We are proud to announce that the PC-BSD project has evolved into TrueOS: a modern, cutting-edge distribution of FreeBSD focused on security, simplicity, and stability for desktops, servers, and beyond! TrueOS harnesses the best elements of PC-BSD, combines it with security technologies from OpenBSD, and layers it on top of FreeBSD to provide a complete system for modern machines.
I’m a little confused – while there is mention of TrueOS on the PC-BSD homepage (it’s their server offering), there’s no mention of TrueOS being the successor or something along those lines to PC-BSD at all. Weird.
They just think TrueOS sounds better:
https://www.trueos.org/more-on-trueos/
“What Happened to PC-BSD®?
Many are very familiar with the name PC-BSD® and may be wondering why we changed the name. Although it’s a household name for so many, the developers realized this was a time for a new name that would better convey our message. Lead developer Kris Moore had this to say: “We’ve already been using TrueOS® for the server side of PC-BSD®, and it made sense to unify the names. PC-BSD® doesn’t reflect server or embedded well. TrueOS® Desktop/Server/Embedded can be real products, avoids some of the alphabet soup, and gives us a more catchy name.” One important lesson learned from going to conferences is that people can have a hard time remembering the acronym that makes up our name, which is not a good place to start with marketing a product. We’re confident the TrueOS® name will allow people to quickly identify the project. Subsequently, we will be able to convey our brand message in a better and more unified way.”
Probably a recognition that the original goals of PC-BSD are no longer relevant. PC-BSD was originally FreeBSD + KDE made easy to install, with PBI packages coming a bit later and not having to make install clean for everything.
Approaching 2017, FreeBSD has been a disaster on desktops with anything other than nVidia graphics for almost 10 years now, and KDE has been a disaster since 3.5.10. So now, by necessity, the PC-BSD team is doing a little more out of the box than just skinning FreeBSD to meet their goals. Lumia desktop written in-house as a ground-up replacement for KDE/plasma/whatever it’s called this week, LibreSSL in base and Linux drm to allow more current graphics drivers than what FreeBSD provides.
Personally, I think TrueOS is easier to forget than PC-BSD. PC-BSD tells exactly what it is in the name. Is it Linux? No, it’s BSD. Does it run on SPARC? Nope, it runs on PC’s, can’t you read? TrueOS on the other hand, is that like CentOS, PureOS, ClearOS? It will take time for the brand recognition to stick.
Edited 2016-09-02 01:28 UTC
No, it has not, it had a bump road, specially the first versions of KDE4 and KDE5 but most of them were ironed out and many of the GUI apps created around KDE libs are the best available on FOSS camp, see Krita, Digikam, K3b, Kdenlive, Okular, Dolphin and many other.
And the effort applied on KDE5 + Qt5 to avoid duplication and have a better/proper segregation of functionalities is paying dividends.
I would say that, thanks to KDE, Qt became a better toolkit and, thanks to cross-pollination, both are very, very good now. And pure Qt applications are reaping the rewards, like Scribus, Qt Creator, Octave, Textmaker and other.
The critics toward KDE and Qt are mostly unrealistic, they don’t take in account the limited resources available (human + time) and run assumptions about software development that under examination proved unattainable until now. I hope things will calm down from now on.
I realize the KDE team does a lot of cutting edge work. They were one of the first desktops with HiDPI support for example. But the last time I played with KDE was late in the 4.0 series I want to say it was 4.10 and it was so buggy as a live cd that I went and started testing the iso image against the hash.
Mate user on Ubuntu LTS so maybe I am spoiled…
I suffered through KDE 4.0, and I currently run KDE5 (or whatever screwy name it has this week), and generally, I really like the desktop. I even really like KMail.
Akonadi, however, is a pile of flaming canine excrement.
It is at least usable now that I’ve dumped the “per profile” MySQL configuration, and gone to a system-wide mariadb server, which has been tuned to use more than 128mb of memory.
For that matter, Exchange support, which was promised eons ago, is still completely lacking (and no, I’m not writing it myself– I’m not an exchange expert, and I’m already paid to do other types of programming and systems management, and I’d like to preserve what small amount of social life I have remaining for non-computer tasks).
I can only communicate with my enterprise exchange server via davmail, which while it works, seems to think it needs to load massive portions of my mailbox into memory, and frequently breaks 5 gb of vmem.
So in order to keep up with my email at work (to say nothing of calendars), on any given day, I’m losing about 5-6 gb of physical memory, and it occasionally chokes an i5 with 16gb of memory.
I have heard of these problems but, as I don’t use kmail, never have suffered with it (I use Thunderbird for my mail needs). I also really dislike akonadi and one of the first things I do when I have to upgrade to a new version is to be sure that the KDE desktop search is disabled, I am aware that the side effect of it is to handicap kmail. My concerns are beyond performance, I want to be sure that once I delete anything personal, that all the info is gone for good and all those indexing and caching of metadata and data makes this a hard target.
I love KDE and try to help with bug reports, patches, build small apps for my use and things like that, but I am not bent over to use all its apps when they are clearly not up to the task.
Back to the subject, I like the new name more. To me TrueOS gives a better sound and “spells” better the “quality” they want to associate to the project.
Also, they already use it for the server version and it is more appropriate to be used in embedded versions.
Will give it a try.
On a side note, I build the Lumina on openSUSE a couple of months ago. Did not really like it.
It will, but clearly they don’t feel the BSD brand has any value for them any more.
Mac OS has “BSD Inside”, but how many Mac users know, or even care, about that?
The beauty of a unique name is that it makes things easier for folks to find. One reason I used Ubuntu is that when I have an issue, I can just search for “Ubuntu <issue>” and find relevant information. If I search for “Linux <issue>”, I get the phone book and it’s dumb luck how germane the advice I get actually is to an Ubuntu install.
Walking away from BSD to a unique moniker will help users find relevant answers to their issues, rather than generic replies that may or may not apply.
Except that PC-BSD won’t have unique, good quality AMD drivers (or if it will, I’ve vastly underestimated their resources–that’s beyond what Linux can do!). And Lumia is just not very good. It’s not well integrated like Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon, or KDE, and it’s not very lightweight like LXQt or Fluxbox (or even XFCE). They made a slightly slow, poorly streamlined Qt DE.
I fail to see how this is better than FreeBSD, to be honest. I highly doubt they will have better drivers, and I have yet to actually be impressed with Lumina.
I’m not sure why it won’t in the future.
FreeBSD is periodically syncing the DRM/DRI code from Linux, and uses the same Mesa drivers as Linux. While right now newer GPUs aren’t supported, I’m sure it will happen.
Even on Linux, AMD stuff is in a temporary mess as the old firegl driver is no longer supported or provided, and we are forced to use Mesa. This means a downgrade from OpenGL 4.5 to (checking) 4.1 with my R9 390. While Mesa is making good progress to 4.5+, that has meant a temporary period of regression. Since FreeBSD relies on the same code, this also applies to FreeBSD, though there’s no old firegl driver in this case.
I would be quite surprised if the AMD mess is temporary. It’s been a mess for a very long time (fglrx is bad, very bad), and I am skeptical that things will actually improve in the near future.
But you quote the TrueOS website, how can one attest it is a genuine statement of PC-BSD people?
TrueOS people and PC-BSD people are the same people. The statement is a quote from Kris Moore, who is in charge of both TrueOS and PC-BSD. (I am not very comfortable saying “both” because TrueOS and PC-BSD are actually the same thing: they are built on top of the same “forked” FreeBSD tree and the same set of packages. The only difference was the set of packages installed by default.)
while this may be evident for insiders, it isn’t for everyone else. a short notice (with a link) on pcbsd.org would be helpful.
as it is now, pcbds.org looks like a community website, while trueos.org looks like a corporate one.
I guess it will follow TrueOS Desktop release. At the moment PC-BSD 10.3 is the latest desktop release, and TrueOS Desktop is only a Beta with known issues…
The notice about the name change (along with many other changes) is on the PC-BSD blog.
https://blog.pcbsd.org/2016/09/pc-bsd-evolves-into-trueos/
What is it with these name changes? It doesn’t do anyone/anything any favours, in fact more often than not it does the exact opposite.
Lets see,
Mandrake to Mandriva? Nope, totally ruined it.
Lindows to Linspire? No, soon disappeared.
Corel to Xandros? Didn’t work either.
Windscale to Sellafield? Ah, best forget that, not!
There will be plenty I forgot, and those admittedly aren’t the best choices, just off the top of my head, but still, it makes the point I think.
Bring back PC-BSD, at least folk know what it is and what it does. TrueOS? What’s that? Sounds like something Microsoft came up with!
Actually the names you listed were changed for good reasons:
– Mandrake changed because they were sued by the owners of a character named Mandrake the Magician;
– Lindows also wad litigation problems over the name from the owners of Windows (which they tried to imitate in both name and look);
– Corel changed after the Corel corporation sold their distro to another company, which of course couldn’t retain the name.
Now, in the PC-BSD case, it looks like the TrueOS name was already used by the project, so is not a complete surprise.
Yeah, but what happens next year when the “Honestly it’s the Truest TrueOS” is released?
Mandrake actually changed its name to Mandrake Linux following the legal issues of the trademark. The switch to Mandriva came years later, when the project merged with another distro.
To me, TrueOS feels more related to Tru64 UNIX than to BSD.
I really do not understand why they have to change things that are perfectly fine. PC-BSD was a very good, self descriptive name. Why did they have to change it?!?
The name TrueOS gives me the impression of a hobbyist operating system.
Please give us PC-BSD back!!!
Well, this was a real Unix, and the name change was a necessity since Compaq had purchased Digital Equipment Corporation.
When it comes to Linux distributions, the names mean as much as the latest anonymous git init, while copying the entire source of a real distribution with the only change being the author’s choice of desktop added. Outside of Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu and the RH server flavor, I don’t care for ever reading about any others. They don’t excite me.
When it comes to BSDs, there is honor in the naming as they are distinguished in their own merits.
Sure, PC-BSD is FreeBSD underneath, but its alternate packaging methods deserved praise and recognition. In a way, the Docker idea caught on to PBIs and others (Solaris zones, FreeBSD jails).
the one TrueOS?
Despite not having a BSD acronym in it’s name, TrueOS continues being FreeBSD under the hood. PBI format is long dead, they use pkg, and they continue working with the FreeBSD developers: Kris Moore is even a FreeBSD core team member.
FreeBSD has already sufficient recognition as an OS that it doesn’t really need a mention in the title. If it helps “TrueOS” gain more users, it’s OK.