Describe Your BSD Experience

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by AutoCascade, Jul 10, 2017.

  1. AutoCascade

    AutoCascade Registered Member

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    The last time I tried it I dropped it because under BSD Chromium seemed to be unsandboxed (chrome://sandbox) however it appears that there is a sandbox but it is unrecognized by Chromium itself since its not one that Chromium is designed to work with by the Chromium developers. The same is likely true of Firefox.

    Supported desktops at least on FreeBsd were very old (at least when I last tried it) and getting support is an exercise in patience.

    There is a lot of attitude from BSD users that no one should ask questions at least that's my take and searching online for answers is no panacea.

    So I'm curious to hear other Linux users describe their BSD experiences. I'm betting a lot of distro hoppers have tried it along the way.
     
  2. oliverjia

    oliverjia Registered Member

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    BSD is not for average users. More likely for developers.
     
  3. J_L

    J_L Registered Member

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    Most of my experience was PC-BSD in VirtualBox. Worked OK most of the time, but eventually dropped because it was mostly pointless since I have no use for it.

    Pure FreeBSD went over my head, and I didn't bother to learn it. And yeah, I remember their attitude: RTFM.
     
  4. Balthazar

    Balthazar Registered Member

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    I am running a pfsense firewall which is based on FreeBSD. Once I had it configured there hasn't been a problem since.

    Just yesterday I tried OpenBSD 6.1. The basic installation is very easy and well, very basic. It takes only a few minutes. I had a problem with configuring Xfce, though. I will investigate soon but just wanted to check out if it was compatible with Libreboot.

    Re attitude:
    I am not a friend of making generalisations. I think there are all kinds of people among the Windows, Linux and BSD users. There are just fewer BSD users in general. To be fair, the man pages I read were very well written and very precise. Learning the basics by reading the man pages shouldn't be hard.
     
  5. mirimir

    mirimir Registered Member

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    I also use pfSense, obviously ;) And I've used FreeBSD to build packages for pfSense. But I've never bothered to learn it.

    I do note that *BSD VMs are useful for compartmentalization. Because they have different graphics fingerprints from the Debian family, which I mostly use. PC-BSD works well enough for that.
     
  6. AutoCascade

    AutoCascade Registered Member

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    It's really not a generalization. It's prevalent in their forums, mailing lists etc. especially in OpenBSD. No matter how detailed documentation is there will always be questions.
     
  7. Mrkvonic

    Mrkvonic Linux Systems Expert

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    My BSD experience is very much BDSM. That's the most adequate description.
    Lots of pain, with brief moments of pleasure and excitement.
    Mrk
     
  8. NormanF

    NormanF Registered Member

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    Mine? Mac OSX. Quite pleasant, polished, user-friendly and stable. Not Linux but Unix.
     
  9. Balthazar

    Balthazar Registered Member

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    Okay, to be honest I don't have a lot of experiences with BSD forums. I had to look up a few things in pfsense forums then and didn't notice that kind of attitude.

    Well, I did try OpenBSD 6.1 again today and installed the Lumina desktop. I had no problems this time and everything I had installed is working fine. I am not in the mood for tweaking the desktop and playing around much but I think I will soon.
    For now I am still more than satisfied with Arch/Parabola.
     
  10. AutoCascade

    AutoCascade Registered Member

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    Lumina does work well with BSD and OpenBSD is likely the most secure desktop out there though maybe HardenedBSD gives it a run for its money.
     
  11. new2security

    new2security Registered Member

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    I've tried OpenBsd for desktop use. Horrible experience. Third party software is outdated and not secured (as the system itself). So unless you just want to use openbsd as a server, it's not worth the hassle.
     
  12. lodore

    lodore Registered Member

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    I have downloaded Freebsd in the past and set it up as a desktop and I did like it. I really like the concept of freebsd being a complete operating system with the applications seperate and really want to find a use for it. my main use for my pc is gaming so windows is the only platform that makes sense for that. once i have sorted other things out I will get some server grade hardware and setup a freebsd for samba and other uses to learn it.
     
  13. Uitlander

    Uitlander Registered Member

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    A big waste of time is the short version. You got further with it than I did. I joined their forum to seek help in finding out which hardware components to use in my custom-build to ensure PC-BSD would run. Only help I got was a link to someplace with a crappy list of ancient (as in AGP slots) hardware. When I returned to the PC-BSD forum and complained that link was of no help, that Google was neither, and said that "the first priority of any established OS should be getting users, and for that a decent hardware-list is essential"... the shrewish mod (don't recall her name) banned me. I of course immediately rejoined long enough to brighten her day with some colorful language (years ago I actually cared about being banned). Needless to say, I never bought the PC-BSD install CD from OSDisc. Any operating system having a forum dripping with that much attitude deserves to fail...and it appears to have done so:

    https://forums.pcbsd.org/announcement-3.html
     
  14. chrome_sturmen

    chrome_sturmen Registered Member

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    I tried pc-bsd back about ten years ago just for something to do - I liked the cleanness of the desktop. I couldn't get my wireless network card working so I jumped on the forums - the folks there were very helpful and worked with me til I'd pretty much exhausted all possibilities. I never could get it working so I eventually stopped working with it, other than that I did like the feel of the desktop and the people on the forums were quite helpful. I had it installed on a harddisk that also had windows, I had no problem booting between both.
     
  15. chrisretusn

    chrisretusn Registered Member

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    The last time I tried BSD was in 1995. Back then I was still working, Unix was what I worked with, HP-UX and Sun / Solaris. Still have the disk I got from Walnut Creek CDROM. It was FreeBSD 2.0.5 "A full 4.4 BSD Lite based 32-bit Operating System" Really don't remember the experience. It probably was good but not that good. Back then Slackware Linux was my preference, still is.
     
  16. reasonablePrivacy

    reasonablePrivacy Registered Member

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    You probably used some -release branch. There may be some patches for 3rd party software (I mean ports/packages) in CVS up to 6 months. It is reasonable, because community is small, and maintaining patches for too long is a waste of human resources. It's better to work on base system.
    Base system has longer lifespan for security patches.
    As a desktop user seeking for patched 3rd party software, you are welcome to use -current, which is rolling release and contains new versions of 3rd party software. I use it and don't have much stability issues.
    When it comes to hardware for desktop/laptop buy something 2, 3 years old with Intel GPU. Haswell, Broadwell CPUs with integrated GPU are reasonable, although even Skylake GPUs are begining to work.

    I like OpenBSD community attitude, because they are honest and productive. Most things people are asking is basic things found in manual pages, which can be interpreted by someone with basic computer science knowledge, which could be found on Wikipedia. There are some things that are not contained inside manual pages and these questions are welcome.
     
  17. NormanF

    NormanF Registered Member

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    Like I said, most people who take this route end up buying a Mac.

    All the pleasures of BSD Unix and none of the pain.
     
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