Anyone moved to a member of the BSD family?
- Thread starter wengole
- Start date
I've used it in various incarnations over the last 10 years. Mostly for servers / storage. Occasionally as a desktop. Predominantly FreeBSD and derivatives.
I didn't really move to it. Linux is still my main. My favourite thing about it though is package management and ports. It's so good Gentoo based portage on ports. The thing I like least is how long it takes to configure a desktop exactly as you want it. A lot of sticking stuff in /etc/loader.conf, /etc/login.conf, /etc/profile, /etc/rc.conf and more. It's even more of a pain in the arse to build up a desktop system from a base install than it is on Linux.
I didn't really move to it. Linux is still my main. My favourite thing about it though is package management and ports. It's so good Gentoo based portage on ports. The thing I like least is how long it takes to configure a desktop exactly as you want it. A lot of sticking stuff in /etc/loader.conf, /etc/login.conf, /etc/profile, /etc/rc.conf and more. It's even more of a pain in the arse to build up a desktop system from a base install than it is on Linux.
Funny you should say that, I was testing out what it would take to setup a FreeBSD desktop in a VM last night. I had to freeze the VM as it was getting way too late and I needed to go to bed (could've left the computer on but didn't want to).
I was just building a basic XFCE environment from ports. I did like being able to choose all the options for everything when building it. I've always put BSDs strengths in server applications and was interested to see it as a desktop.
I was just building a basic XFCE environment from ports. I did like being able to choose all the options for everything when building it. I've always put BSDs strengths in server applications and was interested to see it as a desktop.
You can quicken up installation with binary package installation, rather than building everything from source. Granted, you don't then get the configuration selection control you do when building from source. But if you're building really big packages and suites from source, you can be stuck for ages monitoring the thing going through the pre-build and build routines, waiting for configuration options to pop up. You can of course cut out those choices with the right option when you pass the install command, but if you're doing that you might as well just install a binary packaged default. I think there's a command to also have all the configuration options prompt first, so that you can select them all and then not have the install hang waiting for input because you've gone off to do something while waiting for it to compile.
On servers /storage I would always build from source for greater options control. But with the desktop environments I would always install binary packages. The defaults by packagers / maintainers are usually quite sane.
On servers /storage I would always build from source for greater options control. But with the desktop environments I would always install binary packages. The defaults by packagers / maintainers are usually quite sane.
A lot of the configurations I did just chose the default options, so probably could save some time with binaries. The FreeBSD installer with zfs on root is a nice feature.
I'll spend some more time on it this weekend. Although if I really want to try/learn it I should install it on an actual machine rather than a VM. If I were to use it, I think it would probably be on a storage server. There always seems to be some random program that means I'd need to use linux or Windows or OSX on my desktop.
I'll spend some more time on it this weekend. Although if I really want to try/learn it I should install it on an actual machine rather than a VM. If I were to use it, I think it would probably be on a storage server. There always seems to be some random program that means I'd need to use linux or Windows or OSX on my desktop.
Yep. OS X back in 2006.
OS X has the advantage of a unix base but with the popularity that means software is developed to run natively on it. I think the big ones are the Adobe suites and Lightroom etc.
I read a rumour that they were going to incorporate ZFS, which would've been great. They could still do it, but they've pretty much abandoned the server side.