I am less frustrated, and more focused working on this setup. A big chunk of that is even outside the constant popups in OS X, there’s simply less to be distracted by.
I’ve gone so far as to have to literally switch a cable to move between machines (as opposed to a KVM), to help me train my brain into a different context.
Overall I’m quite happy with the choices I made here.
A nice write-up from someone switching from OS X to FreeBSD, and everything that entails.
I kind of wish FreeBSD were still popular in the server sphere. I mean, Linux is great and all, but diversity would be a good thing. Right now, from my own experience, there are no challengers for Linux on the server; except maybe Solaris on extremely high-end hardware, and that’s for very specialized roles. (Bare-metal servers running giant databases, stuff like that.)
Also too bad the interoperability with Linux filesystems is poor. If FreeBSD had proper read-write support for XFS, I would probably use it everywhere.
I am curious, regarding servers (vague) how do you see FreeBSD really not competing with Linux?
I mean in terms of usage statistics, not features.
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-freebsd/all/all
http://www.w3cook.com/os/freebsd
In terms of features, FreeBSD is competitive and then some… But nobody’s using it.
Edited 2015-11-29 19:46 UTC
I’m going to have to disagree yet. You’re right that linux is installed on more servers per the limited tracking those sites do. However, FreeBSD is also included on every Playstation 4, netapp appliance and ixsystems freenas derived box, half the enterprise routers used on the internet, by Netflix and Yahoo, and various other sources. 33% of all internet traffic is netflix and a good chunk of that is going through freebsd boxes.
So if you want to look at cheap hosting companies that offer wordpress sites, yeah, linux is winning the war. If you want to look at what people are doing with them, it changes quite a bit.
Ironically Netflix depends as much (if not more) on linux than it does on FreeBSD (not that in any way implies anything regarding the qualities of either OS).
Edited 2015-11-30 22:08 UTC
Yahoo! is not a FreeBSD stronghold – https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/yahoo-no-longer-a-freebsd-strongh…
And yeah, we all know that Netflix build it´s infrastructure using FreeBSD, but it has to STOP being the only example available. I love FreeBSD too, but some “Netflix/ZFS/Dtrace wada wada seems” to be all that some folks can talk about, when the subject is FreeBSD.
I’m using FreeBSD on all my servers, web and databaseservers, even on my personal Plex media server.
Why would you need XFS anyway when you can use ZFS? It’s the only file system I currently use.
XFS is the best *performance* File system I’ve seen for large files. ZFS is great because of all of its integrity checks z-raid and snapshots. So it kind of depends on how you manage backups and how much performance you need. Oh, and last time I checked XFS used less memory, to make a difference on some lower specked machines.
As always with file systems, there are trade offs.
Given the right hardware and correct configuration I’m pretty certain ZFS outperforms any XFS hardware raid setup all day long which is not really fair of course since like you said it requires a lot more memory as well.
I agree it’s not suitable for use with external drives, not only for the obv reasons but because ZFS generally requires ECC memory which means you can’t just hook a drive up to any machine without running into risks of data corruption.
I love it on my 40 TB media center server though, with 3 raid5 vdevs it’s super reliable and VERY fast.
ZFS definitely does not require ECC RAM and works fine with external drives.
The whole fear about data corruption from using non-ECC RAM is just FUD. There is nothing about ZFS which makes it any more vulnerable to data corruption using low-end RAM than any other file system. So if you’re fine with using ext4 or XFS with low-end RAM you are just as safe using ZFS with the same RAM.
Someone suggested further up that ZFS might not perform well with low-end hardware. This is misinformation. ZFS runs fine on low end machines like the Raspberry Pi. I’ve been using ZFS with Raspbian for six months with zero issues and half my RAM is still free.
Again, interoperability. XFS is good for external hard drives and such. (Unless you’re using Windows. Which I don’t.)
Well, FreeBSD still finds its place in the server room with pfSense/OPNsense and FreeNAS appliances.
Well, there are Server Rooms, and then there are datacenters, and then there is the cloud. Many of the small businesses I have friends working for have transitioned their server rooms straight to the could.
He left out the most important (and juicy) part of such a transition: the software. I get it, he uses mostly the terminal for his work. but he mentioned the media library formerly on iTunes, he mentioned his wife editing pictures and videos, he mentioned his daughter having an account on the computer. How they deal with such a huge change?
They continue using the Mac.
then is pretty much a non-story: geek changes his own OS with a geekier one
I’m guessing there’s more than one workstation in the house.
From the article:
“I didn’t want to install FreeBSD on my iMac. My wife uses it for photo and video editing, my music is all tied to OS X, sometimes I have an hour to play the latest Shadowrun game. Dual booting would just be a pain.
I decided to build a computer for home use. I hadn’t done this in at least ten years – I’ve built plenty of servers in that time, but at home I’d been happy to just have my Macs.”
Regarding apps on BSD:
http://www.freebsd.org/ports/categories-grouped.html
http://openports.se/ (OpenBSD)
http://pkgsrc.se/ (NetBSD)
Most will work just as they would when running on Linux. There are a few differences:
Most (all?) of the BSDs limit normal users’ access to mount(8). On FreeBSD, the vfs.usermount kernel parameter needs to be set to 1, you need to be a member of the operator group, and you also need to own the mount point. It’s discussed about halfway down the page in this link:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/usb-disks.html
Another issue is HAL/udev. FreeBSD had HAL support, but that’s deprecated now (even on Linux), and there’s no udev port. That’s the bad news; the good news is that FreeBSD and OpenBSD both had functional kernel device-notification systems well before udev came out, and it’s not too hard to script them. Here’s one example, which you should be able to install with pkg(8):
https://github.com/vermaden/automount/blob/master/automount
It negates the mount(8) permission issues, but I don’t like how it does it (security-wise). I wrote a similar set of scripts years ago that preserved the normal limits on usermounting (quoting from my old web page):
This worked for me as of 5.4 or so, but I have no idea whether it will still run. I’m also not a developer, so it could have serious bugs. I do know that fstab polling was re-enabled in the KDE port, so that should work again.
Also, sorry about the formatting. The auto line-wrap on OSNews mangled some of the comments (I did a quick proof-read a fixed a few), so be very careful if you paste this into a shell script. I could clean it up and test it if enough people are interested.
Edited 2015-11-29 21:18 UTC
if the apps work on BDS just as well as on Linux, then I expect a lot of Mac users will consider this a huge step back.
These things you mention might not matter to this person. Most people using only OpenSource Operating Systems have to sacrifice on proprietary software. That’s why I like OS X, because for me it offers the best of both worlds
“Circa OS X 10.6, I was really happy with OS X. It was fast, stable, and never got in my way.”
When OS X launched I was super excited. I was running FreeBSD, Windows, BeOS and Slackware at the time (I was pretty wrapped up in the OS world thanks to OSNews) and the idea of *nix system that was pretty and didn’t take a lot of futzing really appealed to me.
These days I’m tired of it. Everything ‘new’ seems to just be gimmicks or iOS sytle features. The OS does more annoying things with each release (I could never stop it posting App Store notifications: event after upgrading to Yoemite it was telling me I should upgrade to Yosemite) and other things I want to do (often with OSS) just seem to be harder than they should be. Every update seems to reset my keyboard settings and disable key repeat, which has a vim user is crazy annoying.
I recently built a PC after years of using Mac laptops exclusively, and I’m loving it.
I do still use the Mac for work, and I have manged to shut up notifications for the most part by enabling quiet hours from 4:00am to 3:59am.
Edited 2015-11-29 23:06 UTC
Me too. Switched to Linux in the past year because
a) OS X was getting too slow
b) it was constantly using up bandwidth in the background, and
c) I was spending “too much time telling OS X to shut up and leave me alone” (as the article author says)
For a couple of years I used it on servers. As my main desktop it did not last so much, unluckily. I loved how easily I could configure it, probably the most sane way I have seen, though.
As I said some time ago, I try to keep the software stack as close as possible to what is inside the official repositories. Compiling and installing from ourself usually generate a bit of headache down the road and, as I got older, I started to be less lenient to even small nuisances. Hardware support and some new features/updated versions of software I used/needed killed it for me.
I suggest the author to use tmux (if he doesn’t already). Copy & past from terminals work way better with it and, I’m sure, the other pluses will delight him.
My favorite terminal is also urxvt, even though I play a bit with st (from suckless) and tilda from time to time.
There is a little mistake, I think, inside the text where he cites LXCE instead of LXDE. By my side, I plan to try LXQt as soon as I get some free time available.
i3 is nice and if most of my job was remote administration, editing and file management with mc I would probably set down with it. That is not my case, though, perhaps unluckily.
Yeah, if Copy and Paste aren’t working.. Uck. I’d go back to OSX and just deal with everything else. Trying a different terminal is a good suggustion. Personally, I like xfce term, even though I don’t care for running XFCE itself.
Wasn’t Darwin supposed to be apple’s bsd?
Why not use Darwin? or was darwin just for the old ppc stuff?
The OpenDarwin project was abandoned almost 10 years ago, mainly because of lack of interest – it was hard enough tracking changes (Apple doesn’t go out of their way to make their open source stuff easy to build outside of OSX), and people were using the OpenDarwin site mainly as a hosting facility for various OSX projects.
PureDarwin is much more recent, but still hasn’t been updated in a few years. (The last update was February, and was just an updated boot sector for a 2012 release)
While the FreeBSD workstation experiment sounds fun, educational and doable in itself, there is really no need to use “constant pop-ups in OS X” as an excuse for it.
Seriously: Turn on “Do Not Disturb”, and be done with it. No more pop-ups.
He implied that he tried that. I agree with many of this points about OSX, but I’d agree this is one I haven’t come across. Mainly because I don’t have idevices in use right now.
That would be way too easy 😀
In my professional experience, much ado about nothing and sysadmins go hand in hand like peas and carrots.
How good does FreeBSD support wifi adapters? Is it on par with linux?
Not nearly as well as linux. For example, there is a project to support the current intel wifi that ships with most new laptops but it’s not ready yet. Further, 802.11ac doesn’t work. You get 802.11g for most wifi cards.
In my experience from trying to install BSD next to my Linux partition on several laptops the hardware support is not as good as Linux. The standard advice of research your hardware’s compatibility with your OS before buying is still very much in effect for Linux and BSD users. Even people upgrading versions of a mainstream desktop OS should do a little research.
I read the article, but I still don’t understand…
If all he needs is a terminal and a browser then why all the fuss? Install Linux Mint (or almost anything else), set the session so a terminal window opens and fills the screen after login, and he’d be done in half an hour, including enough time to make a cuppa and set the background image.