It's Official But Sad: TrueOS Is Over As Once The Best Desktop BSD OS

[Awesomeness]

What makes BSD better compared Linux? What would user, currently using Ubuntu (LTS, or Debian, or Fedora,...), gain by switching to BSD?

For specific tasks the performance might be better for FreeBSD. For other tasks Linux is better. OpenBSD has tighter security vetting than most Linux distributions.

[Guest]

For specific tasks the performance might be better for FreeBSD. For other tasks Linux is better. OpenBSD has tighter security vetting than most Linux distributions.

How much performance gain, is it huge gain, like 3x faster? Or, only marginal, like 5% faster? Although, if it's only marginal, then it makes sense for gaming consoles (even 5% more performance for same hardware price is huge gain).

And, security vetting of what, kernel or packages?

[skeevy420]

What makes BSD better compared Linux? What would user, currently using Ubuntu (LTS, or Debian, or Fedora,...), gain by switching to BSD?

Depends on what you're doing and what you use a computer for.

For the average desktop user, there isn't much to gain and a lot to lose if they play games.

IMHO, BSD's benefits are more of a technical nature and most, if not all, of them are replicated on Linux to some extent -- a fine example is how FreeBSD is a core system and then you add stuff to it to make it your system, that isn't much different than an Arch or Ubuntu minimal install followed by adding stuff to it to make it your system. (Free)BSD does the whole core integrated system better, but outside of that you'll run into the same issues Linux has where there's a lot of ways to do the same things so tight integration starts going by the wayside as more and more things are added to the system.

From there it just depends on either what benchmarks better, if licensing matters, and more technical things like file system features (ZFS/Hammer2/BTRFS/LVM+???)....stuff more in the realm of a sys admin designing a workflow and not a user using a workflow that's presented to them.

[darkoverlordofdata]

I have NomadBSD running on an old Dell Inspiron, and it much runs faster and more stable than any of the 'lightweight' Linux distros such as PepperMint. It can also run on a usb, and in that scenario, it's light years ahead of Puppy. I haven't had to reboot that PC in over a month, where linux was rebooting daily, at the very least.

I have GhostBSD installed on my new ZenBook, dual booting with Windows10 in a ZFS partition. No SystemD, either. I used to have Ubuntu installed there -- it was noticably slower than Windows, and DBus was not stable. I was always rebooting. Now I only reboot to use Windows.

[scratchi]

What makes BSD better compared Linux? What would user, currently using Ubuntu (LTS, or Debian, or Fedora,...), gain by switching to BSD?

When I just started using FreeBSD, the main attraction for me was ZFS. I like to take snapshots and it truly saved my laptop once But now with all the work on OpenZFS for Linux, even that's not a huge advantage anymore. And I know some will say btrfs does everything zfs can do on a workstation and more, but I had a really bad experience with btrfs once, and not touching it again after that.

Other things I like to play with this on this laptop are bhyve and jails. Again, both have equivalents in Linux with KVM and LXC/Docker.

At first I just thought I'd try FreeBSD for a few months on this laptop and when it got annoying or if I needed to do some real work where I usually use Linux, I'll just switch it up. But everything just works. I do PHP, Python and some Java development on it, I have jails set up for my apps for each framework just not to have one big cluttered mess. Godot engine works fine, so I can do some game development (something I'm just poking around in, not an expert in the field by any stretch) and everything is just as stable as on my main Gentoo desktop.

So yea, to answer your question, there is no real gain in anything I do on it, everything I do on FreeBSD can be done on Linux. But it works well, I like the community and support, so I recommend it. But I love Gentoo and their community too, so I'm not picking one over the other, both Linux and BSD rock!

[StarterX4]

Yes, that is what Windows users have been saying for years about Linux. Sounded just as naive as your statement

Open-source software can never die. Even TrueOS can be forked and maintained

But it changed mostly thanks to Android and Valve

Even if it would be forked and maintained, who would use OS that supports hardware from up to 2007 (+ some individual newer network cards)?

[stormcrow]

TrueBSD was hampered by FreeBSD's lack of timely support for reasonably up-to-date desktop or laptop hardware. Its server support was always pretty much first rate because that's what the majority of its user base was using it for. I'm not surprised to see TrueBSD close shop.

Lack of modern peripheral support is something a few of the FreeBSD developers have finally realized and trying remedy, but I do wonder if it's really just not enough. OpenBSD is good on newish laptops (excluding lack of support for TRIM ops) because that's a what a lot of its devs are using, especially Thinkpads. It's great that Netflix and other server companies are supporting FreeBSD, but it doesn't have nearly the same developer base on the desktop and workstation side as Linux and the various Linux distributions. Compared to the various packaging systems with the Linux distros, ports and pkg are primitive and annoying to deal with. This limits its appeal to those that aren't constantly tinkering with the underlying software and just want to get on with doing they're actual work.

Just my two cents worth.

I like FreeBSD as a server OS, but it frankly sucks for a desktop for many people.

[SystemCrasher]

Nice try. But BSDs have way too much probs as desktop I guess, since companies often give no crap about contributing their improvements back. Sony is most famous example, ofc.

[creative]

Bummer, this post lead me to download ghost bsd and install it on my multiboot pendrive, it completely reminded me to give bsd a whirl.

Well that did not work MultiBootUSB said iso is not supported. Oh well.

[Xaero_Vincent]

I'd love to give FreeBSD a try again but for that I need DXVK to work and also Nvidia to release Vulkan drivers for FreeBSD. I also need Wine WOW64 support to work in FreeBSD as well. Get those working and I'll be happy to try again.