A Script Making It Easier Turning A FreeBSD Install Into A Working Desktop

[nivedita]

Who gives a crap about what you crap about?

Clearly you’re exhibit #1.

[Space Heater]

However games consoles (Switch, PS3, PS4) all use FreeBSD (possibly due to the less restrictive licensing rather than technical merit).

The Nintendo Switch does not run FreeBSD, it uses an in-house microkernel called Horizon.

[tuxd3v]

Also, most banks run Linux these days. However games consoles (Switch, PS3, PS4) all use FreeBSD (possibly due to the less restrictive licensing rather than technical merit).

Well, majority of banks run a plethora of systems,
AIX is very used in the banking systems, Solaris is also used..
Oracle have been making some interesting proposals if you use Oracle databases, you can bypass spectre/meltdown, and this bugs are the initial trigger to Oracle starting to capitalise on that..

So its a mix, but generally speaking AIX/Solaris/Linux are used in the Banking System, with the majority of the business in Aix/Solaris..

Which is a shame because we can learn a lot from them but their "owners" are old fashioned people and will unlikely open-source them so the world can benefit.

Well, you could learn a lot from the simplicity Idea, but with mega/hyper strange projects like systemd, you can forget..
To learn a lot in Unix, you need very qualified people working with them,every day..
This machines are a lot less than x86 ones, which means that only a few touch them..

But the reality is that majority of people that comes to Linux and tries to develop something ...this people came from Windows and are completely off the Unix simplicity and Ideals..

[Templar82]

The Nintendo Switch does not run FreeBSD, it uses an in-house microkernel called Horizon.

Nintendo's licence agreement for the console acknowledges FreeBSD, although this doesn't tell you how much BSD they used.

The Playstations don't exactly "run on" FreeBSD either but their OS is pretty heavily based on it.

[Space Heater]

Nintendo's licence agreement for the console acknowledges FreeBSD, although this doesn't tell you how much BSD they used.

The Playstations don't exactly "run on" FreeBSD either but their OS is pretty heavily based on it.

If you've watched the talks from the teams that reverse engineered the Switch, they openly say it's not at all based on FreeBSD, so while it likely is using some portion of modified FreeBSD code in userspace, it's not as if the OS is a heavily modified version of FreeBSD - it's largely based on the OS of the 3DS.

[fuzz]

Hmmm... It's unfortunate that there's nothing to support flatpaks/snaps on BSD or I'd actually try one of these out.

I'm at the point in my linux desktop where I can install pretty much distro and still be able to use flatpaks. It's very nice and I wouldn't want to go back to how it was before...

EDIT:
To clarify, I'd love to be able to use existing flatpaks. Not necessarily just implement something *like* flatpak on BSD.

[kylew77]

In my opinion FreeBSD is objectively better than Linux simply because it is a cohesive whole. Building a Linux distro from scratch has a whole book written on how to do it called Linux from Scratch because of all the disjoint projects that have to have their code pulled together to get a workable system at the command line level. Any of the BSDs on the other hand one just has to build world and it is done. Building an entire FreeBSD OS capable of dumping you at the command line is just a few lines of compilation. The elegance of having the whole OS as one project instead of dozens of disjoint projects is nice. That being said the man power at work is less and they for some reason don't focus on the desktop that much and having to pull in drivers for modern graphics cards from ports is a big disservice. In conclusion the elegance of the engineered solution that is FreeBSD is something to be admired while at the same time their struggles to make an easy to setup desktop and refusal to incorporate modern graphics drivers into the core do the project a huge disservice.

[aht0]

Yup, deemed impossible by many haters because GNOME is supposedly tied to systemd, but here you go.

It's Gnome 3.28 and has not been upgraded for ages. Yes, because of systemd, however little you like reality.

[aht0]

That being said the man power at work is less and they for some reason don't focus on the desktop that much and having to pull in drivers for modern graphics cards from ports is a big disservice. In conclusion the elegance of the engineered solution that is FreeBSD is something to be admired while at the same time their struggles to make an easy to setup desktop and refusal to incorporate modern graphics drivers into the core do the project a huge disservice.

Nearly every user has his/her favorite DE/DM, providing n amount of iso's each release would just be more resource intensive. It's a bit like Arch Linux, build your own system, isn't Arch popular among Linux-users?

Hmmm... It's unfortunate that there's nothing to support flatpaks/snaps on BSD or I'd actually try one of these out.
I'm at the point in my linux desktop where I can install pretty much distro and still be able to use flatpaks. It's very nice and I wouldn't want to go back to how it was before...
EDIT:
To clarify, I'd love to be able to use existing flatpaks. Not necessarily just implement something *like* flatpak on BSD.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/possibility-to-port-snapd-flatpak-for-freebsd.68354/

[SystemCrasher]

Not caring about UNIX in this day and age is still quite naive. "Commercial UNIX" (such as AIX, Solaris) on the other hand possibly wont be in this world much longer. Which is a shame because we can learn a lot from them but their "owners" are old fashioned people and will unlikely open-source them so the world can benefit.

Unix actually had rather good phylosophy. Say I do like the idea of fast (usually C) independent programs, piped into each other or coordinated by shell scripts. At least it order of magnitude better than present-day hipsters approach where they throw whatever shithonrust megaframework or anything that is buzzword here and now, just to ditch it 2 years later.

However, as time has shown, sometimes unix way also imperfect. Say, systemd can prepare arena for future process of even sub-hierarchy of processes, sandbox that and policy it. Since it being privileged entity capable of executing syscalls directly, it just in right place at right time to do that. Classic unix way somehow lacks appealing way of doing this. Making sandboxed processes and containers pain in the rear. Because classic unix-way approach needs a lot of access outside of prepared arena, which could already be unavailable. Ironically its *nix security and syscalls models that mostly lead to this state of things. At which point it rather process should be ran as root and sandbox itself. And then each and every programmer have to put same code again and again for each and every program. Which is clearly silly and overall very huge duplication of efforts.

As for AIX, etc... imagine it's source now dumped to e.g. github. What is supposed to happen next? Sun attempted something like this, yet their time been long gone - so everyone who needed or wanted to lurk in source gone Linux long ago. Those who give no crap just use windows and enjoy MS backdoors, spyware and forced reboots, moaning eventually here and there (yes, that's what you get for the lack of control over your working environment - and its deserved, isn't it?). And before Linux came and showcased it can thrive, proprietary companies were just too greedy to share. So short-term local gains killed off long-term development and destroyed ecosystem. Not to mention lack of standard API for anything going beyond chroot() + setuid()/setgid() which aren't terribly great sandboxing.

The future is created today. Be a greedy proprietary bitch today and suffer for that tomorrow - just because future happens without you, when smartest of us get fed up with artificial limitations and pointless bitching for the sake of nothing but arrogance. Some have to learn this simple idea hard way.

p.s. btw, script is rather simple and clean and easy to modify. So its clearly not a worst solution I've met. However it isn't solution for newbies and casual users, and therefore it doesn't makes $subj user-friendly. At most slightly more geek-friendly, dev-friendly or so. Oh, not even link would load, so you have to view page source to get idea... he-he, pretty much in BSD spirit.