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

[vermaden]

Please use GhostBSD and/or NomadBSD for instant 'BSD desktop experience' instead.

[pracedru]

Indeed sad.

[zxy_thf]

That's a very distance third.

Well that's not even third...The L4 family has much larger number of deployments (all newer iOS devices, base stations, etc)

[pabloski]

Not really if you count PS3s and PS4s.

PS4 Orbis OS is based on FreeBSD. But PS3 OS is not. I was talking with another user on the Phoronix forum and he claimed he was an engineer for Sony PS3. He said that the PS3 OS uses parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD ( mainly networking stuff ) on top of a custom kernel. While Orbis ( PS4 ) is a FreeBSD fork.

[kpedersen]

Well that's not even third...The L4 family has much larger number of deployments (all newer iOS devices, base stations, etc)

Technically it isn't 4th. Because Minix in everyone's Intel processor XD

[scratchi]

That aside, I don't feel that FreeBSD needs desktop distros. It is trivial to type 1 pkg install command to get a full desktop environment so it is a waste maintaining an entire distro just for that.

Precisely! I actually used TrueOS at work in a vm for a year or so. It worked, but Lumina wasn't great. I mostly just needed a terminal, so it was fine for my daily use, but I poked around the UI a bit, and it was buggy and sluggish in the best of times. Like resizing my virtualbox window would cause havok with the launchbar sticking in the middle of the screen because it doesn't realize the screen was just resized, and there was no way to move it; would need to log out and log back in for things to go back to normal. Stupid stuff like that which was fixed in KDE, Xfce a decade ago.

I've been using FreeBSD with Plasma5 on my laptop for a few years now. Getting it up and running wasn't much harder than my Gentoo desktop and updating it is straight forward and usually painless (I did run into a snags a couple of times, but in most cases there was already a bug report of the same issue and it was fixed quickly).

So yea, if you want a BSD workstation experience, just use FreeBSD. If you have experience installing various Linux distros already, this will like just another distro, no need to simplify it even more.

Sad to see TrueOS go, but after using it for a bit, I'm not surprised.

[Buntolo]

As sad it may be, from a dev perspective (they put a lot of effort and time in it), I prefer not to have many forks/NIH software. It's important to have them, that's one of the main point of open source, but too many will just water down the software.

First we should get to two digit percent, then we may think about forking.

[Guest]

I've been using FreeBSD with Plasma5 on my laptop for a few years now. Getting it up and running wasn't much harder than my Gentoo desktop and updating it is straight forward and usually painless (I did run into a snags a couple of times, but in most cases there was already a bug report of the same issue and it was fixed quickly).

So yea, if you want a BSD workstation experience, just use FreeBSD. If you have experience installing various Linux distros already, this will like just another distro, no need to simplify it even more.

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

[Awesomeness]

PS4 Orbis OS is based on FreeBSD. But PS3 OS is not. I was talking with another user on the Phoronix forum and he claimed he was an engineer for Sony PS3. He said that the PS3 OS uses parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD ( mainly networking stuff ) on top of a custom kernel. While Orbis ( PS4 ) is a FreeBSD fork.

You don't need to be a Sony engineer to find that out. It's spelled out in the copyright attributions. IIRC it was the same for Vita as well.

[Awesomeness]

Not really if you count PS3s and PS4s. But just like iOS and Android, that is a bit of a scummy remix.

Android is Linux, merely using BSD-licensed userspace components, whereas the iOS/macOS/… kernels use proper BSD code.