Goodbye, Trident on FreeBSD.
 

Project Trident, formerly known as PC-BSD and/or TrueOS, has decided to migrate to Void Linux some time soon. Although I find Void Linux quite bearable, I think that this is a loss.

Your mileage may vary.

Without the uniqueness of the FreeBSD underpinnings I'm left wondering how they will fair in direct competition to all the other 'easy to use' linux distro/desktop pairings.

I don't see it working, but I wish them well.

this is definitely a surprise to me. Project trident has been doing quite well lately as its popularity, according to distrowatch, has been continuously increasing.

Good riddance.

So it is basically a desktop on top of someone elses OS ... and its going away or going to use Linux instead of freebsd/trueos.. and...?

The entire raison d'etre of Trident (formerly TrueOS, formerly PC-BSD...) was to be a desktop respin of FreeBSD.

Their new found reasons for the change of platform are what amounts to some creative historical revisionism.

Lumina desktop, the desktop which Project Trident is now based around, was to be free of Linuxisms - but now Trident the main "vehicle" for Lumina is now going full on Linux. I know the distribution it's chosen to rebase on is not just "any old Linux", but Linux is Linux.

TrueOS (iXsystems) decided last year that they wanted to focus on being a "core OS" and cut loose the desktop part of the project - the result being Trident, which still received some sponsorship from iXsystems among a few others:

https://www.trueos.org/blog/trueosdownstream/
https://project-trident.org/information/faq/
Now the logo and name will become completely and utterly irrelevant...

So to cut a long story short - it's quite simply the end of PC-BSD/"legacy TrueOS".

PC-BSD had died multiple times. Now it has turned into an awkward clone of Ubuntu Server.
Or, at least, it will.

Sounds like they want to cater to the Arch/Ubuntu crowd. People who call software older than half a year "ancient". BSD is definitely not the best base for them.

I do not know anything about Void but it is Linux, so would Gnome and KDE not be considered easily accessible well-developed desktop communities?

I find boot times with both Open and FreeBSD quite quick, so this claimed benefit of migration is dubious.

"Uniqueness" is exactly what they lose. As a pre-configured FreeBSD with cute graphical tools for everything, they were fairly unique in the BSD world. In Linuxland they will be one of the crowd.

Good question. Apparently, and ... nothing.

But since Void is Linux they will have a better chance of capturing the desktop market. The year of the Linux desktop will finally arrive! :D

iXsystems are in the "news" again:

https://www.ixsystems.com/community/...-beyond.80462/

If we wanted to get all paranoid - and taking into considering that Project Trident isn't an iX project, but was one and is worked on by iX employees - this is starting to look like a move away from FreeBSD towards Linux.

For those unfamiliar with FreeNAS, it is based around ZFS.

FreeBSD decided to move to ZFS on Linux (ZoL) around a year ago, mainly because delphix, the company who worked on ZFS for illumos, moved to Linux :

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/...er/027085.html

Somewhat coincidentally, it is also iX who have been talking about and pushing for FreeBSD to move to ZoL, with lots of contribution from iX on that front:

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/...il/090915.html

For many, FreeBSD was a means to an end for running a ZFS based storage solution. With it now "mature" on Linux and with FreeBSD re-basing on the Linux implementation, FreeBSD, whether some want to believe it or not, have quite simply lost some of that uniqueness and the obvious benefits of FreeBSD + ZFS have diminished greatly. It means that FreeBSD has become a tiny contributor to a large mostly Linux centric project, which will be geared towards serving corporate Linux.

The switch to OpenZFS/Zol, benefits iX as it provides easier "migration" options for their customers.

So I guess that OmniOS is steadily becoming the least horrible ZFS-on-NAS solution.

There is also XigmaNAS, which is based on the pre-iXsystems FreeNAS 0.7 branch, but I know very little about it.

What were the real reasons for the move, the reasons they listed seem inauthentic? Seems like a project past its last leg, in the military we had a name for it..."The Walking Dead". Its when a person is basically dead, does not realize it and still functions temporarily.

For iX and FreeNAS, it's a business and they're simply taking the path of least resistance. In the future TrueOS itself could be discontinued or re-based - there doesn't seem to be much or any loyalty or commitment to FreeBSD left in that camp.

For Project Trident, again iX employees are involved, so it's certainly an indicator of the general direction of things.

Probably irrelevant, but Void and FreeNAS are both based on Github, and FreeBSD is not.

The Github purchase is what led me to predict the Red Hat purchase, so I feel obliged to point out that many projects are ominously migrating TO Github, and if FreeNAS is part of the picture, there is a minor possibility of an explanation there.

I wasn't aware of FreeNAS having anything to do with this until about 2 minutes ago.

Yup, entirely irrelevant.