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View Full Version : How many of have you have tried BSD & what is your experience



linuxyogi
August 11th, 2012, 09:27 AM
How many of have you have tried BSD & what is your experience ?

Artemis3
August 11th, 2012, 10:36 AM
You missed Freebsd :P

codemaniac
August 11th, 2012, 10:40 AM
Used as a server mainly .

Aquanet
August 11th, 2012, 11:44 AM
Back in about 2009 I downloaded Karmic and PC-BSD just to check them out. I didn't know anything about Linux or other similar OSs, just Windows.

I had PC-BSD installed for awhile on an old PC, and it was cool at first because it was new(same for Ubuntu). But the different desktop environment was infuriating, half because the pc's specs were horrible and half because it was very buggy and difficult to navigate as a Windows user. I don't think I ever updated it, but regardless I never grew to particularly like it. It's since been deleted and Karmic was installed in its place, but that's gone too now that I'm using Precise.

The thing I disliked the most about PC-BSD was the general lack of support.

neu5eeCh
August 11th, 2012, 02:26 PM
I tried PC-BSD and didn't like it, mostly because of KDE -- bloated KDE on top of an already slow OS made for two minute start-ups and VISTA like behavior. KDE's network manager was still a mess while KDE was the only DE they were offering. There were also a variety of fussy hardware issues. My inner Geek is a week-end warrior. Unless I can google the solution, I crumble.

I've been wanting to try BSD again. I'd love to try GhostBSD. The only thing that has prevented me from doing so is all the idiotic crap associated with dual booting BSD and Linux. Maybe things have changed, but I remember finding pages and pages of tried-and-failed attempts to dual boot BSD from Grub or Grub2 -- check this, uncheck that, move your comma there, chain boot here, put this and those brackets, can't be in this partition, can't be primary, should be extended, no, not extended, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I decided it's not my job to make BSD compatible with grub. If they're not interested, neither am I.

Dlambert
August 11th, 2012, 03:13 PM
Tried GhostBSD, it was alright. I think BSD will die off though. IMO.

Gone fishing
August 11th, 2012, 03:34 PM
I've tried PCBSD as a desktop it was OK but I'm not a KDE person - I've used FreeBSD on servers where I thinks its great stable, secure (I like the jails) with really good documentation.

I've also used pfsense as a firewall distro based on FreeBSD. I thought I might try and build a FreeBSD desktop xfce? with everything compiled just to see how quick it would be.

Redache
August 11th, 2012, 03:53 PM
Tried GhostBSD, it was alright. I think BSD will die off though. IMO.

Why exactly would BSD die off?. It's still reasonably popular and you know, the whole OS X using chunks of BSD probably helps it along ;).

I've used FreeBSD and OpenBSD before, both were great but I am too transient to stick to something for very long.

linuxyogi
August 11th, 2012, 04:06 PM
I am using PC-BSD 9. Its a great OS IMO. Things have changed a lot from 8.x to 9.x. It offers various DEs to choose from. I am using LXDE. I dont know how much effort is needed to mske it dusl boot with Linux coz I havent tried it.

Doj
August 11th, 2012, 04:21 PM
I think I tried FreeBSD like in '05 back when I would put in a Linux live disk because it looked cool. I couldn't get it to do anything, so I just took it off again... :)

cwsnyder
August 11th, 2012, 04:21 PM
I just use the hardware which I can find fairly cheap and don't buy from the Linux/BSD compatibility lists, so it isn't surprising that I have had no better luck installing PC-BSD or FreeBSD on my bare metal than I have had in getting Ubuntu Unity running on the same. I have run older PC-BSD as a Virtual Machine, but never used it much, as I don't really use KDE 4.

Easy Limits
August 11th, 2012, 04:29 PM
I haven't been able to get any version of BSD to run on my computer. I burn a disk then reboot and my computer keeps rebooting. It is really weird. I don't have this problem with any other Linux and I distro hop a lot.

Majorix
August 11th, 2012, 06:11 PM
FreeBSD 9.x is just the OS for me. I use it as a workstation for computing and programming, both for work and for CSE education. Also pretty good as a desktop OS, bit harder to set up than Linux, but it pays off. Community (especially the people over at the official forums) is extremely knowledgeable and believe it or not, they helped me through my newbie-ness :)

A few advice that should help you:
1. Stick to -RELEASE. -STABLE or -CURRENT is not for starters.
2. Use ports, not binary packages. Then you will have to compile, but have newer versions of software and no breaks.
3. Learn to love your terminal. It is more widely used in *BSD than Linux, at least that is what I noticed.
4. Use the forums when you have questions, that helps a lot.

Mr.Plex
August 11th, 2012, 08:32 PM
I have always loved the FreeBSD/PCBSD for an OS, Great for server use. But here were my issues.

Cons
1 -- Hardware support:
Many company's don't make drivers for BSD and it became quite hard to find a sweet spot between "Good" hardware and "Compatible" hardware. This made me stick to Linux. I am a struggling student who has unfortunately a lot of reparations to pay off and no money to rebuild system with BSD compatible hardware.

2 -- Application Support:
The Ports library is great and I loved compiling from source but for the most part the programmers are not making BSD compatible software which leaves all the work for the community. This leaves BSD users with old/half compatible applications and the task to make them compatible. This is good for programmers but bad for end users, which is bad for success of a distribution. The end user makes up a huge amount the PC user crowd and the more programmers neglect BSD the less anyone will want to use it.

3 -- Community is too small:
The community used to be marvelous, probably before I was using Linux/BSD distributions, but its like the titanic and everyone is jumping ship except for the captains. Which leaves way to much work for the hardcore BSD developers to want to stick BSD.

Pros
1 -- FreeBSD is a OS not a Distro:
From a philosophical standpoint this was a big plus for me. I felt that the more you divide developers into distributions the worse off you are. Its like the Scooby Doo situation. You split everyone up to look for improvements separately in different areas and your splitting up advancement into different areas as well. But instead of all Linux developers meeting up later at the mystery machine to share the success you have them all split into the Debian machine, Fedora Machine. To sum it up, some distributions have success in hardware support, some in free software solutions etc. BSD or at least FreeBSD that didn't happen. It was one OS that everyone could theoretically improve together on.

2 -- Great HandBook:
When the community was not there, the handbook was and it was very extensive and well written. As long as you had a will to research, you had all the information to fill your hearts content with.

3 -- Not Owned by Millionaires/Billionaires:
I am a democrat at heart, despite the parallelism that democrats/republicans share in this day and age. But I believe that humans work based on self-interest. By self-interest I mean if Romney is a big business owner, he has already shown his allegiance to the dollar and not the common man. Unlike Red-Hat or Ubuntu who have certain monetary necessities to stay in the game, FreeBSD for me, did not have that big business mentality. No deals with Microsoft, no philosophies forced onto the consumer (like a social distro, with tons of preloaded social widgets)

4 -- BSD license is superb for my philosophy:
The BSD license is just swell, maybe its my self-interest to learn programming code without being forced into a copy-left attitude. But in reality I think the solutions (programming code) should be widely available to the up and coming programmers to better the OS. I don't want to have to figure out "how can I rewrite this GPL code without using the GPL license. The license is good and very free but It just adds a certain philosophy to the BSD license that forces you to use GPL. Thats just my personal opinion, I want freedom and GPL forces its version onto the programmer, not the end user.

5 -- Ports:
Enough said really. The ability to compile heaps of software at my fingertips was great as well.

6 -- Jails:
Jails are basically perfectly sandboxed virtualization solutions that don't eat up memory it doesn't need. Its like pure virtualization.

7 -- Bestie
What Distro/OS has a mascott? That is except for the Beefy Miracle hot dog at the moment. I am a big Bestie Boy fan so I like the name in the first place. I have always loved the way beastie looks as well. Its like a stoner demon. Not that I advocate being a stoner, but I have never felt a stoner would attack/hurt anyone.

http://www.unc.edu/%7Eadamsonj/pictures/beastie/beastie_300.png


These were my personal experiences and in the end I am a Ubuntu/Beefy Miracle dual booter so it says a lot for how negatively my cons over weighed my pros. I would love to get a tri-boot going on someday though to relive the BSD experience.

Balthazar54
August 13th, 2012, 12:47 AM
I did some volunteer work on a community bbs that used bsd on a couple of Sun workstations. Don't remember the year, but is was back when we were worrying about slip and ppp, and visiting other computer sites using gopher.

Suppose that was too long ago to matter now, but at that time it seemed very stable.

Spent a chunk of money on O'Reilly books for it, suppose they are in a box here somewhere.

And I liked the dragon logo...

Ji Ruo
August 13th, 2012, 07:40 AM
My degree has a *NIX subject and we used FreeBSD for the OS. For the project/assignment we had to install and set up a myth tv server on a jailed 8.0 host, using VLC to pick up 2 tv channel streams and use them as channels (a virtual tuner) and run Shepard to populate the database. It was a nightmare.

Seems quite good for server use. I'm guessing its equivalent to something like Gentoo in terms of usability.

Mr.Plex
August 13th, 2012, 06:21 PM
To be honest PCBSD is becoming a good contender in the OS wars. I loved the fact that during installation you could install 4/5 different DE right out the box. Including Gnome2. :)