NetBSD 8.0 Is Approaching Release With USB 3.0 Support

[Luke_Wolf]

My understanding was that audio input with usb is still unstable. I'll have to check again, last time I checked 11 was just released.

TrueOS is based off of FreeBSD -CURRENT as opposed to the releases nowadays with mixins from Matt Macy's Branch, HardenedBSD, and a few other trees for additional driver support and features.

[profoundWHALE]

USB audio input is working under TrueOS / FreeBSD 12, at least it is with my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4.

My understanding was that audio input with usb is still unstable. I'll have to check again, last time I checked 11 was just released.

[danboid]

Now that TrueOS supports my laptops Haswell GPU, I'm trying to use it as my primary OS at home. I've been happily running FBSD 11 on my home server for a couple of years already. I have ditched Lumina in favour of MATE as Lumina is still quite buggy.

I would like to ditch Linux in favour of TrueOS/FBSD mainly to take advantage of ZFS - primarily boot envs and snapshots - because ZFS is more mature and well supported under FreeBSD.

I am unable to fully switch to TrueOS / FreeBSD because bhyve lags some way behind KVM in terms of features, its lack of USB passthrough being the primary showstopper for me. Apparently USB passthru used to work under FBSD Virtualbox but it doesn't work anymore. I also want to use a few non-free Linux apps such as REAPER and the U-he synths which may not work under FreeBSD's Linuxulator.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend FreeBSD as a server OS, but its hard to recommend FreeBSD/TrueOS as a desktop OS to non-techies. Same goes for most Linux distros but not to the same degree.

Everyone should be happy we have alternatives. Competition and choice are good! I'd like to see TrueOS achieve parity with the likes of Mint and Ubuntu etc in terms of ease of use, available apps etc.

[danboid]

OSS4 is actually pretty great. It needs to get USB audio input working before I consider to be *fully* functional.

USB audio input is working under TrueOS / FreeBSD 12, at least it is with my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4.

[eidolon]

....Make the FreeBSD Desktop Great Again.

Superb. Now I'm envisioning Beastie and the FreeBSD logo with Trump hair...

I guess the release announcements will be laden with superlatives.

[ElderSnake]

What does netbsd give me that linux can't? "People use them" is not a good argument. I saw a hotel that was using 10.8 on the kiosk computer, so safari wouldn't open gmail.

What do you give to society that others can't?

One could play this game all day.

[Luke_Wolf]

What does netbsd give me that linux can't? "People use them" is not a good argument. I saw a hotel that was using 10.8 on the kiosk computer, so safari wouldn't open gmail.

NetBSD really isn't interesting for the desktop user. You want to use DragonFly, FreeBSD (<- This one most likely), or OpenBSD (<- This one as second) if you want BSD on the desktop. NetBSD's focus is on portability and they have some very interesting if academic work consequent of that on things like RUMP kernels, you don't care about that though so it's particular advantages aren't really of consequence to you.

[profoundWHALE]

OSS4 is actually pretty great. It needs to get USB audio input working before I consider to be *fully* functional.

[Luke_Wolf]

More like "it's good if you don't mind missing some advanced features like bluetooth audio" (or maybe 5.1 or 7.1 setups, I don't remember). Pulse and JACK bridged the gap.

if you really really need it there's a fake pulseaudio that wraps OSS in the ports tree

Could you elaborate a bit more on this? I have no idea of what you are talking about here and I'm curious.

So originally this is a feature from Solaris, but since I know you use openSUSE you know how if you have btrfs installed snapper will snapshot the filesystem every so often and can roll back and forth between them? Boot environments take this a couple steps further. Instead of rolling the filesystem back and forth, with boot environments you have a set of snapshots where you can mark any particular snapshot as the one to boot into from either the operating system or the boot loader, with no time penalty of it rolling back changes.

This means you can do stuff like totally frag your install and then just restart go into the bootloader, select the previous boot environment and you're back and fully operational again. Each set of updates can be handled as it's own boot environment, and lets say for example that you prefered to clean install between major versions rather than have a rolling update, well if the installer supports it (as in TrueOS) you can install that updated version into a new boot environment in your zpool and if the new version is skragged then easy enough... you just activate the old boot environment and you're rocking again. You can also mount the non-active boot environments onto your filesystem tree and pull files from them that way. Frankly this is a glorious idea and everyone should be doing it but... I think it's only possible in Solaris and FreeBSD right now, the tooling around btrfs could be changed to support this of course but everything right now seems to be obsessing on traditional snapshotting instead.

Hell for the sake of argument with boot environments you could in theory (for the sake of our argument assuming they all support ZFS and boot environments) do something like install all the major linux trees, all the BSDs, and whatever else each as it's own instance inside the zpool as boot environments and work with each of them with a singular /home and have it all be fairly manageable through beadm (the boot environment admin software).

[garegin]

What does netbsd give me that linux can't? "People use them" is not a good argument. I saw a hotel that was using 10.8 on the kiosk computer, so safari wouldn't open gmail.