD on a Thinkpad laptop for over a year now. It works exactly as advertised. FreeBSD has never claimed to offer a desktop-focused experience, so I don't expect it to offer one and don't consider it a fault when it doesn't. 

I just stumbled upon a release announcement for TrueOS, and it appears that team is actually trying to serve its nominal purpose now - by integrating more features for graphics and wireless driver improvements, rather than simply slapping a desktop environment over vanilla FreeBSD. 

While it's tempting to try it again, I'm hoping to get some anecdotal feedback from others because my previous experiences (when it was still PC-BSD) have been terrible. 

So, if anyone has installed this on a laptop in the last 6 months or so, please share your experiences.


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## Snurg (Dec 17, 2017)

I have used PC-BSD for almost 1.5 years on my laptop until some time recently.
The most terrible problems I had with PC-BSD were caused by their "pc-updatemanager" that runs every night on PC-BSD.

I got:
-damaged grub blocks
-destroyed boot environments
-zfs filesystem filled up 100%, 0 byte left (a very bad situation on zfs because in this case you cannot use rm anymore, it fails due to insufficient space)

These kinds of damages are not trivial to fix, partially even need physical access to the computer to use an emergency boot medium.
*Thus, if TrueOS still contains that "pc-updatemanager", I won't recommend anybody to use it for production.*

Using PCBSD or TrueOS might save a few hours to install/configure because of its preconfiguration.
But in the end it has cost me much more time, due to the need to fix these things listed above.


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## lonestar (Dec 17, 2017)

Snurg said:


> I have used PC-BSD for almost 1.5 years on my laptop until some time recently.
> The most terrible problems I had with PC-BSD were caused by their "pc-updatemanager" that runs every night on PC-BSD.



In fact I do recall the update process being a major problem when I tried to use it. 



> Using PCBSD or TrueOS might save a few hours to install/configure because of its preconfiguration.



I don't even care about the pre-configuration thing, it's barely even a benefit. The main benefit I see is their tracking of a branch with more frequent updates without having to build source each time. 

But yeah, if they can't get the update process right, that defeats the whole purpose.


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## vermaden (Dec 17, 2017)

lonestar said:


> I just stumbled upon a release announcement for TrueOS, and it appears that team is actually trying to serve its nominal purpose now - by integrating more features for graphics and wireless driver improvements, rather than simply slapping a desktop environment over vanilla FreeBSD.



TrueOS uses FreeBSD 12-CURRENT, does that makes You feel more 'stable'? 

Besides that, it uses OpenRC instead of well tested FreeBSD rc, does that feel more 'stable'? 

I have read MANY, MANY TIMES from the PC-BSD team, or from newer name - TrueOS team that now its the best desktop experience on BSD systems, and everytime I try their 'experience' I fell cheated.

Because everytime I boot/install that PC-BSD/TrueOS and compare it to Linux Mint or other desktop Linux distro, PC-BSD/TrueOS fells amateur/unfinished/bugged at least, because everytime you get back to Linux Mint, it really is a desktop distro, while PC-BSD/TrueOS aspires to be one, while it isnt.

Any big anouncement will not change that.

Its also big FreeBSD problem, because if bugs like these - https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=199872 - unsolved for YEARS, the desktop BSD system is not possible, this exact bug crashes EVERY FILE MANAGER upon directory deletion when You first entered that directory, nautilus/caja/thunar/pcmanfm/... You name it ...

There is also GhostBSD which at least looks nice (MATE), because Lumina is just plain fscking ugly as hell.

If You want to have 'desktop BSD', then DOING IT YOURSELF is the best way to go, unfortunately.


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## lonestar (Dec 17, 2017)

vermaden said:


> I have read MANY, MANY TIMES from the PC-BSD team, or from newer name - TrueOS team that now its the best desktop experience on BSD systems, and everytime I try their 'experience' I fell cheated.



That's been my experience, and that's what I suspected. 



> If You want to have 'desktop BSD', then DOING IT YOURSELF is the best way to go, unfortunately.



That's what I've done, it's not hard to install x and a desktop/window manager. And my hardware works. I thought maybe there could be some improvements from newer commits, understanding there would be _some_ level of stability sacrifice. I don't run any mission critical stuff on this laptop. But at the same time, I don't want the stability to be at nightmare levels.


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## Snurg (Dec 17, 2017)

vermaden
I agree. Nobody on the world needs"Me too" projects like buggy pc-updatemanager or ugly Lumina more urgently than athlete's foot.

"True" OS is just marketing.

This is sad because the Moore brothers are competent to do actual useful work and give back something to the FreeBSD community.
For example concentrating on developing an easy-to-use systemadministration GUI framework.
And fixing the desktop-related glibby things.

Instead of giving people bad impression about FreeBSD by presenting (potentially) instable versions as "the true OS".


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## Sensucht94 (Dec 17, 2017)

For anyone interested, the new DesktopBSD release, announced in 2016, is available as Alpha on sourceforge, under the name of DesktopBSD Next. Tried the i3wm-version ISO a while ago on QEMU and it looked promising


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## Snurg (Dec 17, 2017)

lonestar said:


> I thought maybe there could be some improvements from newer commits, understanding there would be _some_ level of stability sacrifice. I don't run any mission critical stuff on this laptop. But at the same time, I don't want the stability to be at nightmare levels.


This sounds as if you might like to change pkg from "quarterly" to "latest" repos:

...in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf:

```
url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest"
```
(This is not from me. Source is here, credit goes to aragats.)


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 17, 2017)

Snurg said:


> Instead of giving people bad impression about FreeBSD by presenting (potentially) instable versions as "the true OS".



Brother, you don't know the half of it.

I helped beta test PC-BSD and was doing so when they implemented what I remember to be security/fwbuilder as a front-end to the pf firewall. (Edit: Firewall Manager GUI in PC-BSD 9.0) It was a failure easily shown by substituting my pf.conf file for theirs and running security/nmap on both. This was when they were touting it as a server, no less.

The apparent lack of concern or response to the issue, and what seemed to me as a move toward making PC-BSD the Windows of the BSD world, was what caused me to move to vanilla FreeBSD and I have never regretted it.

All that is old news, and Dru Lavigne and the Moore brothers are fine people IMO, but from what I continue to read the same problems with PC-BSD/TrueOS still exist to a degree. The introduction of automatic updates doesn't do much for me either.


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## Oko (Dec 18, 2017)

vermaden said:


> TrueOS uses FreeBSD 12-CURRENT, does that makes You feel more 'stable'?
> 
> Besides that, it uses OpenRC instead of well tested FreeBSD rc, does that feel more 'stable'?
> 
> ...


Just to add to this wonderful write up by Vermaden. The first time I played with PC-BSD version 1.3 was in March of 2007. I have a very low registration number on their now locked forum. Although I have never used much as a desktop system I deployed half dozen TrueOS 10.0 (server version of PC-BSD) in the January of 2014 (replaced with vanilla FreeBSD 11.0 in Summer of 2017). At that time I just like Michael Lucas who wrote a blog post (PC-BSD better FreeBSD than FreeBSD) I came to believe that PC-BSD (TrueOS was a server version) is better production system than FreeBSD. Some of the things I pointed out as better were:


Installer (Z mirror  for the root)
pc-sysinstall script and customizable configuration files are superior for automatic or customized installation to vanilla FreeBSD installer.
boot environments/snapshots (beadm)
update/upgrade manager
out of box integration of boot loader with beadm
Life Preserver (management tool for ZFS snapshots and replication)
the Warden (Jail management) now replaced with iocage
sane[r] defaults
LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL
Better tested quarterly released stable packages
Concurrently with TrueOS I also deployed two 9.2.1.9 FreeNAS file servers which are still in production almost 4 years latter.

From a believer I came to resent anything related to IXSystem and flat out hater of everything related to these guys. I even turn down 6 digit job offer in spring of 2017 when I learned that I was suppose to babysit  bunch of FreeNAS servers.

Where to start. Maybe from the moment IXSystem decided to drop support for 10.xxx PC-BSD in the form of regular quarterly package update releases and instead of releasing PC-BSD 11.00 with a smooth upgrading path from 10.xxx to 11.xxx they decided to create TrueOS desktop based of unstable moving target 12.xxx branch of FreeBSD. There are some indication prior to it that IXSystems might do such thing to unpaid "customers".

Their Jail management system Warden was replaced without migration to path with the original iocage. Even prior to it Warden was very buggy but instead of fixing it the main developer put lot of time into developing Lumina Desktop (Fluxbox in disguise). Then just when iocage reach sweet spot in the term of the usability they hired off original developer made him kill the project and rewrite iocage in Python for IXSystems internal needs. Needles to say iocage-py is the worst possible choice of half dozen or so ZFS+Jail management tools available.

Similar story with Life Preserver (between both Warden and Life Preserver were available on vanilla FreeBSD via PC-BSD-utils port). I shortly replaced Life Preserver with zfsnap and then with zfsnap2.

LDAP authentication and authorization on PC-BSD was non-functional due to infamous customization and hidden PC-BSD configuration options.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.9 did not fare much better. FreeNAS Corral release fiasco is the greatest embarrassment in BSDs history second to none. They BS about dockers and "Linux Jails" is the testament to incompetence.

Ever since PC-BSD came to umbrella of IXSystems it was treated as a test bed technology preview for TrueNAS. I was OK with it as CentOS in now playing similar role to Red Hat (Fedora is flat out unstable test bed equivalent to current TrueOS).


Vermaden mentioned OpenRC. I am using OpenRC on the Alpine Linux (Xen Dom0) so that fact in its own right would not disqualify TrueOS and the system is production stable (probably not as stable as FreeBSD rc system).

Long story short people unless you have money to pay for TrueNAS storage appliance (they are 20-30% more expensive than vanilla SuperMicro servers which I use) don't bother with it. Speaking of desktop my attitude is that running FreeBSD desktop is the best way to learn this OS and must for a system admin who is running bunch of FreeBSD based servers. If you goal is just to have quick working system the best way to run UNIX is to purchase it from Apple pre-installed with OS X. Sorry plain and simple OS X is the UNIX for wide masses.


Just in the case people think I completely lost the sense of reality. I do realize that IXSystems is a profit seeking entity and are under no obligation to release anything back to FreeBSD community. I have a great personal admiration for  Dru Lavigne who has turn a very difficult life situation 180 degrees around a made a great carrier out of her ability to learn things quickly on her own. She is second only to Michal Lucas and perhaps Dan Langille in the terms of useful FreeBSD documents created. I am not a big fan of Moore brothers although they were very cordial in all personal interactions.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 18, 2017)

This is me in the PC-BSD forums:

Weixiong
Member
06-20-2005, 10:17 AM


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## lonestar (Dec 18, 2017)

Oko said:


> Speaking of desktop my attitude is that running FreeBSD desktop is the best way to learn this OS and must for a system admin who is running bunch of FreeBSD based servers. If you goal is just to have quick working system the best way to run UNIX is to purchase it from Apple pre-installed with OS X. Sorry plain and simple OS X is the UNIX for wide masses.



I use both, and I agree. 

We use OS X at work and I own a MacBook Pro. Knowing my way around a BSD system enough to solve problems and set up a desktop is a point of interest for me, and it has helped quite a bit at work too. In itself, developing node.js apps doesn't require a lot of UNIX knowledge, but in some ancillary areas it certainly helps.


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## vermaden (Dec 18, 2017)

Oko said:
			
		

> Even prior to it Warden was very buggy but instead of fixing it the main developer put lot of time into developing Lumina Desktop (Fluxbox in disguise).



Like TrueOS/PC-BSD is 'bad' marketing for FreeBSD, this Lumina 'look' is bad advertisement for Fluxbox. Fluxbox can be configured to look VERY NICE while Limina developers choose otherwise, just check some of these: https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/139/ord/top/



			
				Oko said:
			
		

> Vermaden mentioned OpenRC. I am using OpenRC on the Alpine Linux (Xen Dom0) so that fact in its own right would not disqualify TrueOS and the system is production stable (probably not as stable as FreeBSD rc system).



I was 'thinking fast and writing fast' so this sencence about OpenRC was more a mental shortcut then clear thought. I have nothing against OpenRC (and I like concepts and idea behind Alpine Linux), I would choose OpenRC ANYTIME before systemd. What I was thinking was that integrating OpenRC with FreeBSD services and boot process would take time to be mature and bulletproof, all the Ports software come with rc scripts, these also need to be translated into OpenRC scripts and tested, this it would take time (several TrueOS releases) to make this stable solution.



			
				Oko said:
			
		

> Long story short people unless you have money to pay for TrueNAS storage appliance (they are 20-30% more expensive than vanilla SuperMicro servers which I use) don't bother with it.


What is more interesting, that iXsystems use SuperMicro servers for their appliances 



			
				Oko said:
			
		

> If you goal is just to have quick working system the best way to run UNIX is to purchase it from Apple pre-installed with OS X. Sorry plain and simple OS X is the UNIX for wide masses.



I would add to that, that If You just want to get rid of Windows on Your laptop, then use Elementary OS < https://elementary.io > (Mac OS X clone) or Linux Mint < https://linuxmint.com > with MATE or XFCE ... or make Your hands dirty and create and MAINTAIN your FreeBSD desktop distribution.

In the process of creating 'my own FreeBSD desktop' that I use in my laptops/desktops I created scripts/automations for:
*- automounting removable devices:* https://freshports.org/sysutils/automount/
*- base WM, taskbars and monitors:* tint2/conky/openbox
*- CPU scaling scripts (low / medium / high):* <just #!/bin/sh scripts>
*- network connectivity: *https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/62013/
*- monitor battery state:* zenity with popup reminder
*- universal laucher for X11 applications depending on extension: *<just #!/bin/sh script names see.sh>
*- keyboard/mouse bindings: *xbindkeys + openbox shortcuts
*- windows management:* <various #!/bin/sh scripts like aero-snap.sh or tile.sh that manage windows with Openbox>
*- wallpaper management:* <random wallpaper with #!/bin/sh script with Openbox menu shortcuts for edit/reload/delete>
*- set of apps that work and behave:* firefox/iridium/midori/caja/thunar/galculator/gimp/transmission/deadbeef/thundermail/pidgin/leafpad/viewnior/skippy-xd/xflux/libreoffice/gnumeric/audacity/...

I lie myself that one day I will find time to release all of this as a USB drive FreeBSD/HardenedBSD/OpenBSD desktop distribution, or LiveCD, but lack of times keeps that lie away :>

*EDIT:*
By the way, here is how my current boot looks like, little silenced, not as silent as Illumos/Solaris, but a lot more silent then the default one:





It can be achieved by these options/mods:

[FONT=Courier New]% *grep mute /boot/loader.conf          * 
*boot_mute=YES*

% *grep -n -E '(1|2)> /dev/null' /etc/rc.d/* | grep -E 'routing|netif|ldconfig'*
/etc/rc.d/ldconfig:40:             check_startmsgs && echo 'ELF ldconfig path:' ${_LDC} *1> /dev/null*
/etc/rc.d/ldconfig:60:                         echo '32-bit compatibility ldconfig path:' ${_LDC} *1> /dev/null*
/etc/rc.d/netif:260:                                /sbin/ifconfig ${ifn} *1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null*
/etc/rc.d/routing:70:                      eval static_${_a} delete $_if *1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null*
/etc/rc.d/routing:97:              static_$2 add $3 *1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null*
/etc/rc.d/routing:104:              static_$2 add $3 add $3 *1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null*

% *cat -n /etc/rc.d/random | grep -A 8 'random_start()'*
    45  random_start()
    46  {
    47
    48          *# *if [ ${harvest_mask} -gt 0 ]; then
    49          *#*       echo -n 'Setting up harvesting: '
    50          *# *      ${SYSCTL} kern.random.harvest.mask=${harvest_mask} > /dev/null
    51          *#*       ${SYSCTL_N} kern.random.harvest.mask_symbolic
    52          *#* fi
    53[/FONT]


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## Sensucht94 (Dec 18, 2017)

vermaden said:


> Like TrueOS/PC-BSD is 'bad' marketing for FreeBSD, this Lumina 'look' is bad advertisement for Fluxbox. Fluxbox can be configured to look VERY NICE while Limina developers choose otherwise, just check some of these: https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/139/ord/top/
> I would add to that, that If You just want to get rid of Windows on Your laptop, then use Elementary OS < https://elementary.io > (Mac OS X clone) or Linux Mint < https://linuxmint.com > with MATE or XFCE ... or make Your hands dirty and create and MAINTAIN your FreeBSD desktop distribution



Now Juno Computers even sells laptops with ElementaryOS pre-installed, I won't submit a link here as it would be against rules, but their price is more coherent to Hardware than Macbooks', and personally I would recommend one of those to a friend, as one's granted hardware is 100% Linux-supported

I deceived myself believing Chromebooks had the potential to become another great alternative to Macbooks, but after having seen one of them I couldn't have been more disappointed: repository is just to tiny, there's no offline office suite available, and you can't even open a terminal, or view files outside $HOME unless you switched to developer mode, hence loosing Chrome warranty. I can understand they want to prevent people from breaking system, and subsequently call on warranty policy to ask for maintenance, but permissions are way more restrictive in ChromeOS than even in Windows.

Anyway, yes, Mint and Elementary have almost all the features to replace a Macbook, and provided hardware were supported, it would be hard to tell difference. However, it's unimaginable to figure a Linux user never opening a terminal, despite all the GUI facilities Ubuntu and derivatives come with, and that's were Linux desktop falls down for most end-users. I lost the count of all the engineering, computer science, physics, math, communication science students I know, who were told to install Xubuntu in order to run some sort of software, and got rid of GNU/Linux no sooner had they had to open a terminal for the second time.

Obviously there are people who install free Unix-like systems just for fun and passion, but still I have to encounter any in real life.

I'm of the opinion that for those people Mint or Elementary might even feel too bloated after a while. Despite being a Slackware user (and recently a Void user) I'd say that,  from an objective point of vie,   RPM-based distros are a better choice in general, while Gentoo (and here comes OpenRC again) for me scores as best desktop free OS for the medium/experienced user. If Void were to become more of as serious thing in future it might be able to catch up with Gentoo

Anyway, to each their own, in the end it's always a matter of taste: my laptops and my rpi3 all run a *BSD as only OS, while my desktop runs Void too for Steam-gaming purposes, and I'm fine with that, otherwise I wouldn't be here


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## scottro (Dec 18, 2017)

If my memory is correct, it seems to me that the success of Ubuntu was one reason that Linux became quite popular.  Many companys will have their one or two special applications that require Windows or Mac. Look at your doctor or lawyer's machine, for example.  I also like Void, but as a smaller, niche distribution, programs are rather old (for example, fcitx) and unless somene has the time or you have the talent, it'snot that easy to get it upgraded.

I'd like to see somene do a FreeBSD with great hardware recognition. While we can complain about it getting too popular, at present, I can buy a laptop and be reasonably sure that Linux will support it in a couple of months, at most.  FreeBSD and OpenBSD still don't properly support a 4 year old laptop I have, neither able to fully utilize its iwm card's 802.11ac. FreeBSD requires CURRENT to get its video (Haswell ULT 4000) working properly, and OpenBSD also has a few issues with its video. Both can be made to work, and I use them for challenge, fun, and to further familiarize myself with both systems.  I strongly agree with Oko's earlier statement that it's good to run one of these on your desktop if you are a sysadmin for it.
However, on that same laptop, I also have a couple of Linux installs which required almost no work (and if I liked the full fledged desktop environments, I think it would have all worked out of the box). 

TL;DR
I think that if someone did succeed in creating an easy to use FreeBSD desktop,it would probably be quite good for FreeBSD in general, and perhaps make it easier for all of us to have a BSD on our laptops.


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## lonestar (Dec 18, 2017)

I've been lucky with the hardware I have, it's a Thinkpad T530 I bought around 2013. Intel HD4000 graphics, I did replace the wireless with an Intel Taylor Peak or something like that b/c the other one worked but sucked BAD on everything except the stock Windows install. 

I'm hesitant to support an "out of the box" experience. In theory it's nice, because it would save me some time on a task that I was going to perform anyway; I'm already motivated enough to overcome the existing hurdles. But lowering the hurdles leads to a less motivated community, with less appreciation of UNIX philosophies. Then morons and snowflakes will get involved, which leads to the next point. 

This could be my own attribution bias, but I would guess many BSD users in their 30's and 40's started exploring open source software with Linux, which became something so completely different that they ended up in the BSD realm. It could be seen as a purity spiral, but my response to that is, "so what?"

For those who want more focus on optimized UNIX desktops, PC-BSD's stated goal is good. However, their implementation is so poorly executed that it becomes harmful to the stated goal and target audience.


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## Snurg (Dec 18, 2017)

scottro said:


> I think that if someone did succeed in creating an easy to use FreeBSD desktop,it would probably be quite good for FreeBSD in general, and perhaps make it easier for all of us to have a BSD on our laptops.


Yes. But, what is an "easy to use FreeBSD desktop"?
This must be defined.

Let me illustrate the problem with a "desktop" analogy: the Android smartphones.
You probably know that there are two different philosophies: pure and proprietary.
Pure here means the original Android "desktop", without deviating modifications. Like Google Nexus smartphones, former Cyanogenmod, and the like.
And then the proprietary smartphone "desktops", like Samsung, LG and many other manufacturers. These all are heavily customized and often bear little resemblance with the original.

Then look at the Linux distros.
It's the same like with the Android smartphones. There are few distros that come with the "pure", uncustomized KDE,Gnome,and all those WMs and desktops.
Most distros come like the smartphones with the proprietary "desktops".
And then keep in mind that most DE users tend to customize their desktop anyway, no matter whether "pure" original or "proprietarily" precustomized.

*Now imagine this:
If there is a postinstaller, usable via graphical, text and shell command line interfaces/frontends.
This postinstaller offers you about 100 of the most popular applications.
You can choose from these "basic" desktop applications, browsers, office stuff, etc. what to install and configure.*
Scripts then take care in the background that these applications are correctly installed, _inclusive the things that usually are left to the user to be done manually_, listed in the pkg postinstall notes.

Then users could have a very usable basic desktop system from scratch, without ever having to see the console prompt.

And they can use the DMs they like, and get them in the "pure", original variant ready to use and customize.
The FreeBSD specific GUI system configuration frontends would be DM/WM independent, and so be generally available.
*
Could such an approach help improve FreeBSD desktop usability and popularity?
Could such be a way to achieve much with very limited resources (to implement and maintain)?

What do you think?*


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## beanpole (Dec 19, 2017)

First off, I want to thank you all for your input about PC-BSD. As a developer on that project we saw many of the same fundamental problems with it, which is *exactly* why PC-BSD was *discontinued* and replaced by TrueOS.
TrueOS *is not the same* as PC-BSD, even if a few of our utilities share the same names. If you have not used TrueOS any time in the last 6-months or so, I highly recommend that you actually use it for a while before trying to explain/complain to others about the project.

Let me just give you a few bullet points about TrueOS and why you might want to use it instead of FreeBSD for a laptop:

TrueOS supports nearly all modern laptops, whereas FreeBSD 11.1 only supports up to the Intel "Haswell" Generation. This might not be a problem for computer-savvy people who diligently examine all their laptop specs/chipsets ahead of time (if they remember to put in the hours ahead-of-time), but for those of us who want things to "just work" (even if you bought a random/basic latop from your local big-box store) this is a big deal. This covers not just the motherboards/CPU's, but newer/better wifi drivers as well.
System Updates. Doing updates on FreeBSD (particularly between major versions like 10.x->11.x) is still a massive undertaking involving lots of man-hours, manual file merges, and extreme hazards around every corner. TrueOS has made the update process so safe and reliable that it *can be done automatically* without any user interaction. In fact, if anything _does_ go wrong with a TrueOS update, it only takes a few seconds to reboot the system into your pristine system from right before the update (due to the magic of boot environments, which come standard on TrueOS but you have to manually setup on FreeBSD).
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.
Do you like spending all your time chasing OpenSSL security vulnerabilities? We don't! That is why TrueOS uses LibreSSL for the base system and *all* packages (essentially - there are still a few oddballs that require OpenSSL but those will use the latest version from ports)

Note that absolutely none of these points even touch anything desktop related - TrueOS is not just a "desktop" OS like PC-BSD was, it is all about taking FreeBSD itself to the next level!
On the desktop side TrueOS distributes/supports the Lumina desktop (since we can actually *fix* things that come up - good luck getting timely patches from other DE's), but you can still use any of the desktops/WM's that FreeBSD has available *just like on FreeBSD*.

And just to address the Smurg's definition for an "Easy to use FreeBSD desktop":

postinstaller (text/graphical) for installing applications and configuring the system. *TrueOS has this: it is called SysAdm*
Users can have a desktop system without ever seeing a console prompt. *TrueOS has this: it is called a "desktop" installation as opposed to the "server" installation.*
Users can use any DM they like (in "pure" form). *TrueOS has this* (FreeBSD does as well for that matter)
FreeBSD specific GUI system configuration frontends are DM/WM independent: *TrueOS has this: it is called SysAdm (plus some other tools we supply)*


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## PacketMan (Dec 19, 2017)

Hmmm, sound like I should try ditching Ubuntu on my wife's laptop then eh?


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## Snurg (Dec 19, 2017)

Dear beanpole 

1. Isn't the better support for new hardware you describe just the consequence of TrueOS being 12-Current based?
2. You praise the TrueOS update facilities exactly like formerly PC-BSD's ones were praised. 
    So, does TrueOS have a new updater?
    Or does it use pc-updatemanager?

And, by the way.
What would you say if there is a FreeBSD desktop project and these guys rip from PC-BSD/TrueOS these GUI admin components that are actually usable, like the zfs disk manager, and incorporate them into a FreeBSD "desktop admin tools metapackage" or the like?


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## beanpole (Dec 19, 2017)

Smurg:
1. Partially. It is also partially from the fact that FreeBSD contributors can get their updates committed to TrueOS almost instantly whereas it might langush in the FreeBSD bug trackers for months/years due to senseless bickering before finally getting committed. We have had a number of things on TrueOS (such as some new Intel wifi chipset support that was brought over from DragonflyBSD) long before it was accepted into the FreeBSD source tree. In fact, committing driver updates to TrueOS first often helps the changes cut through the arguments that arise on the FreeBSD submission system because it has already been "proven" to work on live systems.
2. TrueOS's update utility is still called `pc-updatemanager`, but it has almost no resemblence to the old utility from the PC-BSD days.

As for FreeBSD people making ports of the TrueOS admin utilities - we have no problem with that at all. In fact, we have been trying to get our administration utilities committed/updated within the FreeBSD ports tree in a timely manner already, so that "pure" FreeBSD users can also benefit from our work. You just need to understand that the tools might not have the same level of functionality on FreeBSD as they do on TrueOS because TrueOS is much more strict about "standardizing" a lot more base-system functionality (such as ZFS + boot environments) that you might not get on a self-built FreeBSD system.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 19, 2017)

Sensucht94 said:


> For anyone interested, the new DesktopBSD release, announced in 2016, is available as Alpha on sourceforge, under the name of DesktopBSD Next. Tried the i3wm-version ISO a while ago on QEMU and it looked promising



I stopped working on DesktopBSD a few years ago.  There was another who attempted to carry on the work but he left as well.  As far as I know it is no longer being developed.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 19, 2017)

I really appreciate TrueOS, IMO it is very good for FreeBSD that it's exist.
But that's why, personally I don't use it:


beanpole said:


> *1.* TrueOS has this: it is called SysAdm (plus some other tools we supply)


I don't like *nix OS-es with such things, like OpenSUSE (YaST), Mandriva (drakconf)...
and may be some others, which try to emulate Windows®™ control panel. 
In my honest opinion it is much better to configure something via simple configuration file.
And I don't like when a lot of software exist on my system, which I don't use,
because it can cause problems. 

*2.* System Updates. I'm very happy with `freebsd-update` and I did not find any problems with it, 
it is really very handy and easy to use. 

*3.* I really don't like all those nasty Qt stuff that comes with TrueOS, all those tools and apps.

With all of these remarks noted above, IMO GhostBSD seems to be a better option for newcomers, but personally I don't use it too.

Anyway, it's only my opinion, it may work good for you and you may like it.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 19, 2017)

beanpole said:


> TrueOS *is not the same* as PC-BSD, even if a few of our utilities share the same names. If you have not used TrueOS any time in the last 6-months or so, I highly recommend that you actually use it for a while before trying to explain/complain to others about the project.



I've downloaded TrueOS-Desktop-17.12-x64-USB.img and will give it a fair try. I have a spare HDD that won't take a minute to install into another laptop. If I don't care for it as easy to go back to FreeBSD.

I've never used ZFS anyway so this will give me a chance, and PC-BSD is how I learned to use FreeBSD so I owe you that much.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 19, 2017)

Trihexagonal said:


> PC-BSD is how I learned to use FreeBSD


For me PC-BSD gave exactly the opposite effect, when I first tried to use it, it was pretty glitchy and very slow,
I didn't like it at all. I didn't see any point to start using it. And only some time later, when I tried pure FreeBSD 10,
I liked it and started to use it...


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 19, 2017)

I looked through some of my old posts yesterday and it was pretty embarrassing in places.

I was looking for /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portsnap when learning to use ports. 

I started using it at PC-BSD v0.75 and stuck with it for 7 years before moving to FreeBSD in 2012, so I have actually used it longer.


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## ivosevb (Dec 19, 2017)

TrueOS is a really great project and all they need is support. They try to make FreeBSD desktop wihtout any linuxism. I'm not developer, but i'm pretty shure that KDE, GNOME, XFCE and others  are developed with only Linux in mind, with all those systemd, hald, pulseaudio ... things. It's not easy with every new version of GNOME or KDE to have a system where "everything just works". I use FreeBSD only dekstop on all my computers and must say - it's incredible good. And TrueOS and iXsystems are doing really great job for community, so ... Also, do we have any other similar project?

ps. Sorry for my bad english.


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## ekingston (Dec 19, 2017)

ivosevb said:


> TrueOS is a really great project and all they need is support. They try to make FreeBSD desktop wihtout any linuxism. I'm not developer, but i'm pretty shure that KDE, GNOME, XFCE and others  are developed with only Linux in mind, with all those systemd, hald, pulseaudio ... things. It's not easy with every new version of GNOME or KDE to have a system where "everything just works". I use FreeBSD only dekstop on all my computers and must say - it's incredible good. And TrueOS and iXsystems are doing really great job for community, so ... Also, do we have any other similar project?
> 
> ps. Sorry for my bad english.



I think GhostBSD (http://www.ghostbsd.org/) is doing something similar. I haven't tried it.


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## ivosevb (Dec 19, 2017)

Yes, you're right. My mistake.


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## tankist02 (Dec 20, 2017)

GhostBSD founder Eric hinted on their forums that next versions of GhostBSD will be built on TrueOS foundation.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 20, 2017)

tankist02 said:


> GhostBSD founder Eric hinted on their forums that next versions of GhostBSD will be built on TrueOS foundation.


May be if they'll remove "SysAdm" and all that Qt stuff, it won't be such a bad idea.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 20, 2017)

If only the Lumina desktop the project touts so much wouldn't be one of the ugliest pieces of software I have ever seen... Its UX is just terrible. Is that because they don't have any designers worth their salt or because it's an engineer-run company?


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## Snurg (Dec 20, 2017)

beanpole said:


> ... whereas it might langush in the FreeBSD bug trackers for months/years due to senseless bickering before finally getting committed. We have had a number of things on TrueOS (such as some new Intel wifi chipset support that was brought over from DragonflyBSD) long before it was accepted into the FreeBSD source tree. In fact, committing driver updates to TrueOS first often helps the changes cut through the arguments that arise on the FreeBSD submission system because it has already been "proven" to work on live systems.


These are two sides of the medal:
-the "rock-stable" philosophy of FreeBSD on the one side
-and on the other side its drawback, that things have to have reached a particular quality level before being accepted into the core.

TrueOS as a testbed is a very valuable thing for the FreeBSD community, of course.
On the one hand, TrueOS profits from that reputation of FreeBSD, but on the other hand there is the potential problem that things like the permanent update problems (which _do not_ originate from FreeBSD) damage FreeBSD's reputation as a reliable OS.



beanpole said:


> 2. TrueOS's update utility is still called `pc-updatemanager`, but it has almost no resemblence to the old utility from the PC-BSD days.


Complete rewrite? Or just beautified?
Could you provide a bit more detail, what actually makes the difference between old and new pc-updatemanager?
To make you understand better what I mean: Won't you be cautious to buy without some actual detail information, even if somebody said you "this is a _new_ Ford Pinto" ?



beanpole said:


> In fact, we have been trying to get our administration utilities committed/updated within the FreeBSD ports tree in a timely manner already, so that "pure" FreeBSD users can also benefit from our work.


That's good! Thank you, keep this up! I'll look into that soon.



ILUXA said:


> ... Windows®™ control panel.
> In my honest opinion it is much better to configure something via simple configuration file.


The "control panel" is ideal for the less computer literate, and the config files for the advanced users.
Using both should always be possible imho.
Bad thing is that GUI based config tools often do not behave, clobbering config files, so you cannot edit manually anymore.
That is a big problem, but probably avoidable by adequate programming manners.



herrbischoff said:


> Lumina... Its UX is just terrible. Is that because they don't have any designers worth their salt or because it's an engineer-run company?


It seems to be an one-man's (Beanpole) project. In my personal opinion Beanpole is a very skilled and talented developer. He could really do far better things than wasting his skills into developing yet another Windows 95®™ GUI clone. So sad.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 20, 2017)

Snurg said:


> Bad thing is that GUI based config tools often do not behave, clobbering config files, so you cannot edit manually anymore. That is a big problem, but probably avoidable by adequate programming manners.



I guess that's how the XML configuration files of macOS came to be. Not ideal in any regard but apparently it solves the GUI/text file configuration conundrum. The problem with writing reliable GUI config tools that respect plain text configuration files is probably the multitude of different formats in use. You'd have to write a sane parser, lexer and writer for all of those.



Snurg said:


> It seems to be an one-man's (Beanpole) project. In my personal opinion Beanpole is a very skilled and talented developer. He could really do far better things than wasting his skills into developing yet another Windows 95®™ GUI clone. So sad.



If the result looks like Lumina I agree the effort is wasted and the energy should be better spent on other pursuits. Especially when it is occupying the talents of a skilled developer. Appears to be a fish-out-of-water kind of situation.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 20, 2017)

Snurg said:


> Dear beanpole
> And, by the way.
> What would you say if there is a FreeBSD desktop project and these guys rip from PC-BSD/TrueOS these GUI admin components that are actually usable, like the zfs disk manager, and incorporate them into a FreeBSD "desktop admin tools metapackage" or the like?



 I believe that is what sysutils/desktop-installer was intended to do.  The last I checked there was even an option for Lumina which is the default DE for TrueOS developed by the TrueOS project.


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## sko (Dec 20, 2017)

It seems a lot of criticisms against TrueOS are based on old PCBSD or very early TrueOS experiences. I also remember having some rough times with PCBSD when I tried it.

Today I'm using TrueOS as my desktop OS on 3 desktops and my laptop. My main workstation is running TrueOS since sept. 6th 2016 according to the root dataset creation timestamp (it was installed after one of the HDDs began dying and debian/devuan linux silently corrupted a lot of data on the md-raid1 before finally dying...). The laptop was set up with TrueOS a bit earlier (dual-booting)

Yes, early on with TrueOS there were sometimes issues with updates (most I had were related to drm-next drivers for the integrated intel GPUs) - thanks to boot environments that are automatically created you are back up and running in no time.
Apart from a small glitch with the last update on one (out of currently 9) systems with TrueOS (STABLE) I manage, I didn't have any issues with updates since around spring this year (and never since the transition to STABLE/UNSTABLE branches).



Snurg said:


> On the one hand, TrueOS profits from that reputation of FreeBSD, but on the other hand there is the potential problem that things like the permanent update problems (which _do not_ originate from FreeBSD) damage FreeBSD's reputation as a reliable OS.


As said: didn't have any issues for quite some time now. The STABLE branch has worked without a problem on my 4 machines (3 desktop + 1 laptop) and all 5 clients of our TrueOS test-deployment here in the company which is about to be extended to most (if not all) clients early next year.



Snurg said:


> Could you provide a bit more detail, what actually makes the difference between old and new pc-updatemanager?


pc-updatemanager is basically just a wrapper for pkg, beadm, zfs and some other standard tools to automate the update process in a safely manner. It's a shell script - so you could easily recreate the steps manually or modify/rip out everything you don't like/need/want...



Snurg said:


> Bad thing is that GUI based config tools often do not behave, clobbering config files, so you cannot edit manually anymore.


As far as I can tell, all the GUI tools used to modify system settings usually directly use the config files, not some own special magic in the background like e.g. pfSense does for all of their configuration. I couldn't detect any clobbering or strange behaviour if the files were also modified not using the tools. Also everything TrueOS/Lumina-specific I needed to configure was found in config files that could be edited directly (although sometimes not recommended).
Our clients get configured via ansible, which directly deals with the config files either modifying or replacing them, and I haven't found any issues with that yet. The only problem I've encountered so far, is that the graphical user manager uses either pw and/or directly modifies /etc/passwd and /etc/group, which breaks NIS configurations because e.g. if a user changes his password, the entry will be written to /etc/passwd instead of relayed to the NIS server e.g. via yppasswd. To prevent this, /etc/passwd and /etc/group are set to immutable for now to prevent accidents and users have to set their password (amongst other things) during an initial config script that is fired at first login.

I still have to incorporate sysadm into the whole configuration, which should make some tasks easier and safer. Currently I'm using sysadm only via GUI for remote manual changes to single clients.




herrbischoff said:


> If only the Lumina desktop the project touts so much wouldn't be one of the ugliest pieces of software I have ever seen... Its UX is just terrible. Is that because they don't have any designers worth their salt or because it's an engineer-run company?


As always: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I like that Lumina is delivering a full DE without being utterly bloated and pulling tons of dependencies (most of which are owed to linux-cruft that gets dragged in on other DEs). Configuration to suit my workflow is relatively minimal (mostly keyboard shortcuts) and easily accessible and shareable between systems. That being said - a DE for me is 80% for managing my open terminal windows and 20% for some browser windows, mail client and very few other programs or tools. I can't stand a desktop that gets in my way when working, especially if its only for the sake of "being pretty" or "user friendly".
Yes, one could also configure fluxbox manually to get some similar result, but not everyone wants to spend hours for this task and then constantly try to find yet another tool/hack for every new task or use case to finally end up with a working DE after weeks/months of "fine-tuning". For someone who actually WANTS to set up the whole system from scratch, TrueOS or Lumina of course isn't the right choice, but so is ubuntu, GhostBSD, Gnome or KDE. This would be like someone complaining about a station wagon being too big if he wants to buy a motorbike anyways...
Also - talking of the typical desktop user in a work environment - not everyone is mentally capable of putting together a DE manually. As said: we're about to roll out TrueOS over most/all our clients that currently still run Windows. For these scenarios you just need a DE that is relatively minimal and already has all loose ends knotted together or your archetypal Windows-users will die of dehydration from constant whining and crying. The fact that everything in Lumina is still easily configurable through text files makes adaption to user habits even at scale not only feasible but only possible (especially compared to windows where you're stuck with whatever crap Redmond is forcing on you/your users).


Finally regarding OpenRC: Yes, there were some rough edges during the transition, but because the approach was more of a slow transition with fallback/compatibility in mind and parallel support for rc (it still reads rc.conf!), there was never a point where a system wouldn't boot or shutdown properly and the few glitches were relatively easy to find and fix. In fact the few problems I encountered with services not properly starting (esp. on DHCP-configured systems) were all fixed with the adaption of the "net-online" service and setting the service dependencies accordingly.



To sum it up: My experiences with TrueOS have been very positive and I can only recommend that everyone who had bad experiences with PCBSD should try out a recent TrueOS release - its a whole new OS now.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 20, 2017)

sko said:


> As always: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.



In this case, no, it's really not. Just about everything is out of proportion, it has no coherent visual style and the overall feel of the environment is quite reminiscent of using a Motorola phone circa 2004: the hardware is great but the software feels just wrong. There's a reason why no free software desktop environment has ever (and by the direction all of them are going, never will) come even close to the user experience macOS or (sadly) Windows offers. Quite frankly, if you don't spend days/weeks/months fine-tuning every aspect, they are just crap for most users. If you spend most of your time in terminal windows, the desktop environment really matters very little. To most users however, the desktop environment actually IS the computer.

Then again, there's no accounting for taste. When everything you've got at your disposal is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. More bluntly put: if you're used to looking at crap, it tends to be what you expect.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 20, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> Then again, there's no accounting for taste. When everything you've got at your disposal is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. More bluntly put: if you're used to looking at crap, it tends to be what you expect.


I strongly disagree.  Windows 10 is an awful user expereince for me.  Sure maybe with releases like Windows 7, and Windows XP it was not quite as bad.  Even macOS cannot stay consistent all of the time.  As soon as you install Chrome that consistency goes out the window.  If you want total consistency then maybe iOS is there.  This really is a matter of preference.  It is impossible to be all things to all people.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 20, 2017)

sko said:


> As said: we're about to roll out TrueOS over most/all our clients that currently still run Windows. For these scenarios you just need a DE that is relatively minimal and already has all loose ends knotted together or your archetypal Windows-users will die of dehydration from constant whining and crying.



Perhaps my first impressions as a TrueOS user will be beneficial in that area.

Minimal requirements show as 64-bit processor and 4GB RAM so I used one of my Thinkpad T61 with Intel Core2 Duo T7300 @ 2.00GHz and 4GB RAM. The install process went smoothly and the driver for my Quadro NVS 140M was offered. The choice to use Lumina or Fluxbox was available so I chose x11-wm/fluxbox as that's what I normally use.

The TrueOS version is at 1.3.1, ports is at 1.3.7 and there is no terminal or file manager available. You cannot start x11/xterm and the `xterm` command is non-existent:


```
% xterm

CORRECT>Eterm (y|n|e|a)? no
xterm: Command not found
```

(x11/eterm is missing fonts and fails to start with that error.)

So with not many other options I moved to Lumina, which seems to be a big point of contention. As such, I won't post a screenshot of another OS but here is a link to how I have it set up for anyone who is interested in the esthetic aspect:

Lumina screenshot

Personally, I could get used to looking at it and it may well look better than my x11-wm/fluxbox configuration, if not for deskutils/lumina-fm. And this is where IMO it really falls short.

I can't believe I am the only person using this that transfers files, but if there is a way to do it I'd like you to show me. File Operations are limited to Cut, Copy, Delete and Archive and I could not see a way to move-to or copy-to a file or directory. Drag and drop crashed it.

There is also very little room on the business end of things that I feel detracts from what pleases me about it. Too much wasted space at the bottom (and menu) and very little room to work from compared to x11-fm/xfe. The main window cannot be resized that I could see. This is more along the lines I'd like to see it:




And why can a user enter their credentials and open the Insight file manager as root? That seems counterintuitive. I entered my root password twice before I noticed it wanted my user password.

The AppCafe was still using .pbi installer last time I used it but after familiarizing myself it became apparent it was just a front-end to pkg, and adding programs using `pkg install` pulls from the same repository. I did not use ports for anything.

pf has been replaced with ipfw and it works as intended. There was 1 preset rule in the Firewall Manager GUI and I deleted that.

After setting everything up and tweaking it I no longer felt like I was looking at TrueOS but at FreeBSD. I did, however, expect it to do more of the work for me. ZFS seems to be doing alright, but this is the first time I've used it. If it updated anything overnight it did so successfully as it was still running this AM.

I said I would give it a fair try, these are just my first impressions and I will continue to use it for a while to do so, but I prefer to build my own desktop from ports.


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## Handsome Jack (Dec 20, 2017)

Tried to install  TrueOS Stable (Current Release: 17.12) ;
Wrote .img file on USB stick, first with dd, and day later with Mint Image Writter from live iso;
Installer starts and after few seconds there is black screen with white trueos logo, after that noting more happen (no visible/audible signs of activity in next few minutes, only logo frozen).
I know this is not trueos forum, and reason to mention this is:
Booting in non-uefi mode produces almost twice bigger trueos logo than booting in uefi mode, which maybe is a hint that there will be same problem with nVidia boot/console resolution/fonts as described here and here .
I'll try booting from DVD/.iso when I find some free time.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 20, 2017)

Handsome Jack said:


> Installer starts and after few seconds there is black screen with white trueos logo, after that noting more happen (no visible/audible signs of activity in next few minutes, only logo frozen).



I wasn't going to mention it but I tried to use my W520 with Optimus first because it has an i7 and 8GB RAM. I got the same screen with multiple renditions of the boot screen I do with FreeBSD but switched to discreet graphics, used `mode 0` during the boot process and continued with the installation.

It offered the nividia driver and looked like it was going to be alright as far as resolution but I tried 3 times and it stopped each time sometime during the build with a plain gray screen and the cursor frozen in the middle. I attributed this to possible I/O errors on my machine as I did experience them the last time I transferred a large amount of files at once and used another.


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## Handsome Jack (Dec 20, 2017)

Solution for broken installer [ link ]
Few notices:
- GELI + UEFI unavailable (GELI was main reason I decided to try FreeBSD)
- GELI available on non-UEFI installation
- non-UEFI installation has (on my system) bad resolution (800x600?) with too big fonts, and I will not going to install that; I already reinstalled FreeBSD from nonUEFI to UEFI because of that.
- there is installer option "Install into Boot Environment" - sounds jummy, but I am new to ZFS miracles, and have no idea if that will nuke my FreeBSD system, since I see TrueOS as an extremely unpolished buggy and unfinished (sorry devs, no hard feelings, just my newbie view) system which does not add to positive picture of FreeBSD to potential newcomer.
- installer on booting immediately asking for passphrase for my FreeBSD ada0p5 and gpt/zfs0, and not accepting passphrase, so I doubt it will success "installation into Boot Environment".


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## malco_2001 (Dec 20, 2017)

Handsome Jack said:


> - non-UEFI installation has (on my system) bad resolution (800x600?) with too big fonts, and I will not going to install that; I already reinstalled FreeBSD from nonUEFI to UEFI because of that.
> .



The installer uses VESA in the case of bios boot, and SCFB in the case of EFI.  After install a proper driver can be selected, and changed at anytime using the display manager.  This was to allow everyone a chance to get the system installed when graphics support might not be available, or might crash the system.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 20, 2017)

Handsome Jack said:


> - GELI + UEFI unavailable (GELI was main reason I decided to try FreeBSD)


There are fixes for this in FreeBSD but the work is still in peer review the last I checked.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 20, 2017)

Handsome Jack said:


> - non-UEFI installation has (on my system) bad resolution (800x600?) with too big fonts, and I will not going to install that; I already reinstalled FreeBSD from nonUEFI to UEFI because of that.



I got that at first on my W520 but was able to make things out and move from one screen to the next till it got to the driver selection screen. Once I set the driver the resolution corrected itself and went on with the process normally.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 20, 2017)

Handsome Jack said:


> since I see TrueOS as an extremely unpolished buggy and unfinished (sorry devs, no hard feelings, just my newbie view) system which does not add to positive picture of FreeBSD to potential newcomer.


This is probably why you do not see desktop distributions popping up for OpenBSD. NetBSD, and DragonlflyBSD.  Imagine how terrible those would work!  Is it not better to have some effort for a FreeBSD desktop distribution than none at all?


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## Handsome Jack (Dec 20, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> There are fixes for this *in FreeBSD* but the work is still in peer review the last I checked.


If You mean _FreeBSD_-UEFI+GELI, I know that, that is my current default encrypted healthy installation; and on TrueOS this work is under development, I hope will be finished next year.



Trihexagonal said:


> I got that at first on my W520 but was able to make things out and move from one screen to the next till it got to the driver selection screen. Once I set the driver the resolution corrected itself and went on with the process normally.


As I said here , I didn't have problem during FreeBSD installation or when booted into (nvidia) DESKTOP/GUI, problem appeared when switching from desktop to consoles (_non-UEFI _installation), so reinstalled system in default UEFI  installer and so far EVERYTHING works perfect.
So I was thinking that TrueOS, since is based on FreeBSD, will also have GELI+UEFI available ESPECIALLY when is using version 12.


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## Handsome Jack (Dec 21, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> Is it not better to have some effort for a FreeBSD desktop distribution than none at all?


Of course, I like idea of TrueOS very much, and every year or so I'm trying TrueOS, to see "maybe they managed to solve this or that", but no luck so far (my subjective opinion).
Fortunately, with one half printed page of instructions and notes, it is very easy to get FreeBSD installed and running Desktop Environment.

This begins to be a little off-topic, so I'll stop now.


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## Snurg (Dec 21, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> ... sysutils/desktop-installer ...


Thank you very much malco_2001 for hinting at that project !
I read the whole script.
It is like a valuable stash of configuration goodies one should know about when implementing a postinstall tool. A very good start!

As I am going to have to set up a few computers the next time, and want them as similar as possible, I am practically forced to make a setup script anyway.
So I guess I'll make that a bit more beautiful than I normally do for my own purposes.
Just to show what I am thinking of. If people like it, they can use it and help improve the thing by suggestions and contributions.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 21, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> May be if they'll remove "SysAdm" and all that Qt stuff, it won't be such a bad idea.





herrbischoff said:


> If only the Lumina desktop the project touts so much wouldn't be one of the ugliest pieces of software I have ever seen... Its UX is just terrible. Is that because they don't have any designers worth their salt or because it's an engineer-run company?


_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.
IMO it is much better to use lxappearance, to configure your DE, and if you like fluxbox,
use fluxbox as a WM, as a compositing manager use compton, and as a panel, use lxpannel(or mate-panel or xfce4-panel).
Or use x11-wm/fvwm2 as a WM and create your own panel. I don't really see the point why _Lumina_ exist,
taking into account that so many people don't like it (or even hate). The biggest problem for Lumina
is that almost nobody like Qt apps and DE-s, because it is ugly, glitchy and remains Windows 98
or at best Windows Vista. Even KDE is dying now.


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## Snurg (Dec 21, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> _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.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 22, 2017)

Snurg said:


> In this perspective, Lumina, which looks like "programmer art", represents a GUI evolvement stage of _before_ Windows 3.0.



Thank you.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 23, 2017)

Snurg said:


> 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.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 23, 2017)

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.


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## aht0 (Dec 23, 2017)

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.


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## scottro (Dec 23, 2017)

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.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 23, 2017)

scottro said:


> 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.


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## scottro (Dec 23, 2017)

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).


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 23, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> Snurg said:
> 
> 
> > I guess it's a marketing thing.
> ...



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.


----------



## Beastie7 (Dec 23, 2017)

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


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 23, 2017)

What good is a file manager that can't transfer files? I never did get an answer to that one.


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## Oko (Dec 23, 2017)

scottro said:


> 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.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 23, 2017)

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.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 23, 2017)

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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## vermaden (Dec 24, 2017)

Oko said:


> 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).



Oko said:


> 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.



Oko said:


> 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.



Oko said:


> 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.



Oko said:


> 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.





Oko said:


> 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.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 24, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> 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


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## Beastie7 (Dec 24, 2017)

vermaden said:


> 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.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 24, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> 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.


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## Oko (Dec 24, 2017)

Beastie7 said:


> 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



Beastie7 said:


> 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.









Beastie7 said:


> 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.
> 
> ...


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.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 24, 2017)

Oko said:


> 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.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 24, 2017)

Oko said:


> 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.


Oko said:


> 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;



Oko said:


> 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.


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## beanpole (Dec 24, 2017)

Trihexagonal said:


> 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).


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## Oko (Dec 24, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> 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.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 24, 2017)

beanpole said:


> 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:
> ...



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.


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## Oko (Dec 24, 2017)

beanpole said:


> 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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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 24, 2017)

beanpole said:


> 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.



No hard feelings.


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## beanpole (Dec 24, 2017)

Beastie7 said:


> 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?


There is already a collaboration ongoing to accomplish this exact thing. I can't say any more at the moment since it is not my place to make this announcement, but stay tuned to FreeBSD news sites for a full announcement.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 24, 2017)

beanpole said:


> There is already a collaboration ongoing to accomplish this exact thing. I can't say any more at the moment since it is not my place to make this announcement, but stay tuned to FreeBSD news sites for a full announcement.



Oh my.. this is exciting.  Stay tuned, I will.


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## beanpole (Dec 24, 2017)

Oko : Go ahead and propose it to the bsdnow guys, they know I am always game for something like that. Just note that I restrict myself to TrueOS matters: FreeNAS and other derivative projects are outside my realm of responsibilities


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## Snurg (Dec 24, 2017)

Dear beanpole,

I seem to have agitated you much.
My experience with PC-BSD/TrueOS on laptop was so devastating that I think that it deserves to be told. People should know what expects them imho. This is neither OT nor "hijacking".

And the case of the so-much-praised "TrueOS update system" which under the hoods is apparently still mostly is the infamous pc-updatemanager from PC-BSD...
And then the fact that anytime a buggy 12-CURRENT commit can have the consequence that TrueOS users cannot work with their computers.

This will damage every of them who has no back up system (i.e. other than TrueOS) he/she can work...
Imho these things have much to do with responsibility and ethics.

I compared that to the Ford Pinto case.
GM back then was criticized heavily because they calculated in the victims, as it was cheaper to pay compensations than to fix the problem which caused many people getting burned alive.

Isn't the parallel obvious?
As Oko put it correctly, so many users got burned.
Do you really think that the comparison with the Ford Pinto tank fires engineering scandal is inappropriate?

OT:
Anyway, beanpole posted a link to a TrueOS forum discussion thread.
I'll share a very funny post I found there:


> TrueOS is for TrueBelievers. Until another religion comes along, TureOS is the religion here. So, let’s play, prey and hope for the best in TrueOS.
> 
> Yo’ll have Happy and Merry Holy’days
> 
> ...



Happy Christmas to all you guys, no matter from what sect!


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 24, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> ILUXA said:
> 
> 
> > 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.
> ...


Some of your statements are fairly correct, but you get me wrong, I wrote nothing about creating
"full desktop system from scratch ", this is pure conjecture on your part, I wrote that many WM-s or DE-s,
like Xfce or Mate for example, can be easily customized, by changing its theme and configuration, and this
can be easily done using its settings, by ticking some options and downloading desired theme from
www.gnome-look.org, for example. And even a very "average user" is able to do this.


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## vermaden (Dec 24, 2017)

Oko said:


> 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.



I think that, in some time from now, we will see LibreSSL in the base, and I think as HAMMER2 will be finished, there may be a chance that we will se it in FreeBSD, keep in mind that DragonflyBSD is a FreeBSD fork which should make porting easier. FreeBSD project also quite often ports available portions of good software into base. I would like to see DMA (DragonflyBSD Mail Agent) instead of Sendmail.

There is also other initiative - HardenedBSD - which follows the principles of OpenBSD, seems like a good direction for me, especially that You get all the features of FreeBSD and some of the OpenBSD security.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 24, 2017)

vermaden I would be very interested in getting ASLR, and Hammer2 into TrueOS.  At this point I would not want to attempt a 3 way merge but if there were small enough changesets to bring those features I want them.  Assuming the changes are not too invasive like launchd was with mach.


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## lonestar (Dec 24, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> Oko Actually OpenRC is my fault.  I spearheaded that effort, I did a large part of the work, and convinced the others.



What is the short version of your sales pitch for this? I've literally never seen an easier-to-use init system than BSD's rc. 



> It was largely my idea to make TrueOS a rolling release, and I had to do a lot of convincing to make it happen.


 That's _somewhat_ understandable, but as someone else mentioned you may have been better off opting for an MFC approach. I don't do the work, and don't know how difficult it would be, so I won't criticize this choice. 



> Even the idea to use the name we owned "TrueOS" I pushed for.  No one else wanted to go that direction.



Since you mention this.... I never really thought it was a very appealing or marketable name. But whatever, in my opinion that's not a major concern. The most important thing is _defining a benefit and making sure you deliver on it_.


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## lonestar (Dec 24, 2017)

Oko said:


> 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*)



I've always found your comments interesting and entertaining, I like the no-BS and blunt tone of them. 

If FreeBSD and Mac OS are so similar, why can't FreeBSD easily adopt many of the desktop benefits of OS X? I've always genuinely been curious about this.

I don't do OS design, so I'm very ignorant of these things. But other than the flags used in some utilities like `ps` and `ls` I don't see many similarities between FreeBSD and OS X. Even the hierarchy on Mac is a lot different - and weird.


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## Snurg (Dec 24, 2017)

(Sorry for brainstorming, tl;dr)



lonestar said:


> If FreeBSD and Mac OS are so similar, why can't FreeBSD easily adopt many of the desktop benefits of OS X? I've always genuinely been curious about this.


The thing is that FreeBSD does *not* put its users into a corset, _does not define itself by its desktop, but by its core_.
People choose FreeBSD not because of "its desktop", but for other reasons.

Both main desktop principles - Apple's strict and Microsoft's loose "desktop discipline" - are perfectly supported on FreeBSD in the way of Gnome and KDE.

The only problem is the seamless lack of the integration of FreeBSD to these desktops - all those system-dependent things, mostly of administrative nature.
*To most "normal" people a computer OS is "good" when:*


common computer handling skills are sufficient to set up a working system. That is, no need to edit config files, and by no means ever the need to use something esoteric the guys call "console" or "terminal".

the desktop is seamless. All things match the look+feel and the design guidelines of the preferred OS. No "patchwork" impression.
no essential things of nowadays personal computers are missing, like Bluetooth, reliable suspend+resume (to RAM as well as to disk)
the most common hardware is supported in a timely manner

This are just a few possibly very important aspects important to "normal" users.
We can learn a lot from Apple.
Much of MacOS stuff is powered by scripts hidden behind a seamlessly-integrated frontend UI.

Thus I ask myself, could it be a good idea to make a framework of system administration scripts designed for communication with a GUI frontend, like Apple did for their own use?
So that there is some sort of "API" that assists integrators to seamlessly add this stuff into desktops like Gnome, KDE etc.
An advantage of such an "API" would be that the integrators are *not* required to have deep system knowledge of every component of FreeBSD, which bars many people willing to volunteer from doing so.

Couldn't this be a sensible approach that could make integration of FreeBSD *much* easier?

Let me explain why I am thinking about these things so much.
I am currently working on a jail manager that is actually easy to use, both for beginners and professionals.
As a consequence of this I am implementing the interactive part of my utility in a manner that can be integrated easily into all those environments.
And this means that I had to include thoughts about the UI from the beginning, for those users who prefer not to use the command line.

A simple approach into the direction of frontend-independent system administration has already been done by the `dialog (1)` utility which is been used by many installers.
So it has been very simple to add a graphic installer to FreeBSD - they just added a graphical based frontend to the text-based one, without having to make much work on the backend side.
This way they needed not to write another full installer, but just quickly added an empty frontend GUI shell.

Ideally the integration would be that easy that integrators have not to do much more than creating dialogs with the actual desktop framework's (Qt, Gtk,...) dialog editors and do all the fine-tuning so that the UX is smooth, and just attach that to the scripts that do the actual work.

Currently there is much redundant work in this area.
Every single of these separated "desktop building" groups (Mate/GhostBSD, Lumina/TrueOS,...) repeats this big effort again and again.
This kind of having-to-reinvent-wheels-integration approach thus has a divisive and weakening effect on the BSD community.

Thus I believe it might be worth thinking about how this kind of redundant work could be avoided, achieving the goal of making seamlessly integrating FreeBSD into KDE, Gnome and all these DMs much easier.

But how can we achieve that this is actually BSD compatible?
Meaning that the possibility to do manual (or scripted) configuration editing does not get blocked by interactive configuration utilities that do not respect changes done to them by others (scripts, admins)?
Apple solves this problem by making the config files XML (thanks herrbischoff for hinting at that). This way they can be edited manually too. However, this breaks much things and it is probably no much joy to edit such files. 
So the correct solution would be to have a sort of parsing-lexing interface utility library so that interactive utilities can easily make changes _without_ clobbering the config files more than necessary.

Thus I am thinking about how the situation would be, if there exist:

parsing-lexing routines for handling the most common types of config files (i.e. read the config into a data structure, write back changes into the config file respecting its formatting)

script/API interfaced interactive configuration utilities that are easily integrable into different GUI frameworks
I ask myself: Would then be so much motivation (maybe even the need?) for integrators to fork to make a separate distro just to support a single DE, instead of staying in the FreeBSD project and just working on integrating the respective DE's?


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## Snurg (Dec 24, 2017)

And regarding the problem of brand-new hardware support:
*
What about making a repo for CURRENT device drivers that STABLE/RELEASE users can use?*

It would make MUCH difference if I can run RELEASE and take only one or two drivers from CURRENT that are missing in RELEASE!
Because, I then could run a practically stable system, the risk would be limited to the driver component...

Is this possible?


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## malco_2001 (Dec 24, 2017)

lonestar said:


> What is the short version of your sales pitch for this? I've literally never seen an easier-to-use init system than BSD's rc.



Off the top of my head BSD licensed, written in a compiled language, dependency caching, service supervision, simplification of init scripts, parallel boot, better documented, and less invasive than other options.  There is more to it of course if you factor in dhcpcd but I will save that discussion for a future Q&A as proposed instead of hijacking this thread too much.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 24, 2017)

lonestar said:


> That's _somewhat_ understandable, but as someone else mentioned you may have been better off opting for an MFC approach. I don't do the work, and don't know how difficult it would be, so I won't criticize this choice.



lonestar To respond to your comment, and answer similar question from Snurg if it were that simple that is what we would have done for sure.  Take for example drm-next-kmod.  It is in ports right?  Yet it doesn't run on anything older than 12-CURRENT.  Why is that?  In order to run it many other kernel changes including linuxkpi have to be used.  Yes it would be possible to MFC kernel changes but that would entail even more manpower.  Also my experience trying to get wireless drivers backported for several 10.x releases in a row was disappointing.  I would rather have gone that route for sure.  I would rather TrueOS not have to exist at all, and there were an official FreeBSD desktop team that I could just be a part of.  But at this stage I am more interested in TrueOS.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 24, 2017)

Snurg said:


> It would make MUCH difference if I can run RELEASE and take only one or two drivers from CURRENT that are missing in RELEASE!
> Because, I then could run a practically stable system, the risk would be limited to the driver component...


The risk, is always here.


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## Snurg (Dec 24, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> ... written in a compiled language ... service supervision ... simplification of init scripts ...


This makes me feel uncanny, to be honest.
systemd is a main reason why I do not use Linux anymore.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 24, 2017)

Snurg said:


> This makes me feel uncanny, to be honest.
> systemd is a main reason why I do not use Linux anymore.


Snurg In a branch I have support to toggle between rc.d, and openrc.  As is it works but requires some changes to pc-updatemanager.  However if pkg-base gets support for etcupdate (one of the reasons we need pc-updatemanager) then I won't need to touch pc-updatemanager.  Which is kind of why I held off as I have heard that was coming.  Anyways I am going to give this thread a rest.  I am happy to also participate in a future Q&A to field further questions.


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## vermaden (Dec 24, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> vermaden I would be very interested in getting ASLR, and Hammer2 into TrueOS.  At this point I would not want to attempt a 3 way merge but if there were small enough changesets to bring those features I want them.  Assuming the changes are not too invasive like launchd was with mach.


I would say You are 1/3 there, as FreeBSD has ASR (not ASLR), You can have 2/3 with HardenedBSD which has ASLR (not ASR), but currently there is not 3/3 with HAMMER2 also onboard  From what I recall HAMMER2 is not even finished.


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## ivosevb (Dec 25, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> I would rather TrueOS not have to exist at all, and there were an official FreeBSD desktop team that I could just be a part of.


That's the whole point ... Good luck to TrueOS, thanks and continue with your great work.


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## Hecktor (Dec 27, 2017)

Yes, I tried TrueOS on a laptop.

It is far inferior to FreeBSD in almost all aspects.  Yes, it boots quicker than PC-BSD used to.  But at least PC-BSD worked a little better.

The laptop that I do most of my stuff on is a 32 bit laptop I run FreeBSD 11 on.  Works pretty flawless, no issues at all.  The laptop I tried TrueOS on is a 64 bit laptop with 3 gigs of ram and an intel card.  Again FreeBSD 11 works wonderfully on it with no issue.

TrueOS is buggy regardless of laptop issues.  There are frequent posts of having to switch to an old boot environment because some update makes the system unbootable.  Not all services start(avahi and others) and some start intermitantly.  Openrc effectively made many programs not work at all until they get around to making them work with openrc.

Older intel cards(like my laptop) only work with VESA unless you manually do a work around.  And after you did that work around the driver they have installed alters the colors of any QT apps so the colors are off.

Not on my laptop, but frequent slugginess of the system, even locking up the mouse(possibly caused by Lumina copying every single application you install to the desktop).  And on that system it is currently in the state where you just get a black screen with the X-windows mouse cursor after PCDM login, and it stays like that forever.  The sysadm software install program that the run on boot-up is buggy.  Sometimes crashes, sometimes shows no apps, sometimes crashes in the middle of a software install so that the install keeps going but you have no idea on the progress or errors.  Lumina is buggy and has far fewer features than other windows managers.  Environments other that Lumina often times need work to get working if you can get them working at all.

Sleep did not work on my laptop.  Sleep worked on FreeBSD 11 and after I replaced TrueOS with FreeBSD 12, sleep also worked on FreeBSD 12.  FreeBSD 12 ran so much smoother than TrueOS.

I use ZFS on my FreeBSD laptops, and don't have any issues.  It is nice TrueOS allows you to install to install ZFS on a partition without having to know much, however it didn't take me too long to learn how to do it with normal FreeBSD.  Yes, they allow you to automatically install a gui, but again that is pretty easy to do on normal FreeBSD.  In my view TrueOS isn't really usable as anything but a test system.  I tried PC-BSD awihle ago and like others found it slow and no real reason to use it.  In my view TrueOS is much worse.


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## ronaldlees (Dec 27, 2017)

Snurg said:


> I have used PC-BSD for almost 1.5 years on my laptop until some time recently.
> The most terrible problems I had with PC-BSD were caused by their "pc-updatemanager" that runs every night on PC-BSD.
> 
> I got:
> ...



Yes, I had hit-and-miss experiences with the OS, probably due to it's using CURRENT.  OTOH, if you want to run CURRENT and don't want to build your own desktop, it's the easiest way to do that if it works.   I guess it's not _exactly_ CURRENT, but instead snapshots which are vetted to some extent.  And yes - the pc-updatemanager occasionally wants to overturn the boat.  I was disabling it (pretty easy to do) - but on the newer proxied machine the manager isn't savvy enough to get out of the box, so it is causing no problems.


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## angus71 (Dec 27, 2017)

Well, just to add something... 
I use GhostBSD (11.1) on my laptop... with MATE and I like it! It´s stable and you could update via "pkg update".
So if you got spare time, you should give it a try... 
Cheers!


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 27, 2017)

Snurg said:


> 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.





Beastie7 said:


> 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.



Respectfully, I believe more user involvement would be beneficial in smoothing out the desktop experience with TrueOS.

The few things I found over a couple days didn't take any special skills, just normal use of a desktop as someone who uses a FreeBSD desktop on a daily basis.


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## Hecktor (Dec 27, 2017)

angus71 said:


> Well, just to add something...
> I use GhostBSD (11.1) on my laptop... with MATE and I like it! It´s stable and you could update via "pkg update".
> So if you got spare time, you should give it a try...
> Cheers!


I will 2nd this.  When I tried GhostBSD I also liked how it did.  I didn't really find any bugs with it.  Everything got installed at once.  It is basically FreeBSD with everything installed, plus you get a nice gui network thing in your taskbar.

The reason I left them is they stopped support for 32 bit and at the time it didn't support ZFS in a partition.

They plan to base their next distribution off of TrueOS, but might also have another version off of FreeBSD as well.  The current GhostBSD is nice and I could recommend that to anyone.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 29, 2017)

While you, guys, from TrueOS, are trying to do something,
FreeBSD will never become a good desktop OS,
while its developers use MacOS. Also it is
a very bad marketing strategy, to say
that you're "FreeBSD kernel developer, but I use MacOS..." (Apple™ payed (or paying) some money to this guy?).
You're advertising MacOS then, an operating system for housewives, with a lot of adware,
like Windows, and not FreeBSD. You're literally saying that FreeBSD is a crap for desktop usage,
and while the position of some members of FreeBSD team is like this,
FreeBSD will never become more popular and more usable
on a desktops, than GNU/Linux (and its non-systemd variants),
because while some of its desktop features are very poor (like suspend-resume and some GPU support)
some people will never start to use it on their desktops,
when they'll see that FBSD developers are MacOS fans...
Young "future system administrators and developers" will start to use GNU/Linux,
of course they'll never switch to FBSD, when they'll grow up (this is why Android uses Linux kernel, and not BSD).
And any TrueOS or GhostBSD projects will never help to change this.
Unfortunately it is the realities of our day (IMO).


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## lonestar (Dec 29, 2017)

I agree with ILUXA on the point that it would be nice if more people were passionate enough about FreeBSD to put effort into its feasibility on laptops (and desktop use-cases in general). I know there are a few who do this, or have in the past. If there's a way to do that without compromising UNIX principles the way Linux has, and I think that's definitely possible, it would only benefit the community by attracting more development activity.

If there's no interest, then we can expect all future development to target Linux exclusively.

At the same time, it's not my place to tell developers what to do with their time. It's very much a personal choice.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 29, 2017)

lonestar said:


> At the same time, it's not my place to tell developers what to do with their time. It's very much a personal choice.


Of course FreeBSD devs do not need any advices about which OS to use on their desktops,
they already know what to use, they even can be a secret Windows Vista users ,
while they're developing the great and Free UNIX-like operating system.
But, IMO, there is no need to advertise "Windows Vista", while developing FreeBSD.

While also, if OS devs won't use it on their desktops, a lot of specific "desktop" issues will never be resolved,
and will never be in priority. And that is why FreeBSD is an outsider by now (IMHO).


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## Sensucht94 (Dec 29, 2017)

I don't want to step in between, as I have no right to contribute to this conversation, but there's a thought of mine that I wanted to share (especially with beanpole):

Although at the very first glance Lumina didn't look that great to me, I'm actually liking Lumina more and more with every new update it gets, 1.4 release looks very promising with the new Theme Configuration panel (saw the review). Prior one had to manually modify the few themes available, or use a different bar than Lumina-panel. Lumina mostly resemble my idea of Desktop Environment, which is totally different from anything GTK-related, especially bloated GNOME and KDE. I really enjoy those lighter WM/Qt-based DEs like LXQt or Lumina, to the point I always stick to those (and EDE as well) when I feel like using a pre-configured Desktop.
Lumina is fast, light, simple, very BSD-like (other DE on BSD feel alien).
The ZFS snapshots' bar for Insight, which resembles Solaris Time Slider, is another Lumina's strong point and completely eliminates the non-Unix-like idea of a Trash Can.
The Settings Center is very well organized, keyboard settings allow an in-depth shortcuts configuration, while the lumina-archiver really resembles my beloved Xarchiver, and was therefore, much appreciated.

On the other hand I'll join Trihexagonal concern about which IMHO are the 2 main faults of this DE:

- right-click menu, despite looking good, really deserves more powerful customization features, possibly making a step back towards more classical floating WMs'  menus (or simply adopt a slightly modified version of Fluxbox')

- Insight FM should either:
a) be  empowered in its drag & drop, image displaying, navigation options, file operations progress info,open in terminal and open as root features, thus to make a step forward common point&click FMs like, Nemo, Caja.... Still, since those are considerably heavier than Insight and would contrast with the very philosphy and purposes for Lumina, a good compromise would be something like SpaceFM, which I'm a great fan of

b) be improved in its double-pane, keyboard-driven, orthodox, professional info/permission displaying, powerful archive managing features, so as to resemble other great orthodox GUI file managers, like XFE, DoubleCMD, Krusader...
At the actual state, from my point of view, it looks like an incomplete hybrid between those two classes, and maybe that's the reason way so many critics have been risen against it.

Hoped with this to provide useful suggestions,
Best regards,


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## Sensucht94 (Dec 29, 2017)

vermaden said:


> I would say You are 1/3 there, as FreeBSD has ASR (not ASLR), You can have 2/3 with HardenedBSD which has ASLR (not ASR), but currently there is not 3/3 with HAMMER2 also onboard  From what I recall HAMMER2 is not even finished.



Hi Vermaden, It's true HAMMER2 is still unfinished, but  as I'm writing this on HAMMER2 now  I can tell it's very stable, extremely performing even on legacy hardware and partially resolves the problem of tiny file systems quickly filling up if unmantained. HAMMER2 brings many changes over original HAMMER: See the Design Chart for HEAD, as well as latest improvements in 5.0.2 release.

Oko asked about APFS: I can give an amateur opinion around this, as I recently upgraded a couple of friends macbooks', switching from Yosemite and Mavericks to HS. I read the Apple's APFS Guide as it called my attention, and  its closest relative seems to be HAMMER2

What I can say is that, basing on my short experience, performance and speed boost couldn't be more evident: APFS (and some service/storage cleanup) transformed almost dying,bloated HFS machines into very responsive computers


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> While you, guys, from TrueOS, are trying to do something, [...lots of complaining...]



Despite this being a post written in "holy rage" pentameter, you quite accurately sum up the status quo. Don't expect it to change though. FOSS is just not a model that works for complex environments like desktop environments, time has proven this dozens of times over. When people donate their time, they tend to work on what they like the most and don't like to be told what to and what not to do. Also, please see what I wrote about the problems designers and other non-developer types face. This is not an environment conductive to progress as is. You need capable project leads making hard decisions and small teams willing to do it, whether they agree or not. You won't get that in FOSS. What you get is endless discussion and eventual implosion followed by a fork if things get too bad. Yes, a fork, the answer to every smeggin' disagreement in software development. Resulting of course in all forks being spread too thin and going nowhere in the long run. The hard truth is: you can only tell developers what to do when you pay them. Apple does this very well but even they have the problem with talent being spread too thin at times. Now compare the world's most valuable company (and arguably one of the most innovative with regard to actual shipping products) with a unique focus to a couple dozen of FOSS projects with differing views, no design experience, no regard for end user needs (your "housewives" comment makes it clear you are part of the problem), no motivation to shake things up, developers favoring "works for me" over a clean solution and forking away constantly. It's just ridiculous that even the niche area of tiling window managers has two handful of forks between each other. This is not a problem that will be rectified ever. It's just the way we humans work — as much as we want to think of us as evolved, intelligent beings, most are not able or willing to see beyond the immediate horizon. And that includes you too.

Creating a truly solid desktop environment is far more work than slapping a window manager on Xorg and creating some theme. To make things work smoothly, you will have to reinvent and change fundamental parts of the operating system itself. As this is at odds with the stated goal of most Unix systems, it is not going to happen. It would require an undertaking like the switch from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. To completely re-imagine the platform, a hard break with backwards-compatibility, a completely new display server and countless other elements. Even if it does (systemd/launchd), certain factions rebel. Face it: you cannot run a modern, mainstream operating system smoothly with OpenRC. The last company which was capable of creating an operating system to rival the dominance of Windows and macOS was HP — and they abandoned the consumer space altogether. We're stuck with Windows/macOS and to some extent Linux desktops for the next 10-20 years. It's sad but that's the way it is. Given that consumers are moving to iOS/Android devices in unprecedented numbers, there is really very little to be gained in desktop computing, so no company will throw serious resources behind developing a Windows/macOS alternative. It's just not feasible. Even Microsoft could not catch up to Android and iOS, only Samsung is attempting to create an Android alternative with Tizen.

To conclude: it's Game Over for the desktop. All notable and relevant innovation in this space has already been done and FOSS projects can only ever hope to catch up because they're conceptually incapable of creating something innovative and original in this area. Usually they either imitate (badly) or take 15+ years to arrive at a comparable user experience. A modern desktop experience would require fundamental changes to any OS, which is not going to happen, the most likely platform being Linux because the community runs with scissors and breaks things. This is wholly contrary to the BSD mindset. Also, for the majority of mainstream users, the desktop computer fades more and more into obscurity every year, the more capable mobile devices become. The mainstream user does not care about developing software themselves or even to know the fundamentals of the system they use. They expect it to work like a car: get in, turn the key and drive.

So there you have it: why should any pragmatic developer (FreeBSD or otherwise) spend any time on a doomed environment when alternatives that "just work" readily exist? This makes the entire complex a political one, like the GPL hardliners (Stallman, et. al.), with no immediate benefits — technical, usability-related, innovative or otherwise. If what you care about is working on interesting challenges, the graphical desktop is the most thankless one with the lowest return in acknowledgement and innovation.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 30, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> [Truth post]



Ah yes, someone gets it. My sentiments have been realized.


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## MarcoB (Dec 30, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> So there you have it: why should any pragmatic developer (FreeBSD or otherwise) spend any time on a doomed environment when alternatives that "just work" readily exist?


I don't think desktops are doomed. Sure the "market share" is declining but there will allways be users for it, especially developers. So maybe the "desktop" will be more and more developers only, but so what?


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## Deleted member 48958 (Dec 30, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> Creating a truly solid desktop environment is far more work than slapping [ ..a lot of pointless bla-bla-bla...]


Again, you're talking about "desktop environment" while quoting my post,
but I wrote nothing about environments, I wrote about basic functionality.
Without basic functionality on system level (like suspend-resume) even the best desktop
environment will be useless. Desktop Environments is a completely different subject,
than what I was trying to tell.



herrbischoff said:


> your "housewives" comment makes it clear you are part of the problem


Your reaction on these kind of my statements clearly tells me that you are "part of the problem" , 
because you gets angry when someone calls you a "housewife" and start arguing. But "OS for housewives"
 is nothing but just a name for operating systems, which target audience are regular home users A.K.A. housewives.


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## Snurg (Dec 30, 2017)

True words from herrbischoff.
But I am not that pessimistic.

As herrbischoff concludes correctly, the thing is a political one.
Nobody expects a Freedesktop-based DE become a market leader.
It is about providing alternatives for people that do not want to just use what the big companies offer (including all that what's hidden, personal profiling, backdoors, surveillance, etc).

And there are a few people who choose FreeBSD as base for this.
These _do not_ expect a 'perfect' MacOS UX.

And there are a few people who want for non-commercial, so say political, reasons improve the situation.
It is not about providing a seamless system for everybody.
It is about to facilitate these few people who choose FreeBSD their aim to get an usable desktop.

The biggest deficit in that direction is that there is no good automated and integrated (to some degree) infrastructure to get such a system up as easily and effectively as it's the case with the FreeBSD base system.
The need of repetitive manual configuration and setup work is a time killer and the learning curve required only for setting up the desktop keeps people away from FreeBSD even though they would like to use it.

Thus this problem needs no people who expect to be paid, but people who share the desire that this improves and are ready to invest some time to achieve this.
And as it is with political matters, the thing to be achieved first is to work on obtaining a critical mass of people (here: developers) whose goal is not money or fame but the *achievement, the enabling of things*.

IMHO a FreeBSD desktop movement can only be a grassroots one.
And the start of any improvement is the belief that it is possible to achieve.

The important thing however is, to have realistic expectations.
This in turn means that it is important to set milestones in a way that prevents failure and demotivation, instead facilitates constant success by achieving part goal after goal, giving more motivation and drive.

I believe improvement is possible. And I know I am not alone with this belief.


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## ronaldlees (Dec 30, 2017)

With the Windows and Apple operating systems, you have given over configurability and control to a couple near monopolies that use huge monolithic blocks of code that are totally under the control of the monopoly, and thusly can be made idiot-proof, upgrade-crash resistant, and compatible in all directions.  That's great for a car which you get in and drive, because it just works, but bad for people who want to tinker, change, explore, modify, and otherwise hot-rod their cars (or OS systems). That's why the shade-tree mechanic is now a paleolithic memory.  So, Linuxers and Unixers (especially developers) are all about the tinkering and exploring, and that precludes the idiot-proof monolithic system, as was said by several posts in this thread.

Some Linuxers want to compete with the monopolists.  So, we have efforts to create monolithic blocks of code to idiot-proof things.  Read systemd (and other things in that realm) here.  They may eventually cause a split in Linux: the idiot-proof, mostly unchangeable (so may as well be Windows) systems, and the old-time tinker special distros (Gentoo, Devuan, etc). That's fine for me, cuz I'll pick a system I can work on.  The masses will always do what they do best:  follow.


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## ronaldlees (Dec 30, 2017)

ronaldlees said:


> That's great for a car which you get in and drive, because it just works, but ...



It's also the reason your car tracks your doings all day long today (or at least it can) ...


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> Again, you're talking about "desktop environment" while quoting my post,
> but I wrote nothing about environments, I wrote about basic functionality.





ILUXA said:


> FreeBSD will never become a good desktop OS



You should really get your act together coherently if you plan on criticizing others.



ILUXA said:


> Your reaction on these kind of my statements clearly tells me that you are "part of the problem" ,
> because you gets angry when someone calls you a "housewife" and start arguing. But "OS for housewives"
> is nothing but just a name for operating systems, which target audience are regular home users A.K.A. housewives.



Please lower your testosterone output, think again about what you wrote and then feel free to stand in the corner. If you call anything "for housewives" and expect anyone not completely full of themselves to take your comment as "just a name", you are indeed full of yourself. To me, your behavior reflects that of a prototypical half-informed niche-technology user who has never actually contributed to any of the stuff he somehow feels entitled to have an opinion about. Then again, you know what they say about opinions being like anuses...

I really don't want to start anything here, it's just quite obvious to me that you're deliberately being obnoxious.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

Snurg said:


> Nobody expects a Freedesktop-based DE become a market leader.



So what about all the people like ILUXA who clearly complain about the dominance of commercial desktop OSs?



Snurg said:


> And as it is with political matters, the thing to be achieved first is to work on obtaining a critical mass of people (here: developers) whose goal is not money or fame but the *achievement, the enabling of things*.



To my knowledge, political opinionating has never produced any result beyond "barely good enough". If that's what you're after, it's already there: open source desktop environments are available in abundance. I don't mean that in a dismissive way. The fact is that you can either have one serious undertaking or loosely bundled hobby projects that will always be hacked together. You can't have both.



Snurg said:


> The important thing however is, to have realistic expectations.



The realistic results are readily visible in any and all desktop environments that currently exist. I don't quite get what more you expect? A meta-package to set up a FreeBSD desktop environment? Then bickering will ensue about what desktop manager it should be because everyone has a different view and use-case. Again, either you put all your weight behind one full solution or you have the fragmented situation as it is today which caters to the hacker type user happy to tinker for weeks on end. Which is a completely valid use-case by the way. It is simply at odds with somehow achieving a truly integrated desktop experience.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

ronaldlees said:


> So, Linuxers and Unixers (especially developers) are all about the tinkering and exploring, and that precludes the idiot-proof monolithic system, as was said by several posts in this thread.



Yes, absolutely. In this regard, there shouldn't be any discussion about having to seriously tinker to set up your desktop environment in the first place, correct? A quite fitting comparison would be a car mechanic I believe. It's usually an individual who would be very unhappy with a car that simply worked all the time. In fact, if forced to drive such a car, the mechanic would probably find deliberate ways to break it, just to fix it again, complaining about the lack of repairability along the way. The main appeal is not to smoothly get from A to B but to tinker with the car. The technology becomes an end in itself, which is not what most people expect. Just as not all people are fully invested in fishing, mini-golfing, extreme sports, baking, crocheting or collecting toy figurines.



ronaldlees said:


> The masses will always do what they do best: follow.



It's this elitist snobbery that's all too pervasive in the technology sector that keeps all the truly good innovators who aren't developers or self-proclaimed experts away from the open source environment. This also reminds me of something I recently read about a handy shortcut to a self-administered reality check: if one believes most other people to be idiots, it's probably oneself who is the idiot.



ronaldlees said:


> It's also the reason your car tracks your doings all day long today (or at least it can) ...



I would so very very much love to see a completely open source community designed, developed and built car. That would illustrate my points in such a perfect visual metaphor I could never ever come up with myself.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

MarcoB said:


> I don't think desktops are doomed. Sure the "market share" is declining but there will allways be users for it, especially developers. So maybe the "desktop" will be more and more developers only, but so what?



I really don't know what to write any more. Clearly my sentiments resonate with some and not with others. Which is my entire point: the desktop situation being so fragmented because of so many different opinions. The missing sensibility towards this being an issue at all is precisely why I argue that the current situation will never improve. Simply because when one cannot see a problem, it does not exist for oneself.


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## Snurg (Dec 30, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> I don't quite get what more you expect? A meta-package to set up a FreeBSD desktop environment? Then bickering will ensue about what desktop manager it should be because everyone has a different view and use-case. Again, either you put all your weight behind one full solution or you have the fragmented situation as it is today which caters to the hacker type user happy to tinker for weeks on end.



Look at TrueOS (Lumina) or GhostBSD (Mate). This kind of exclusive coupling of a desktop with a forked OS, this contributes to the fragmented situation you mention.

FreeBSD is not fixated to one particular desktop. One can use all.

Its current main disadvantage imho is the gap between after finishing bsdinstall and having the DE environment properly set-up.
This is basically setting up X, choosing one (or multiple) DM meta packages, a few popular apps.
This gap has to be overcome manually by the user (think console, think tinker, think useless steep learning curve).

But, if there were a sweet install/configure like on some Linuxes, the user could just choose and get started quickly in his preferred DE.
With little or no tinkering at all.

And instead of bickering about which DE is the best, people could just work on their preferred DEs and contribute to their improved integration into FreeBSD.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

Snurg said:


> This gap has to be overcome manually by the user (think console, think tinker, think useless steep learning curve).



Thanks for clearing this up. I understand what you mean. But: isn't FreeBSD very much more manual *by design* than any Linux distribution and the "everything is a package" paradigm? To my understanding, such an approach would run contrary to those fundamental design decisions. Which in turn explains the desktop-focused forks like TrueOS and GhostBSD. You have to change way more than just a couple of install routines to get a properly usable desktop installation.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> Herrbischov, do not drink any alcohol today anymore, or cops will put you to the jail. And never do not forget to pray, God is a last chance, for those like you.



It would be so great if when people were out of arguments they'd just stop writing. Thanks for verifying my suspicions about you. You appear to be exactly the kind of troll I expected you to be based on your comments.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> Thank you very much, good bye.



Please, don't stop embarrassing yourself on my account. But I welcome your voluntary departure.


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## Snurg (Dec 30, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> You have to change way more than just a couple of install routines to get a properly usable desktop installation.


I think this is more about adding another (optional) install and system preconfiguration phase (sound, codecs, video drivers,...) as a first step.

Maybe such in turn would facilitate (or even enable) the integration of DMs by interested people.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

Snurg said:


> I think this is more about adding another (optional) install and system preconfiguration phase (sound, codecs, video drivers,...) as a first step.



I see where you're coming from. But given my observations on the manual nature of FreeBSD, I don't think it's likely for anything like that to ever become part of the install phase. Installation has always and probably will always be limited to the base system. Ports are seen as a completely separate part. Attempts at mixing those two will in all likelihood not go down well with the core team.


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## Snurg (Dec 30, 2017)

herrbischoff said:


> Installation has always and probably will always be limited to the base system. Ports are seen as a completely separate part. Attempts at mixing those two will in all likelihood not go down well with the core team.


I do not think that there will be any conflict zone, as this can from principle be only a postinstaller that starts where the base system install stops.
And it is exactly the manual nature of FreeBSD that makes me think that it will be no serious acceptance problem to users to do a pkg install postinstaller or such after base install, and then proceed setting up their desktop system using that.


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## herrbischoff (Dec 30, 2017)

Snurg said:


> only a postinstaller



So your proposal is basically a meta-package, yes? That should indeed be possible in one way or the other.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 30, 2017)

Even if there is a shipped version of FreeBSD coupled with a DE (that the committers don't control). There are issues that will remain beyond that. Who's going to distribute it? What about technical support? Who are people going to call if shit breaks? Will it be an attractive platform for third party developers? Will hardware OEMs pre-install the operating on their devices for people to purchase? Will people actually adopt and replace X system with FreeBSD?

These are things Apple/Microsoft already have vested in reach respective ecosystem. The questions mentioned above will have to be addressed eventually. And no, Forums, Mailing lists, and IRC are NOT support channels either.

So in context of the desktop market, what's the point? People thinking FreeBSD (or hell, Linux for that matter) can slap on X, a DE, and sing "Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!" are deluding themselves.


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## bforest (Dec 30, 2017)

I have been using PCBSD since 0.x and have not switched to TRUEOS yet but I think I am ready to.  I wish there was an easier upgrade path.  I am planning the: Backup / Reinstall path.

I once [2013ish] ran PCBSD on a Laptop [Compaq 6720s] I got for my daughter.  I replaced the CD drive with a matching caddy to hold a second HD.  This way I could use ZMirror boot.  It worked great for the time.  I had VirtualBox set up to run Windows7 so she could use Rosetta Stone language software and any other M$ centric software that she needed.

She has since moved on to a lighter laptop and I took this back,  I attempted to install TrueOS.  I was successful but have always had Graphics card issues.  Laptop is not nVidia.  Had to plug external monitor to get consistent video output without VESA mode.  It was kind of unusable until I went back to it about a month ago and updated TrueOS installation.  Then it was being a bit more consistent with the video.  Something has happened now and the video will no longer come up.  I am thinking some kind of corruption.  I have not tried the external monitor yet.  It is a heavy laptop.  I think I would just like another more up-to-date laptop with nVidia built in.

I made the following post:   http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=10578  asking folks like you to provide some hardware recommendations.

I run TrueOS at work on a VM in my Win8.1 workstation(laptop) and it runs fine (Dual monitor).  TrueOS Does everything I need.  I boot Win8.1 then Boot TrueOS VM and work from in there.  I was using Thunar to access windows shares on the office network but, After a recent TrueOS update Thunar no-longer runs properly.. when I request network drive it crashes the app.

I don't hear anyone in here mentioning the problem with some Linux based apps that they are "designed" to run on Linux so when you try to run them on BSD they have various issues.  That was why I was excited about Lumina which seemed to be being developed around FreeBSD.  KDE is nice and I guess Gnome but lots of the built in controls are designed to read/update Linux config  files.  Seems to cause issues or they cannot be used and the guys must develop our own "tools" when running on BSD.

I don't have an issue with "conforming" to the OS requirements ... if I want this OS, which I do.   so... 

I have had almost 0 issues running nVidia hardware on my desktop, I see no reason to try others.  My biggest issue is going to be with Bluetooth.  (I want it) used to use it early in PCBSD.   Anyway... those are some of my thoughts.  I hope someone can recommend.

-Ben


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## scottro (Dec 30, 2017)

This may be my  memory being incorrect, so take it with a grain of salt.

I remember when Ubuntu came out.  Lots of people tried it, for fun, for whatever.  Regular Linux users who had used Gentoo (or a BSD) had gotten married, had kids, didn't have time, so would use Ubuntu, which most of the time, just worked.  Not perfect of course, but it made it a lot easier. 

As I remember it, this was part of the beginning of hardware and software vendors putting a bit more effort into getting things working with Linux. So, it used Gnome, there were lots of other deskops, it wasn't ready to compete with Windows or Apple, but it made it a LOT easier to get Linux working with your hardware and software.  Therefore if TrueOS, or GhostBSD or any of them, has somewhat similar success, although we'd probably have to work around newcomer-aimed things that got put into it, it would probably make it less difficult to find laptops (or other hardware) that worked with FreeBSBD.   Another factor (one of those things I vaguely remember reading, I never tried to verify it or anything, so almost certainly one person's opinion) was that Mr. Shuttleworth had already shown he could fit in the business world, so the fact that it was him trying to get these hardware and software vendors to support Ubuntu was also a factor.


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## scottro (Dec 31, 2017)

Again, the Ubuntu example. No tech support, just something aimed at the less technical who still have interest, who don't care that much about the style of desktop, so don't care about Lumina flaws. I honestly don't understand why folks in this thread seem to want to discourage this, which, as I said in my previous post, could, if it became popular, be a good thing for FreeBSD. It's not going to compete with Windows and Mac, the desktop and lack of support aren't going to be the things putting people off it.


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## scottro (Dec 31, 2017)

Going to add this from forum rules, as I find this thread interesting and getting it closed for someone's bad day would be a shame. 

Rule for from https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/38922


Personal attacks and profanity (in the context of an argument) are not allowed, and that includes users and developers like. Gross breaches of netiquette, like excerpting or reposting private mail when permission to do so was not and would not be forthcoming, are frowned upon but not specifically enforced. However, there are also very few cases where such content would fit within the charter of a forum and it would therefore probably rate a warning (or ban) on that basis alone.


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## vermaden (Dec 31, 2017)

Sensucht94 said:


> Hi Vermaden, It's true HAMMER2 is still unfinished, but  as I'm writing this on HAMMER2 now  I can tell it's very stable, extremely performing even on legacy hardware and partially resolves the problem of tiny file systems quickly filling up if unmantained. HAMMER2 brings many changes over original HAMMER: See the Design Chart for HEAD, as well as latest improvements in 5.0.2 release.


It would be great to have HardenedBSD with HAMMER2 filesystem, but that int gonna happen fast


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## Beastie7 (Dec 31, 2017)

scottro said:


> Again, the Ubuntu example. No tech support, just something aimed at the less technical who still have interest, who don't care that much about the style of desktop, so don't care about Lumina flaws. I honestly don't understand why folks in this thread seem to want to discourage this, which, as I said in my previous post, could, if it became popular, be a good thing for FreeBSD. It's not going to compete with Windows and Mac, the desktop and lack of support aren't going to be the things putting people off it.



This is a bit of a special case. Mark and Canonical actually went full force in marketing Ubuntu for the Desktop and funded the development of the infrastructure necessary for it to be a viable platform. I don't any of this from the FreeBSD committers or iXsystems for TrueOS. 

But then Mark gave up because, as another person alluded to earlier, there's no money on consumer open source. Who's going to waste money on an idea with no return on investment?


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## tankist02 (Dec 31, 2017)

Snurg There is already a port that post-installs a desktop: sysutils/desktop-installer/ port" href="http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/desktop-installer/">sysutils/desktop-installer/


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## bforest (Jan 1, 2018)

http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?p=63682#post63682

The forums all seem to be discussing "IF" one should use FreeBSD (or variant) on a Laptop.

Since I have already done it and already decided I will do it again. I am just wondering "what" hardware any of you recommend?

What are you using in your laptop running FreeBSD or TrueOS?

Thanks!!
-Ben


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## scottro (Jan 1, 2018)

If that question is to me, as I answered on daemonforums, I'm using FreeBSD-CURRENT.  (It's best to try to confine topics to one thread, though--investigate questions on the other forum on those forums).  

The original question was whether anyone is using TrueOS on a laptop.   Some people are.  Others will suggest running FreeBSD-CURRENT (on a laptop built after 2013 or 2014), OpenBSD, or something else. 

There is no one correct answer to the question of whether one SHOULD run FreeBSD on a laptop, it depends upon your situation, and that actually merits a different thread. This thread is trying (more or less) to concentrate on TrueOS and its good and bad points on a laptop.


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## vermaden (Jan 2, 2018)

bforest said:


> Since I have already done it and already decided I will do it again. I am just wondering "what" hardware any of you recommend?
> 
> What are you using in your laptop running FreeBSD or TrueOS?


ThinkPads X220/T420s/T520/W520/X230/W530/T430/T530 work without any issues, with 11.1-RELEASE.

ThinkPad X260/X270/T460/T470/... work with 12-CURRENT and DRM-NEXT.


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## lonestar (Jan 3, 2018)

vermaden said:


> ThinkPad T530 works without any issues, with 11.1-RELEASE.



Can confirm. Works great on this for me.


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## herrbischoff (Jan 5, 2018)

vermaden said:


> ThinkPads X220/T420s/T520/[...way more laptops...]



I just wondered why there appear to be several people here running more than 4 laptops with FreeBSD. Is that meant to be in succession (retired one, got the next) or parallel (all at once)? If the latter, I'd be interested to know why. Because for the life of me I cannot figure out the benefit or running 7 laptops at the same time.


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## vermaden (Jan 5, 2018)

herrbischoff said:


> I just wondered why there appear to be several people here running more than 4 laptops with FreeBSD. Is that meant to be in succession (retired one, got the next) or parallel (all at once)? If the latter, I'd be interested to know why. Because for the life of me I cannot figure out the benefit or running 7 laptops at the same time.


I do not own all of these laptops/models at the same time 

Currently I only have T420s.

I have used FreeBSD 10/11 as work workstation on W530 from my employee, then I purchased private T520 and installed FreeBSD there, after using it for a while (and carrying in a backpack) I decided that it is too big/heavy, so I got T420s and installed FreeBSD there and sold T520. W530 remains at work. My buddy has X220 so I tried once FreeBSD there. The T420 is same in terms of BIOS/firmware as T420s/X220/T520 so it will also work. There is also great list of supported laptops here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

Regards,
vermaden


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## MarcoB (Jan 5, 2018)

herrbischoff said:


> I just wondered why there appear to be several people here running more than 4 laptops with FreeBSD. Is that meant to be in succession (retired one, got the next) or parallel (all at once)? If the latter, I'd be interested to know why. Because for the life of me I cannot figure out the benefit or running 7 laptops at the same time.


Well because it's fun . I have 4 different computer here with 4 different os's all running at the same time.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 5, 2018)

I have five laptops currently running FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE and one running OpenBSD 6.2. Four of them are Thinkpads, with an IBM Thinkpad T43 due to arrive Monday. I have another T61 that went to heaven, for some reason, when I pulled the USB mouse from the dock while it was compiling ports for use as parts.

I live in a small apartment, in a building that houses around 50 other units, so space is at a premium for me. I always have at least 2 FreeBSD boxen running at once to work from, sometime 3, and my X61 that serves as the music source to my vintage stereo system runs constantly. I leave one in the bedroom and plan to make it into a Kodi box when I have time. However, I am interested in and open to parallel computing options.

I usually don't run them all at once, when I do they are seated at all sides surrounding me, but I can have them all online if I use my Netgear switch with my router. I've rebuilt all my FreeBSD machines at once when the version update was released to save time. The only issue being keeping track where I'm at with each one in ports, and I do that by memory.


Yes, I have thought about what can I do with all these machines at once...

What better way to show FreeBSD can rule as a desktop OS than *actually using it* as one? On 5-6 machines no less?

Because if it didn't rule, in my book, I wouldn't use it, be here, or continue to promote it like PT Barnum.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Jan 5, 2018)

I'm using two machines, one PC and one laptop (T420). (FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE+FreeBSD 12-CURRENT/Devuan testing)
I'm using both machines at the same time, I use PC mostly for backups and laptop is a workstation.
PC monitor is at left of me, usually I'm watching movies, youtube, etc, or listening to the music,
when using it, while working on a laptop, while sitting on my couch . For terminal tasks I use ssh.
I use vncviewer (net/tigervnc and net/x11vnc) to manipulate PC.


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## Sensucht94 (Jan 5, 2018)

herrbischoff said:


> I just wondered why there appear to be several people here running more than 4 laptops with FreeBSD. Is that meant to be in succession (retired one, got the next) or parallel (all at once)? If the latter, I'd be interested to know why. Because for the life of me I cannot figure out the benefit or running 7 laptops at the same time.



I have FreeBSD on a laptop, NetBSD on a older laptop, NetBSD on Rpi3, FreeDOS on very old laptop, Void Linux+DragonflyBSD on desktop 

Laptops just keep redundantly multiplicating throughout years, as from time to time there's  someone getting rid of one, and me adopting this orphan computer  XD


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## rigoletto@ (Jan 5, 2018)

Just about the HammerFS subject: HERE and HERE.

Btw, I hate laptops. I just use them when strictely needed.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 5, 2018)

ILUXA said:


> While you, guys, from TrueOS, are trying to do something,
> FreeBSD will never become a good desktop OS,
> while its developers use MacOS. Also it is
> a very bad marketing strategy, to say
> ...



I was exhausted this morning and if my affect came off as flat or curt I apologize, I've slept a little now but haven't been lately. I don't dislike anyone here or hold a grudge against anyone and I hope I don't give that impression... Sneaker sniffer living down the hall from me the exception, but I digress.

I didn't pick out every video of FreeBSD developers and the like using a Mac, but hopefully this should get my point across and it will be my last on the subject. I have more than done my part as I see it for TrueOS and already said quite enough.

However, I think it imperative to the success of TrueOS for everyone involved in the project to get reacquainted with the real world of people who use desktops (I mean FreeBSD desktops and TrueOS moguls using them. Daily.), and involve a new group of testers before you make the next release. Not necessarily people skilled all the intricacies of FreeBSD, but people who know the basics how to run a desktop and use one on a daily basis. And definitely not me.

That's what you're trying to put out there, a fully functional desktop to match or exceed Linux and if it doesn't work right for people who know what they're doing it won't for those who don't and you are destined to fail. Simple as that.

And when someone advises you of a problem, don't automatically discount it or wait a month before providing a response. It doesn't bode well with the people dedicating their free time to your moneymaking project and makes people think you couldn't care less and their time wasted.

This will be my last post on the subject and I'm done. Succeed or fail it's on you. I do have enough time invested in the project to not want to see you fail, but horse, the water is right here. Drink it or not as you see fit.

Or just continue to tell yourself TrueOS is doing fine and those buzzards circling overhead don't know beans about frijoles.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Jan 6, 2018)

Unfortunately, the truth is (IMO of course) is that FreeBSD is heavily influenced by Apple™,
and Apple®© is not interested in FreeBSD as in a desktop OS...
Because anyone will never buy those ******** macs , that cost much more than it should.

That's what logic says to me, after such interviews with "kernel developers".


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## herrbischoff (Jan 7, 2018)

Trihexagonal said:


> However, I think it imperative to the success of TrueOS for everyone involved in the project to get reacquainted with the real world of people who use desktops (I mean FreeBSD desktops and TrueOS moguls using them. Daily.), and involve a new group of testers before you make the next release. Not necessarily people skilled all the intricacies of FreeBSD, but people who know the basics how to run a desktop and use one on a daily basis. And definitely not me.
> 
> That's what you're trying to put out there, a fully functional desktop to match or exceed Linux and if it doesn't work right for people who know what they're doing it won't for those who don't and you are destined to fail. Simple as that.
> 
> And when someone advises you of a problem, don't automatically discount it or wait a month before providing a response. It doesn't bode well with the people dedicating their free time to your moneymaking project and makes people think you couldn't care less and their time wasted.



Yes. That. Thank you. This is exactly what I mean. Reality check time except "works for me" time.


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## herrbischoff (Jan 7, 2018)

vermaden said:


> I do not own all of these laptops/models at the same time  [...] There is also great list of supported laptops here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops



I'm quite relieved!  Thanks for the list of supported laptops, should be interesting to check when acquiring used machines.



MarcoB said:


> Well because it's fun . I have 4 different computer here with 4 different os's all running at the same time.



Alright, point taken — you just can't argue with fun! 



Trihexagonal said:


> However, I am interested in and open to parallel computing options.



I like this as a use case.



Sensucht94 said:


> Laptops just keep redundantly multiplicating throughout years, as from time to time there's someone getting rid of one, and me adopting this orphan computer XD



I totally forgot about this one. The getting-rid-of part is far more common among PC users than Mac users though. Good of you to give those needy orphaned laptops a home where they can thrive.


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## Beno Kurniawan (Feb 3, 2018)

I am not a power user and not having computer science background. Just a regular person who use computer to work and help my customers solving problems with their machine I sold (the machine software unfortunately only run in Wind*ws).

Come from lin*x reading lots of articles and forums, found the fact that BSD is way much superior in stability and performance.

Tried to build FreeBSD on my laptop by extensively reading the handbook, but my knowledge not yet there. Indeed I successfully have a FreeBSD desktop complete with DE, but then find problems on automounting USB, once this solved, then I found another problems in mounting my ntfs external hdd.

TrueOS fills the gap for a regular user like me to learn BSD deeper while I can start to working with stability and performance of BSD system.

I run TroueOS stable on my A*us laptop.


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## Birdy (Nov 7, 2018)

vermaden said:


> *- windows management:* <various #!/bin/sh scripts like aero-snap.sh or tile.sh that manage windows with Openbox>



I searched the forum and the posted links to the scripts give "404 Not Found". Did you move them elsewhere?


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## vermaden (Nov 11, 2018)

Birdy said:


> I searched the forum and the posted links to the scripts give "404 Not Found". Did you move them elsewhere?



Probably many times 

They both are currently available here: https://github.com/vermaden/scripts

Keep in mind that while *aero-snap.sh* is quite 'polished and production ready' the *tile.sh* needs some serious rework to be useful with more then 3-4 windows.

Regards,
vermaden


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## vimanuelt (Dec 21, 2018)

The question was whether anyone was using TrueOS on a laptop. Yes, I am running TrueOS unstable (FreeBSD 13-CURRENT) on an old ASUS G751JY laptop, and I am having a great experience. 

Regards,
vimanuelt


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## ProphetOfDoom (Dec 21, 2018)

I don’t generally use any OS that’s less popular than its parent OS. For example look at all the Ubuntu spinoffs. You just get Ubuntu but with someone else’s bugs and unprofessionalism included.
I have FreeBSD on my Thinkpad with KDE.


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## vimanuelt (Dec 22, 2018)

AlexanderProphet said:


> I don’t generally use any OS that’s less popular than its parent OS. For example look at all the Ubuntu spinoffs. You just get Ubuntu but with someone else’s bugs and unprofessionalism included.
> I have FreeBSD on my Thinkpad with KDE.



One should not assume popularity equals quality. Most people settle for what is just good enough or mediocre, simply for convenience. With regards to spins, spins attempt to address niche needs (i.e., Ubuntu Studio). It could be argued that spins attempt to address the need for quality.  

I'm glad to see you have a solution that works for you. 

Regards,
vimanuelt


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