FuryBSD Is A New Attempt At A Desktop Focused BSD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FuryBSD Is A New Attempt At A Desktop Focused BSD

Joe Maloney of iXsystems has lifted the wraps on FuryBSD, a new desktop BSD focused on tight integration with FreeBSD. FuryBSD joins the likes of MidnightBSD and GhostBSD on providing a sane and easy-to-use desktop experience out-of-the-box along similar lines to the former PC-BSD (TrueOS)...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...yBSD-Announced

[kylew77]

I also run FreeBSD, and use and even contribute to Wine.

Wine works fairly well, but it could still do a better job on FreeBSD. Quite a few unit tests fail. 16 bit applications don't seem to work for me, will probably have to dig into the kernel for that. And at some stage I must patch Wine's dlls/ntdll/directory.c to support case-insensitive ZFS filesystems better, so it avoids the slow readdir() of every file that is other necessary.

In that case thank you so much for helping to make FreeBSD a first class wine citizen. For my trivial needs Wine preforms great for what I need to run on FreeBSD and am thankful that my old proprietary programs work just fine under wine on FreeBSD. Thankful for codders who understand operating system level programing better than I do!

[dacha]

To those complaining about applications not working in FreeBSD, its Wine support is stellar. It doesn't support Crossover for those hard cases directly but vanilla wine works just fine for running say MS office. Only thing keeping me from using OpenBSD as my daily driver is that it doesn't support virtual box and doesn't support Wine. FreeBSD is my second favorite operating system. It has some quirks but is a solid system. I run vanilla FreeBSD with XFCE as the desktop and I wonder what this FurryBSD would get me that I can't get already in vanilla FreeBSD?

I also run FreeBSD, and use and even contribute to Wine.

Wine works fairly well, but it could still do a better job on FreeBSD. Quite a few unit tests fail. 16 bit applications don't seem to work for me, will probably have to dig into the kernel for that. And at some stage I must patch Wine's dlls/ntdll/directory.c to support case-insensitive ZFS filesystems better, so it avoids the slow readdir() of every file that is other necessary.

[k1e0x]

IMHO XFCE is a better fit for the BSD approach and philosophy. Besides I believe KDE is moving in the direction of integrating with systemd, like GNOME, which will make it not an option for BSD.

A few years back KDE reaffirmed their commitment to support all Unix like operating systems. (not only ones that have a penguin mascot). Plasma 5 runs perfectly fine on FreeBSD/TrueOS. Project Trident has KDE as an optional Desktop. In vanilla FreeBSD you can just install it with pkg install kde5

I use Vanilla with Gnome as my daily workstation.. I find it simple and easy to modify to suit my needs as it's usually done in a very straight forward manner.. FreeBSD also has a very big selection of packages/ports you can use. I often can't find all the software I like to use on every Linux distro without resorting to random github repos sometimes I need 4 or more from different sources.. I tend to use Gentoo but OpenSuSE and Ubuntu have the same problem.. in FreeBSD everything I like to use is in ports.

[muncrief]

....
I hope GhostBSD, FuryBSD and others gain some users and developers become interested in FreeBSD so we can have nice BSD things.

So do I. Like I said the kernel is fantastic, and product competition most always makes all products in that category better. I'll continue to load it on a VM to check it our from time to time, but the last few times I tried I couldn't get it working under KVM. It's been a few years though, so I should probably spend some time to try it again.

[skeevy420]

yall talking about why not plasma instead of XFCE. well why not LXQT instead if they are talking lightweight?

For me at least, because it's been over 2 years since I last used LXQT and Plasma offers everything that I want in a desktop w/o having to resort to either non-KDE/Plasma applications or plugins so I don't feel any real need to use it or try it.

Also, last time I checked (about a year ago), XFCE and Plasma both used 500-600mb of ram after boot and sitting idle for a minute. AFAICT, XFCE's transition to GTK3 made it lose a bit of it's lightweightness and put it on par with Plasma's ram usage (based on Manjaro's default XFCE and Plasma setups which are pretty bare-bones...Gnome, at the time, was in the 800mb range...only tried Manjaro's official isos).

While a bit anecdotal and non-scientific, due to my personal results and numerous other Phoronix users posting similar numbers regarding XFCE and Plasma from different distributions and setups, depending on how one wants to interpret the results that can be taken as either "XFCE simply doesn't have the lightweight edge anymore" or "both XFCE and Plasma can be considered lightweight desktops". I go with the former and not the latter there (XFCE ain't lightweight anymore).

[rhavenn]

I don't get it. They take TrueOS and head that in the direction of Project Trident which appears to be petering out and I never figured out what it was supposed to be. Lumina Desktop (Qt based DM with Openbox as the desktop) which is a 1st class citizen on BSD and now they're switching to FuryBSD with XFCE? I....I'm kinda of at a loss for words. iXSytems isn't big enough to support all that. Is this just 1 or 2 devs starting, more or less, personal projects and then petering out after a few years?

I love FreeBSD. All my servers run it, but it's never going to be a desktop OS unless Linux just takes off as a desktop OS too. I wish iXsystems would focus on their hardware stack and make FreeNAS and TrueNAS a rock stable platform. Work on stuff like blinking light support in JBODs and ZFS daemons, etc.... that's where BSD shines.

I ran FreeBSD for years as my primary work desktop and just got sick of fighting it. I run Arch now and no longer need 2 machines (Arch gaming box and FreeBSD desktop) and stopped using it at work too as a desktop.

[plast0000]

yall talking about why not plasma instead of XFCE. well why not LXQT instead if they are talking lightweight?

[skeevy420]

"...des-K-top BS-D- focus-E-d..."
they're in there, just gotta look

Macklin, you son of a bitch

[kpedersen]

Getting a non-broken desktop environment working is important. Even little things like missing icons in the default install makes it look pretty amateur. I would even go so far as to say a polished desktop doesn't really exist in FOSS; even that provided by enterprise distributions of Linux have breakages here and there.

So I like the idea of this project but I can't help but feel this would be best implemented as a patch-set or really simple self-extractor in its own /usr/fury prefix for FreeBSD rather than a separate install.