Thinking of moving to BSD..

Thanks for the advice - don't want to run without 3d - too slow. I get the not open part but been using nvidia for years and had zero issues so have to compromise somewhere. Plus I game on the same box (diff SSDs) and windows works fine with nvidia. Never tried Radeon (ATI?) since the 90's so no clue how well they work or are supported. On Linux, Nvidia is king but can't speak to ATI.

Can't stand gnome 3 - been a gnome user since version 1.0 and have tried many times to switch to 3 but got tremendously frustrated and moved to KDE. Never looked back. Will need to play with KDE on FreeBSd - 4 is in packages but looks like 5 (plasma) is in ports. Just have zero desire to compile everything and mixing ports and packages has always caused disaster for me in the past.

For some OSes, NVIDIA writes its own drivers, and the OSes are happy to take their binary modules. The term "Binary Large Object Block" was first coined for use with large fields in relational database design, but has long been co-opted to refer to closed-source modules embedded in otherwise open source.

The OpenBSD Project published a song about them 12 years ago.

Originally Posted by YesItsMe Yup: https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/ FreeBSD regularly imports Linux drivers (or writes their own ones for proprietary drivers, like ath10k). Most Linux distributions are harder to administer than FreeBSD. NetBSD is a different beast though.

Gnome 3 is really outdated - 3.18 or so. Cinnamon is presently not having a maintainer. Only big desktop environment seems to be supported is KDE. I don't mind using KDE (Last time, I installed was Arch with KDEmod, decade back), but read KDE 5 is buggy in FreeBSD. If someone running KDE4/5 can share their outlook, will be great.


Right now, I'm refreshing and learning FreeBSD through handbook. So, I assume that for a simple desktop (intel 2nd gen core i3 onboard graphics + 6GB DDR3 RAM, Intel 330 SSD 180GB +2 TB SATA HDD), instead of building using ports, I may use the packages. Packages are updated in every 3-4 months and are behind ports in versions?



Suppose, if I build using ports in above set up with KDE4, how much hours (roughly) it will take.

You can still use FreeBSD-CURRENT instead of waiting for releases - but no, usually they are updated rather frequently as well.

Originally Posted by YesItsMe You can still use FreeBSD-CURRENT instead of waiting for releases - but no, usually they are updated rather frequently as well.

Can I use FreeBSD 11.2 and pull the wanted packages (KDE, Firefox Quantum etc) from CURRENT (which is 12.0?),

You probably should not do that.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...nt-stable.html

FreeBSD-CURRENT should not be considered a fast-track to getting new features before the next release as pre-release features are not yet fully tested and most likely contain bugs. It is not a quick way of getting bug fixes as any given commit is just as likely to introduce new bugs as to fix existing ones. FreeBSD-CURRENT is not in any way “officially supported”.

So, after much careful consideration, I am thinking of switching back to FreeBSD - still on the fence though. How convenient that this is on topic! So, in the past, I have found myself in a quandry about packages vice ports. I would prefer NOT to have to build the entire /usr/local tree using ports because of the time involved. My machine is a beast so it's not THAT much time but when I have done this in the past, there are almost always issues. I know I can use packages but I believe there are some current issues with nvidia drivers from packages. Mixing packages and ports has always caused issues for me and the advice I get from the folks on the FreeBSD forums is "don't".

So...I am not tied to an nvidia card and would entertain getting an intel or amd card (with display port) if they are more compatible or easier to deal with. I don't game on this box any more but need 3d because I would prefer to use KDE 5 Plasma. Pretty sure plasma requires 3d?

Also, anyone have a yubikey working with their browser on FreeBSD?

Just looking for thoughts on this and any experience other FreeBSD users have had.

Thanks in advance.

Originally Posted by sevendogsbsd So, after much careful consideration, I am thinking of switching back to FreeBSD - still on the fence though. How convenient that this is on topic! So, in the past, I have found myself in a quandry about packages vice ports. I would prefer NOT to have to build the entire /usr/local tree using ports because of the time involved. My machine is a beast so it's not THAT much time but when I have done this in the past, there are almost always issues. I know I can use packages but I believe there are some current issues with nvidia drivers from packages. Mixing packages and ports has always caused issues for me and the advice I get from the folks on the FreeBSD forums is "don't". So...I am not tied to an nvidia card and would entertain getting an intel or amd card (with display port) if they are more compatible or easier to deal with. I don't game on this box any more but need 3d because I would prefer to use KDE 5 Plasma. Pretty sure plasma requires 3d? Also, anyone have a yubikey working with their browser on FreeBSD? Just looking for thoughts on this and any experience other FreeBSD users have had. Thanks in advance.

Intel cards and BSD work very well indeed!

Thanks hitest - I actually have plasma5 and sddm running on one of my ssd's - not sure I am going to stick with plasma5 though - has some issues compared to the Linux version. Might go back to my old standby: fluxbox, but was going to try and see if I can get dolphin running as a file manager.

With sddm running, I aven't had any of the issues I described about dropping out of X, mainly because I don't...when setting the system up though, things were still broken somehow: dropping out of twm after testing resulted in the monitor going into unrecoverable dpms again. Not sure if this is an issue with software, hardware. Video hardware is brand new and the appropriate "vty" config is set according to the FreeBSD docs. I am good as long as I stay in X. Haven't tested dpms in x yet though. I thought this may be due to the fact I a using display port but not sure the physical layer is an issue in this case.

I'll get it worked out!

OK, pulled the trigger and am back on FreeBSD. Working great so far with fluxbox but my "can't ever leave X" issue remains. I have exhausted all possibilities of finding a cure over the past year I might have to wait a while until the Intel driver moves to RELEASE, if that is the way things work...it is currently in STABLE so it may be fine...

Originally Posted by sevendogsbsd OK, pulled the trigger and am back on FreeBSD. Working great so far with fluxbox but my "can't ever leave X" issue remains. I have exhausted all possibilities of finding a cure over the past year I might have to wait a while until the Intel driver moves to RELEASE, if that is the way things work...it is currently in STABLE so it may be fine...

Have you tried switching back to the older sc console driver?

Add kern.vty=sc to /boot/loader.conf

Yes, running that config now. Every possible config example I have come across in the last year to no avail. Once I drop out of x, its "blind" but I can type startx and go back so I know the tty is live.

Just a quick update: running 100% FreeBSD as we speak. Everything works: cd ripping, music, videos in FF. I have not tried my yubikey yet but will play with that. Running Fluxbox, xfe, xterm and lfm as a cli file manager. This is awesome! Only thing that I can't get working is wine: tried to run DeusEx (1) and FarCry (1) but both were a miserable failure. Not a big deal because there is OpenMW and I play Morrowwind so I am good. For Skyrim and Fallout 4, there is a PS4.

My NAS backups work using rsync as my user for my /home directory. I use dump to backup the OS to the NAS.

Decided to build a new PC using an i7 7700 (65w) and just leveraging the on-chip GPU instead of my Nvidia GTX 1050Ti. I am told this driver is stable and will (hopefully) solve my inability to drop out of X and back to a tty. I can live with my current machine but it's about 8 years old so should probably modernize to something that is a little more power efficient. Will set up the current beast workstation as a FreeBSD build server so I can custom compile ports and then serve them to the new PC as packages. Not sure on that yet as I don't know how this will affect the normal pkg update process, or if I can even use the normal update process. More research is needed...

Love this OS, not clear why I left in the first place...

For multiple computers running on FreeBSD, poudriere or synth are recommended. I'm yet to try these.

In FreeBSD forums, many opined that mixing packages (pkg) and ports are not good. But, that may not be a proper answer. There is a "pkg lock" to prevent upgrading packages by pkg, if they are originally installed by ports.