GhostBSD 19.04 Release Switches To LightDM, Based On FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT

[aht0]

Fired it up on a testing rig. Impressions of 15min of use.

Cons
- As a random experiment, first thing I did, I opened terminal, went root and typed in pkg install plasma-5-plasma then logged out and tried to use Plasma5. For some reason LightDM had then 2(!) "available" Plasma sessions (first did not function, second did). In order to get out from the former, had to reboot the machine because I got stuck in screensaver's unlock screen without seeing Plasma5 desktop at all. Second Plasma session marked in LightDM worked as it should. It loaded fully functional Plasma 5 (5.15-something).
-When installing, GhostBSD installer refused to do anything with Logitech G1 mouse (old USB gaming mouse). Had to use new Roccat Kone - which worked in installer. After installing, situation became reverse. G1 worked splendidly, Roccat mouse not (buttons were detected as additional keyboard device)
- Considering I ran into such issues in just 15min, it's guaranteed any user will have their own unique experiences with such little oddball problems.

Pro's
- installing is pretty much as easy as installing Linux. Linux-like full X install (when your hardware is up to it. I wanted to try with ATI Rage 3D and see what happens, no PCI slot on mobo though)
- When you dislike Mate, there is XFCE4 install image.
- Nvidia and Intel iGPU graphics seem to work fine, both installer and the desktop. Have no Radeon cards lying around.
- Can choose between UFS and ZFS. ZFS seemed to have more options available than single drive install (noticed "mirror" etc, since I used UFS I did not dug deeply)
- Offered 3 different ways to install boot loader. For "Legacy". Did not try UEFI - it's dual boot (like Windows/BSD) would most likely be problematical. It works fine on "legacy". Messing with it would have required too much time though.

[skeevy420]

Fired it up on a testing rig. Impressions of 15min of use.

Cons
- As a random experiment, first thing I did, I opened terminal, went root and typed in pkg install plasma-5-plasma then logged out and tried to use Plasma5. For some reason LightDM had then 2(!) "available" Plasma sessions (first did not function, second did). In order to get out from the former, had to reboot the machine because I got stuck in screensaver's unlock screen without seeing Plasma5 desktop at all. Second Plasma session marked in LightDM worked as it should. It loaded fully functional Plasma 5 (5.15-something).

I've experienced that on Manjaro & Arch at random over that past few years when LightDM was installed. Been using SDDM since that 5.13 SDDM Breeze theme update and I've yet to experience that happen again. Just posting that so people won't consider that a GhostBSD bug. My anecdotal experiences combined with yours makes me wonder if it's a LightDM bug.

[k1e0x]

Fired it up on a testing rig. Impressions of 15min of use.

Cons
- As a random experiment, first thing I did, I opened terminal, went root and typed in pkg install plasma-5-plasma then logged out and tried to use Plasma5. For some reason LightDM had then 2(!) "available" Plasma sessions (first did not function, second did). In order to get out from the former, had to reboot the machine because I got stuck in screensaver's unlock screen without seeing Plasma5 desktop at all. Second Plasma session marked in LightDM worked as it should. It loaded fully functional Plasma 5 (5.15-something).
-When installing, GhostBSD installer refused to do anything with Logitech G1 mouse (old USB gaming mouse). Had to use new Roccat Kone - which worked in installer. After installing, situation became reverse. G1 worked splendidly, Roccat mouse not (buttons were detected as additional keyboard device)
- Considering I ran into such issues in just 15min, it's guaranteed any user will have their own unique experiences with such little oddball problems.

Pro's
- installing is pretty much as easy as installing Linux. Linux-like full X install (when your hardware is up to it. I wanted to try with ATI Rage 3D and see what happens, no PCI slot on mobo though)
- When you dislike Mate, there is XFCE4 install image.
- Nvidia and Intel iGPU graphics seem to work fine, both installer and the desktop. Have no Radeon cards lying around.
- Can choose between UFS and ZFS. ZFS seemed to have more options available than single drive install (noticed "mirror" etc, since I used UFS I did not dug deeply)
- Offered 3 different ways to install boot loader. For "Legacy". Did not try UEFI - it's dual boot (like Windows/BSD) would most likely be problematical. It works fine on "legacy". Messing with it would have required too much time though.

Yeah, I've noticed with pkg it just gives you the bare minimum to run something. Where as I actually like that philosophy for most packages.. With the "meta" packages it should be the whole kit and kaboodle. However that may mean you get a lot of the KDE optional parts like KDE-Develop etc. hmm

[k1e0x]

Unfortunately, that's pretty much the answer I expected...though Gentoo is on my list of to-do's so there's that...

To make Gentoo look like FreeBSD you would probably want Funtoo. (Daniel Robbins was a FreeBSD fan before he worked on Linux so there is some inspiration there.. ports / portage etc.)

If you use OpenRC on a ZFS root, it's pretty close to GhostBSD. Unfortunately it's hard to keep it stable for years and years. (That is the real reason you just want to use FreeBSD and not Gentoo for your workstation and just get a Windows PC for games )

An alternative is try to get some work and progress on Linux pass through API (the linuxulator) that is fairly close to working on FreeBSD. You can make a Linux CentOS chroot and a surprising amount of stuff runs in it. Such as Java. Similar projects have done this successfully (Microsoft WSL / Illumos LX Zones) A lot of people want this for various reasons.. mostly to combine docker jails and zfs.. Steam is also something wanted tho.

[aht0]

I yesterday messed around with it some more.

Cons:
-When X is running, Ctrl+Alt+function keys would open console but all you can see are just pure graphics artifacts. Colored rectangles and stuff. Upon closing X, you can use non-graphic console again. I've ran into such thing in vanilla FreeBSD, just can't recall the conditions. It's config problem, not a bug.
-Kernel is for some reason compiled with WITNESS option enabled. Which means pretty serious performance degradation. Either recompile using GENERIC-NODEBUG config, edit it out from GENERIC or do sysctl debug.witness.watch=0. Former would be best performing (there's actually like dozen+ debug options in total in GENERIC), latter the easiest (may add the flag to the /etc/sysctl.conf to make it permanent). After kernel reinstall you'll have to rebuild x11/nvidia-driver as well. Or whatever graphics you might have used.

Pros:
-Kernel build/buildworld are much more straightforward than with TrueOS. Sometimes you may need modifications to default configurations.
-OpenRC service management seems to work rather well. I spent bunch of time adding,deleting, updating services.
-Looks like most packages existing in vanilla FreeBSD also exist in GhostBSD.