GhostBSD 11.1 Released: FreeBSD With MATE & Xfce Desktop Experience

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GhostBSD 11.1 Released: FreeBSD With MATE & Xfce Desktop Experience

GhostBSD 11.1 is now available as the BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD 11.1 while catering to Xfce and MATE desktop experiences...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GhostBSD-11.1-Released

[JeansenVaars]

How much of a normal life can you have with any of these at home?

[DanL]

How much of a normal life can you have with any of these at home?

What?

[slacka]

Not sure why you compare GhostBSD to TrueOS. Only TrueOS has drm-next integrated into its kernel. This is essential if want any modern intel (Broadwell+) to work out of the box.

[Spooktra]

Probably one of the best open source OS offerings currently available. The old PC-BSD, with it's PBI's was an excellent offering (haven't tried TrueOS) but Ghost, along with OpenIndiana, is my favorite non-Linux "distro" out there.

[starshipeleven]

What?

It seems that the alien lifeform asked if the BSDs cited in the article are good enough for normal daily PC usage.

[k1e0x]

How much of a normal life can you have with any of these at home?

Well.. lets talk about what it is and what it's not then.

Essentially GhostBSD is vanilla FreeBSD 11.1 with a full polished desktop, lots of pre-installed packages, some extra tweaks to make it better for desktop tasks, an installer and some creature comforts like a graphical fronted for pkg. It gives you a nice light desktop ready to go. (XFCE Woot!) What works for FreeBSD works on GhostBSD. That is not true for TrueOS because TrueOS has much more significant changes (such as OpenRC). Neither is a good or bad approach it just depends what you want. (I tend to like vanilla personally but GhostBSD is quite nice)

FreeBSD is a server OS. (Or a system used for developing in C). It is not, nor does it try to be a Desktop. That isn't what they are focusing on and personally I'm glad they don't because it means the focus is on making it good at a specific task and it knocks the server OS thing out of the park.

How well do they support Desktop hardware? If your on a fairly generic Intel/Nvidia setup probably pretty well. If your using more obscure AMD/Radeon stuff or Laptops that doesn't see a lot of server use then maybe not quite as well, or there may be some minor tweaks you'll need to make. (I've had power management problems with Radeon cards. Hopefully this will change now that AMD is back in the game.)

What can you do with them? Desktop tasks are good, you'll find a wide range of apps your familiar with on Linux. Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, MPlayer, etc. Some specific things that are closed Linux binaries you wont.. an example is Steam or the Skype binary (web version works fine). So for a workstation or a programming environment it's good and you won't miss Linux or Windows much at all. For games however... well.. not so much.

Why would you want this over another OS? It has ZFS native on root. So if your NAS is ZFS (and why wouldn't it be) and you'd like to send direct snapshots of your /home dir, or your project or heck the entire system to your NAS for backups you can just do that without using another backup program, ZFS send and receive makes that very simple and fast and you can basically snapshot as often as you like with very little performance and network hit. Digital breadcrumbs. - If you like to do a lot of custom work with your systems FreeBSD 11 is a good base to work on due to it's clean layout. It doesn't have systemd so you can do your own init system work without pulling your hair out, it follows the Unix philosophy and the whole system adheres to it. Everything is optional so you can pick your favorite system daemons such as OpenBSD's SMTPD. Again the layout and the fact that it's a complete running OS means there is less confusion about the right way to do something. (Redhat/SuSE/Debian putting things in different places etc). Also the documentation that is very good always applies to it.. no confusion if the Arch wiki applies to Fedora. For professionals, it has some powerful tools Linux does not like PF, Jails, dtrace etc. And lastly the ports system allows you to rebuild packages any way you like similar to Gentoo but also allowing you to mix and match with pkg binaries provided by FreeBSD so you can rebuild what you need to without the stability and dependency problems Gentoo sometimes suffers from building the entire system, here that is optional. So if your going for a custom system there are a lot of reasons you might want to go this route as opposed to Linux.. just don't expect to be playing games on it tho.. The system surely could but games on Linux are hard enough to get tbh.

If you decide to use it and you never have before keep in mind that it isn't Linux and it's not trying to be Linux. Some things are different for good reason. It shares a kinship with other Unix'es and even Apple more so than Linux and the GNU so some of the reasons for the differences might not make sense at first to a Linux person.

[JeansenVaars]

Well.. lets talk about what it is and what it's not then.

What a superb answer. Thank you. You can't imagine how many youtubers and enthusiast have tried to explain this to an average linux user and failed in the attempt.

[k1e0x]

What a superb answer. Thank you. You can't imagine how many youtubers and enthusiast have tried to explain this to an average linux user and failed in the attempt.

Heh, np.

One thing thats confusing is people talk about a "complete system" .. what that means is that there isn't 20-30 packages that make up your base system and one base system from one machine is exactly the same as another. You don't have a lot of differing tools to do similar jobs.. so on Freebsd ifconfing is the only network config program you'll need and this is what a rc.conf config would look like for a wired lan with wifi fallback on FreeBSD.

ifconfig_em0="up"
ifconfig_iwn0="`ifconfig em0 ether`"
ifconfig_iwn0="ether ${ifconfig_iwn0##*ether }"
wlans_iwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ifconfig_lagg0="laggproto failover laggport em0 laggport wlan0 DHCP"

[ermo]

Heh, np.

One thing thats confusing is people talk about a "complete system" .. what that means is that there isn't 20-30 packages that make up your base system and one base system from one machine is exactly the same as another. You don't have a lot of differing tools to do similar jobs.. so on Freebsd ifconfing is the only network config program you'll need and this is what a rc.conf config would look like for a wired lan with wifi fallback on FreeBSD.

ifconfig_em0="up"
ifconfig_iwn0="`ifconfig em0 ether`"
ifconfig_iwn0="ether ${ifconfig_iwn0##*ether }"
wlans_iwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ifconfig_lagg0="laggproto failover laggport em0 laggport wlan0 DHCP"

Wait ... did you just ducttape up automatic fail-over from wired to wifi and back again into the config by making clever use of a link-aggregation interface?

That's a seriously cool and elegant way of using built-in functionality. Wow. Does the lagg0 interface get a unique MAC address, such that it "shadows" the em0 and iwn0 MAC addresses?

And how's GEOM these days? I haven't used a FreeBSD box since the 6.x and 7.x days, so I have no recent experience...