# This may sound silly but I have a small question to ask.



## DragonFart (Dec 12, 2013)

Lately, I've been thinking of moving from Linux to BSD and after a quick look around, I've decided FreeBSD might be the one am going to venture into. A little bit about me: my skill in Linux is only intermediate (I know how to compile/patch kernels, am quite comfortable in a terminal environment (not too much though  ), am able to do simple bash scripting, prefer netinstall, dislikes desktop environments, likes window managers (my favourite is Openbox), can't stand Ubuntu and its derivatives, hate the NSA). I have a doubt in Linus (when Linux users ask him about rdrand, he responds: Linux users are ignorant and he knows better, Snowden revelation says otherwise).

TLDR; I have only three years of Linux experience (Debian only) and am a former Windows fanboy LOL .

So my question is: for a noobish like me, am I ready to take on FreeBSD? Or should I just forget about it and come back in three years when my Linux skills have reached exospheric levels?

Thank you!


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## ondra_knezour (Dec 12, 2013)

Anybody who can read can use FreeBSD. Start here.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 12, 2013)

You might also want to check out this thread, it somewhat deals with the same question.


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## SirDice (Dec 12, 2013)

If you have a working Windows or Linux setup just install a virtual machine on it and install it there. Then you can try it out without destroying your current, working, setup.


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## DragonFart (Dec 12, 2013)

ShelLuser said:
			
		

> You might also want to check out this thread, it somewhat deals with the same question.



*W*oah, thanks man. that was a good read. *A* question though: if you were me, would you keep using *D*ebian or try installing freebsd FreeBSD on *V*irtual*B*ox and then slowly move to a host? im *I*'m not running a server or anything, just the typical average joe's usage (Internet browsing, movies watching, music listening, etc.). *A* friend of mine told me not to waste my time on bsd FreeBSD as *D*ebian (*L*inux) is better in that aspect. *I* don't know if he was serious or just being a troll.


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## DragonFart (Dec 12, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> If you have a working Windows or Linux setup just install a virtual machine on it and install it there. Then you can try it out without destroying your current, working, setup.



*T*hanks, *I*'ll give it a try.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Dec 12, 2013)

Why do you want to use FreeBSD? In my case there are some strong feelings about the ethics and business practice of MS and Apple as well as closed source and proprietary software in general. I've also got some odd ideas generally.  That's just me. I have the luxury of running anything I want because I'm an amateur and don't have to be up on whatever some boss would want.



			
				DragonFart said:
			
		

> . . .  if you were me, would you keep using *D*ebian or try installing freebsd FreeBSD on *V*irtual*B*ox and then slowly move to a host? im *I*'m not running a server or anything, just the typical average joe's usage (Internet browsing, movies watching, music listening, etc.). *A* friend of mine told me not to waste my time on bsd FreeBSD as *D*ebian (*L*inux) is better in that aspect. *I* don't know if he was serious or just being a troll.



Your friend may not be a troll. I would not say that FreeBSD is the best choice for a desktop system if you don't have a particular reason - though curiosity alone would be a good one. Debian is great, but if you only use Linux for YouTube, movies, and music, I would chose something like Mint. Of course, you may also want to broaden your knowledge of computing and don't mind putting in a bit of work. In that case I would recommend FreeBSD as a rewarding adventure.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 12, 2013)

DragonFart said:
			
		

> *A* question though: if you were me, would you keep using *D*ebian or try installing freebsd FreeBSD on *V*irtual*B*ox and then slowly move to a host?


I can't really answer that. Well, not without some bias and perhaps a little prejudice.

To be perfectly honest I have some serious doubts. The thing is; you're most likely using an X environment with several programs to make up your desktop and such. But an X environment on Debian doesn't have to be all that different from an X environment on FreeBSD. I can come up with several possible advantages you might get, but in the end most of those advantages are more system related, "under the hood" so to speak.

So there is a chance that you may be doing a lot of work, only to end up with a completely different OS which has nearly the same look and feel (your X desktop).

I'm actually tempted to agree with your friend. It leans to "change because of change".

Of course that doesn't have to be a negative aspect; in the end you may even learn something new. And sometimes change because of the change can be a good motivation to have some fun (if you're into tinkering with your computer and such).

If you're interested I'd most certainly start with a virtual environment first. It helps you get a taste of FreeBSD without having to dive into the deep.


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## CoTones (Dec 12, 2013)

Both are free, so trying them is not a daunting decision. You lose nothing, moreover, you gain experience and a wider view. Then use what fits you better.


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## tryingagain (Dec 12, 2013)

Well, if you managed to get Debian working, you most definitely are ready for FreeBSD  :e 

(What I mean is: I spent two days trying to get Debian 32, Debian 64, and Mint, even starting on my HTPC (trial box, but brand new non-exotic hardware). Then I had enough of it; they didn't even boot up, and since I am running a rock stable pfSense and have been deeply in love with FreeBSD ever since I first learned of it some years ago, I installed PC-BSD 9.2. Fourteen minutes, up and running, smiling at me with a 'hi, you there again?'  :beergrin ).


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## Deleted member 9563 (Dec 12, 2013)

tryingagain said:
			
		

> Well, if you managed to get Debian working, you most definitely are ready for FreeBSD  :e
> 
> (What I mean is: I spent two days trying to get Debian 32, Debian 64, and Mint, even starting on my HTPC (trial box, but brand new non-exotic hardware). Then I had enough of it; they didn't even boot up, and since I am running a rock stable pfSense and have been deeply in love with FreeBSD ever since I first learned of it some years ago, I installed PC-BSD 9.2. Fourteen minutes, up and running, smiling at me with a 'hi, you there again?'  :beergrin ).



That doesn't sound right and you know it. Debian is very solid, and if you had a problem it would be with some proprietary or closed source bits that you wanted. That's why one might want to use Mint, which I based on Ubuntu (fool proof), which in turn is based on Debian. It has all the bits you need for modern media. For various reasons, I have recently installed both. It didn't take very long, and absolutely nothing went wrong. Yes, things can get wonky. I've encountered problems too - everybody has. I suggest you may have had a bad burn or some fundamental thing. One has to be careful about generalizing. As for PC-BSD, I've installed that a number of times. It too goes in like the Linux systems. Very easy. So, we can at least agree on that.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 12, 2013)

Either that or he was trying out Sid 

My only gripe with Linux distributions which are based on something else (or in the case of Mint on two other distributions) is that you can't fully rely on the distribution itself to continue providing that which you want it to. Because in those cases they only add a little content to an existing solution.

Now, in the case of Debian I don't see that as a problem because I doubt the Debian crew would apply drastic and strange changes. But Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) on the other hand... I still recall the uproar over Unity as well as allowing Amazon some extra access into the end users search results. So if you're using a distribution which is based on something else I can't help wonder if you can really put some trust into it.

And those issues are all over the place. I know Mint advertises with "Our LTS version is maintained for 5 years". But the moment Canonical changes that on Ubuntu then I don't see this working out for Mint any longer.


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## DragonFart (Dec 13, 2013)

Thanks guys and @@fonz, I apologize for my bad grammar and all the edits that you had to go through (English is not my first language)  :beergrin


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## pkubaj (Dec 13, 2013)

You've got three years of experience. When I started with FreeBSD, I had only a year (although it was quite intensive, I started with Debian and quickly moved to Arch).


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## freebuser (Dec 13, 2013)

I was on a similar situation sometime back.

I was with Debian for a long time (maybe around five to six years). I also had Debian on my home server, later tried FreeBSD in my *server* and fall in love with its organized way of configurations. I have tried FreeBSD on my desktop several times but for one or the other reason didn't work well with my requirements. It may be as simple as getting the sound card to configure right or as complicated as incompatibilities with several Arduino boards on the market.

For now, I am still running Debian on one of my desktops, PC-BSD on another (son's) and FreeBSD on my server.

If you have lots of time in hand to configure a desktop, then you can go with FreeBSD, otherwise I would suggest to stick with Debian.

Cheers,


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## tryingagain (Dec 13, 2013)

OJ said:
			
		

> tryingagain said:
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To be honest: no, I don't know  :e 

My story is this: early '90s, there was this 'new thing', better than Windows 3.0/3.1. It was called 'Linux'. I tried many distributions back then. I managed to crash them all within one hour (no joke). I tried them for years (you know, back then there was a free CD with the monthly computer magazine - ah, those days   ). Early 2000, I gave up, too much hassle. Install one package, and it breaks the next. A couple of years later, while working at a client, I accidentally walked into the wrong office. Sysadmins of that corporation sat there. They all had these weird looking GUI's on their screens. I asked them 'Linux??'. They laughed, and said: "No, serious stuff: Unix."

So I found freebsd FreeBSD. In my early days I went with 'bare' FreeBSD (I think it was 4, or 5?). It took me one week just to have KDE installed  :e But then again: for over a decade I managed to crash every new Linux distribution by simply going into the CLI and doing something as basic as `ls -l`, or `apt-get install` (as an example), and I managed to have broken something again. And then I met FBSD FreeBSD: I could type in something and it would still simply continue to work   

However: making it a real desktop was cumbersome. Then I discovered DesktopBSD. Unfortunately, the kind man who was behind that, 'Peter', had to abandon the project due to other interests. At the same time I also discovered PC-BSD, which wasn't as stable then as it appears to be now. So I went back to FreeBSD a couple of years later, to "try again". A great member of this fine forum has gone through great, great, efforts back then to help me get it to work, as it appeared I had a visit from Mr. Murphy (and his whole family  :e ). Just when I got it to work a little bit I got a serious accident, which brought me into a coma and has kept me ill for years. Just recently, things have been going a little bit better, and so I decided to try and get rid of Windows once again.

My brother in law swears by Debian. From what I remember, Debian is sort of (IMHO) the most serious Linux, and if memory serves me correctly the Debian- and FreeBSD developers work together. Having memories of how cumbersome BSD on the desktop was for me, I decided to install Debian. On my new HTPC, which has an AMD A10-5700, a new Gigabyte mobo motherboard, 16 GB RAM, and a WD Black harddisk. X64 installed, booted, I log in, nothing happens, I go get coffee, I come back, there is an "oops, something went wrong, please log out and log in again". That's all it said. Of course logging in again only gave the same problem. Fine, so Debian i386 then. I wrote it to the USB stick, installed, it appeared to be going ok, it finished installing, rebooted, and gave three pages of very strange lines (not even normal error messages, but just these lines full of numbers and [ 5 ] and kind of stuff). I was irritated by then. Fine, Mint then: I created new USB stick (Mint 16), it boots, the installer starts, I get through the first two or three pages, and Mint does similar to what Debian did: "there was an error, installer can't continue, press enter to reboot". No clue as to what the problem was, and there I was. After three distributions, I now had to go google on some vague problem?

By then I was extremely irritated. I created a USB stick with PC-BSD 9.2, installed it, and fourteen minutes later it was up and running and I was browsing using Iceweasel.

I have the same experience with pfSense, BTW: you put the USB stick in, and five minutes later it is installed and running.

So ever since the early nineties until this very day Linux has always been giving me problems, FreeBSD almost never gives me problems. That is why I donated to FreeBSD, pfSense and PC-BSD, and not to Linux (well, not quite true, I did donate to OpenElec, as that also just works).

So it might very well be my bad luck with Linux, but then again: I am not doing anything differently. Write either Linux or FreeBSD to a USB stick, and try to install it.


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## DragonFart (Dec 13, 2013)

Great story you got there @tryingagain. Mine wasn't as great, pathetic really. My very first Linux started with Fedora 7 (many years ago) and it was the coolest thing that I've ever seen (Beryl and Compiz, what's not to like  :e  ) but it lasted only a couple of months, then it broke to complete uselessness and it was really hard back then to get things right and after a few days of headaches I threw the CD across the room and went back to using Windows. In 2009, I got real tired of using Windows, googled Linux, and Ubuntu came out on top so I gave it a quick play and didn't like it that much so did a quick reading and found out Ubuntu was based on Debian. Long story short, that was how I ended up with Debian. And what's funny, I came here looking to leave Debian but end up loving Debian even more   :OO


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## Beastie (Dec 13, 2013)

Yes, @DragonFart, like @ondra_knezour already said, you're ready to switch to FreeBSD as soon as you start reading the proper documentation (mainly the handbook and man pages).

I was myself a Windows user in the distant past. Then came the time to upgrade since Microsoft had dropped support for the version I was using and it was slowly becoming unusable in the modern world. I had the choice to install a newer version but I found it was too heavy for the machine, and frankly also got too tired of all the crap I had to endure all these years; so instead of "downgrading" to the newer version I upgraded to FreeBSD and have been using it ever since on that same old hardware. I never looked back.
If I didn't have to use Windows at work, I wouldn't touch a machine running Windows with a 10-miles pole. :e


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## ShelLuser (Dec 13, 2013)

tryingagain said:
			
		

> My story is this: early '90s, there was this 'new thing', better than Windows 3.0/3.1. It was called 'Linux'. I tried many distributions back then. I managed to crash them all within one hour (no joke). I tried them for years (you know, back then there was a free CD with the monthly computer magazine - ah, those days   ). Early 2000, I gave up, too much hassle. Install one package, and it breaks the next.


No offense intended but I can't help wonder what the heck you did with those environments. It most certainly isn't all to blame on Linux.

Thing is; I started out during that time myself. During that time I had finished several Solaris studies and because Solaris/x86 was extremely expensive back then I relied on Linux to keep my Unix experiences fresh. I was so mesmerized by both the extensiveness and complexity of this "Unix thing" that I wasn't going to allow my experiences to go to waste (read: of course I needed all of this for my work, but I was experienced enough to realize that you'd only be using a small subset of the things you learned).

At first I tried using Debian 1.x but eventually ended up with RedHat 3.0.3 ("Picasso", hard to forget that name), using the 2.0.x branch of the Linux kernel. 

Sure, package management wasn't as mature as it is now, but I can't quite relate to your comments about one package breaking another. Package dependencies were something which had already been well in place during those days. Heck, even Solaris (which package system is roughly comparable to the pkg_* tools which we have on FreeBSD) was already quite capable to deal with dependencies.

The main difference was that it was a lot easier to break things because the tools didn't do as much handholding as they do now. If I use a `# pkg_delete package` command and there are other ports depending on this one then the command will refuse to carry out my orders. That was quite different back then; it simply removed the package just as you told it to.

But can you really blame the package manager when that cause of action broke dependencies? Some people feel this way, but quite frankly I disagree with that. Because what's so hard about checking for involved dependencies prior to removing a package?

It's something I still do today, even though I don't really have to. `pkg_info -Rx name` to check for packages which depend on name and `pkg_info -rx name` to check if there's anything name itself depends on (from the top of my head, here's hoping I haven't mixed them up ).


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## fonz (Dec 13, 2013)

ShelLuser said:
			
		

> At first I tried using Debian 1.x but eventually ended up with RedHat 3.0.3 ("Picasso", hard to forget that name)
> [snip]
> Sure, package management wasn't as mature as it is now, but I can't quite relate to your comments about one package breaking another.


I've had similar experiences. I'd surmise that earlier Linux distributions (in my case RedHat 5.2 ("Apollo") being the first one I used at home) were not as convoluted as what we see nowadays.


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## tryingagain (Dec 14, 2013)

fonz said:
			
		

> ShelLuser said:
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I just learned two new words I had to look up  :e

I suspect you are a native English speaker with a certain level of education  :h 

(  )


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## tryingagain (Dec 14, 2013)

ShelLuser said:
			
		

> No offense intended but I can't help wonder what the heck you did with those environments. It most certainly isn't all to blame on Linux.
> 
> --snip--



No offense taken  :beer 

There undoubtedly is a lot of truth in what you write; not all was Linux to blame for. Stupid users, like the undersigned, can do a lot of things wrong. Where it doesn't always help (or should I say 'didn't always help? Perhaps it is improved these days?) that documentation wasn't always very clear (to say it kind), or was even absent. Where it also didn't really help that as a noob you would find many Linux users on the fora that were only there to show off their own 'knowledge' and make a fool of newbies for nothing but the benefit of their own self confidence (I think this rings a bell for many people).

So, what it boiled down for me was this: I have a background in economics and auditing. I have been interested in computers ever since the very first day I saw them. I like to think that I am one of the most stupid persons on this earth, albeit perhaps not _the_ most stupid person, meaning: give me a well written manual, and I will digest it as long as necessary in order to understand stuff. That, by the way, was one thing they were teaching us back at university in those days; whatever you write, _it should be constructed and detailed in such a way that a fairly intelligent person, who has no knowledge of the subject area, is able to understand it_. I think it is fair to say that 99% of all that was written back then, and still is written these days, does not comply with that very elementary rule(...). It isn't simply restricted to xNix documentation (or Windows/Apple/whatever)-documentation; I see it in my own line of work also. As a 'side-responsibility' I am still involved in the academic world, where I am co-examiner for MA-students. It really is: 99% (low deviation  :stud ) of concept-thesis material I send back after ten minutes with a "my grandmother wouldn't understand what you are writing --- would yours?"

So, I dare to propose that the documentation back then was a mess. Give messy documentation and a keyboard to an already not too bright new user, and there are going to be accidents  P 

Add to that the not so stable Linux back then (there is a reason everybody back then said: "Linux is not for the masses, it is not polished and stable enough)", and you end up with one not so happy Windows-user such as myself. And for some reason or the other, FreeBSD has always been way more stable; I couldn't mess it up as easily as I could mess up Linux (hi SUSE - I hate you  §e).

Now, this is not to flame on Linux; I have great, great, great respect and admiration for all the developers, paid and unpaid, who are devoting their talents to making it better. But from an economist point of view, I think their product model is wrong, and FreeBSD's is better. At least, what I understood back then is that 'everybody can write code and dump it in a Linux-distribution', whereas in FreeBSD there is a central monitoring and approving process for code, to assure that is consistent with what is already inside the OS, and won't break anything. Which I think is mandatory when you are building a _system_. Imagine the brake engineers and the engine engineers over at BMW not talking to each other and integrating their design into something stable and consistent  :r


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