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Comment by lucaspiller | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone using FreeBSD on their development machine? Are there any gotchas compared to Linux?

I use CURRENT on a Thinkpad X230. It works ok.

Main gotchas:

    * No SSL CA certificates out of the box.  FreeBSD security team has taken the
      curious posture of claiming that shipping no CAs is better than just
      shipping e.g. Mozilla's CA bundle.[0]

    * rc.d is like Linux init from 5 years ago.  Dynamic network configuration is
      not handled well.

    * Intel GPU driver support for anything above Haswell is still waiting to be
      merged.  But work is ongoing.[1]

    * No Xorg or session management out of the box.  You get dropped to a terminal
      console.  Good luck starting a session.

    * Some packages conflict with each other needlessly.  For  example, you cannot
      install gitk and git-svn at the same time.

    * Finally, the installer has some limited choices.  You can't enable full disk
      encryption for UFS with the installer (last time I checked, anyway).

Other than all that, it works well.

[0]: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=189811

[1]: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/wiki

Hmph. I remember when "session management" was echo startx >> .loginrc

I sure miss being able to understand and control my machine...

I reached the point of not understanding my machine when mounting a disk on Linux required udisks2/dbus and parts of Gnome.

FreeBSD can be pretty spartan, but I do feel like I'm more in control.

Is this a thing? I'm running Slackware and mounting a disk is still done with good ol' `mount`, same as it ever was.

I've been in the linux world for less than a decade, and I miss 'mount' being useful. It's full of spam now - so I've started using 'lsblk' instead...

    $ mount | wc -l
    32
    $ lsblk
    NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
    sda      8:0    0 698.7G  0 disk 
    ├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
    ├─sda2   8:2    0 690.3G  0 part /
    └─sda3   8:3    0   7.9G  0 part [SWAP]       # this was a mistake...
    sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

> # this was a mistake...

That's not an unfixable mistake: sda3 is at the end of the partition table, so if it's deleted, sda2 can be safely resized offline. For example,

  parted /dev/sda rm 3
  parted /dev/sda "resizepart 2 -0"
  resize2fs /dev/sda2 # for ext2/3/4

And then you can create a swap file or volume on sda2, so long as it isn't on btrfs.

Cool! I didn't know about `lsblk`. Thanks!

I was probably being a bit snarky. I have run into cases where getting a drive to show up in the GUI (so, mounting as a user) needed something via dbus.

Ah. Well, I sympathize. When I first started using Linux, one thing I liked about it was the simplicity. Seems that simplicity has been getting eroded slowly but surely since I first started with it, but it has accelerated quite a bit in recent years.

Slackware feels like one of the last holdouts, along with the likes of CRUX and Gentoo, but I fear that soon I will be forced to switch to some BSD -- which I wouldn't mind if my laptop hardware were better supported (I've been running various BSDs on servers for years, but Linux just seems to work better on my laptop; that said, I downloaded the 11.0-RELEASE ISOs a few days ago and I'll give it a shot on the lappy).

That the BSDs init still works and currently makes many people switch from Linux actually makes it look different.

Also small note on FreeBSDs rc vs Linux old init is that it for example always had support for dependencies.

I'm saying that because BSD's especially FreeBSD's simple, pretty and working rc system have always been a thing that I missed when using Linux. Or in other words I disliked that run level system that makes managing dependencies really hard.

I always hoped OpenRC would become the most common init system on Linux and actually still do, because I think it is the best option, when compared with sysv init and systemd.

Also about the CAs: Everything that wants it has a dependency.

About package conflicts: Choose between official packages or your own with Poudriere

Out of the box the system is like Arch Linux, Debian or Ubuntu Server. It's the FreeBSD base system. You can install packages to make it into a router, a server, a thing hosting your private cloud using jails, a jail itself, etc.

And the plus side. You don't have to get rid of all the stuff when you want your nice little i3 environment. And if you want KDE, just install it and kdm using pkg install and do sysrc kdm_enable=yes.

Or go for TueOS (former pc-bsd).

Or if you just want some FreeBSD tools go on MacOS and enter grep --version.

With the other things I agree. FreeBSD isn't really your multimedia desktop environment. It is maybe for people that like it liked Gentoo or Arch Linux, but you should really check on your laptop's hardware before.

Most driver development really happens in the server or usual suspects (Lenovo, Raspberry, ...) area.

Sorry, didn't mean to even strongly disagree, but wanting to share my own experiences. Not everyone comes with the same views and I'm personally someone who is switching back from Arch Linux, because of the developments in the last few years in the Linux world.

It just in my personal experience felt so much more easy to do stuff and have the system I want. Having used Arch for around a decade with only a relatively short break doesn't make that easy, but I liked it's initial idea about keeping things simple and that's what I miss on many ends.

The main reason for not using FreeBSD on laptops really was the lack of some drivers for me. So that's maybe the biggest gotcha. Oh and for new people maybe that it is not just another Linux distribution so many things work differently.

Biggest is probably the separation between base system and ports/packages.

I use HEAD on a Intel Skull Canyon (Sky Canyon i7) NUC.

Intel GPU driver just works on a 4K screen.

I run ZFS on a pair or mirrored M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. Disk encryption is straight-forward here. pfSense 2.4 will have ZFS as well.

I have a mostly retired x230 as well. 'Only' 16GB ram.

> No Xorg or session management out of the box.

TrueOS Desktop is your friend. PC-BSD, now called TrueOS, has for years now been the place to go if one cannot hack getting X up and running onesself, as one has to do with FreeBSD. PC-BSD/TrueOS Desktop has X and GUI login pre-configured out of the box.

> rc.d is like Linux init from 5 years ago.

Linux init from 5 years ago was upstart in quite a few places. (Debian is not the entire world.) init is not rc. upstart is nothing at all like Mewburn rc. And Mewburn rc has significant differences to van Smoorenburg rc, from not having any notion of runlevels (which the BSD world never adopted from the AT&T System 5 world) to a different division of work between the individual scripts and the common script libraries.

Dynamic network configuration is handled through devd rules.

> You can't enable full disk encryption for UFS with the installer

... although the FreeBSD/PC-BSD/TrueOS world is rapidly heading to all-ZFS as the norm. The PC-BSD 10.2 installer creates an all-ZFS system.

How about GhostBSD? Anyone familiar with it?

Just run `pkg install -y xdm` and enable it in /etc/ttys to have init (re-)start xdm on the ttyv of your choice.

Using FreeBSD -CURRENT on my ThinkPad X240. Mostly works great. Can't resume from suspend on that particular laptop, but I can live without the sleep thing.

For development, it's excellent! (Favorite things: non-GPL not-breaking-compatibility-every-day libc that doesn't cause any problems ever. Simple init system. Simple configuration files, moving towards using libucl everywhere. And libxo for output. Good documentation. Jails. ZFS. DTrace. Capsicum.)

I do get annoyed at people who use linuxisms like "/bin/bash" in their code though >_<

We have been dealing with that since Linux was created. And we are still dealing with it today.

Is /usr/bin/env bash good enough? Or should I assume that only a "sh" is available? (I found tcsh tricky when I first started using FreeBSD, and I think a few of my accounts have the default shell set to bash)

Most times yes. In practice I suspect most deployed servers have something like

ln -sf /usr/local/bin/bash /bin/bash

Infinitely more entertaining is running unzip at the command prompt results in /usr/bin/unzip which is extremely limited compared to (installed via pkg) infozip at /usr/local/bin/unzip. At least one specific example I ran into was Play/Activate Scala framework can be convinced via "dist" target to make a zip file of all the jars necessary to run a project, and you guessed it, /usr/bin/unzip doesn't understand that zipfile format and /usr/local/bin/unzip works perfectly. So you can't have a script that automatically runs unzip because you need to run /usr/local/bin/unzip specifically.

Lack of a Debian-like alternatives system is really the only systemic problem I run into on a regular basis. Then again it creates an inconsistency across multiple servers and I would not enjoy playing "update-alternatives whack a mole" to figure out which of my frontends have infozip provide unzip, and which fail.

> Lack of a Debian-like alternatives system is really the only systemic problem I run into on a regular basis.

We'll, there's always Debian/kFreeBSD for that...

Its likely easier to implement a debian-like alternatives system (by hand or by ansible with symlinks if necessary) than to turn a Debian/SystemD non-unix into something unix-like such as Freebsd. Or Freebsd is much closer to what I want, than Debian, so logically it would be easier to change a little bit of Freebsd than a whole lot of Debian.

Of course, Debian/kFreeBSD is an ambitious project - and probably not what you want if you would rather run FreeBSD -- but Debian/kFreeBSD already exists (I'm not sure of the status of Stretch and/or support for the FreeBSD 11 kernel etc):

https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

if you actually need bash, /usr/bin/env bash works; but often something could actually be a sh script with a bit of care. Some Linux distributions have been changing /bin/sh to something other than bash, which helps.

if bash is installed; if not, at least it's a fairly clear indication that you should install bash

I started using it on my X1 carbon. It installed fine. I hadn't used it since 2006, and I was quite impressed with the binary package manager and init/service system (I'm not a big systemd fan).

I'd still be using it, but I got the laptop used and it has had frequent reboot problems (even on Linux) and I get an error when I try to update the bios. I looked up the beep code and it just says the motherboard is bad and to send it in for warranty. :(

I've used it on and off for many years. It makes for a fine development environment. #1 gotcha is what you'd expect: commodity hardware support. Purchase a machine that's known to be good for FreeBSD...

No suspend/hibernate (suspend is available, but fiddly and does not work with X). Apart from that I've been quite happy to this day since last January when I moved to FreeBSD. Though I intend to check-out OpenBSD when I'll have time, as AFAIK it is more laptop-friendly (has working suspend and/or hibernate).

The BSD land is better than any linux distro with its docs and community, and the OSes are really clean and well put-together from the bottom up. Only Arch can come close to them, but then it has no stable releases and breaking changes are often.

BSDs run nearly all the software that GNU/Linux runs, and ports tree is exhaustive. I only have Emacs and Xombrero that I build and install seperately because I'm patching them.

Really depends on your machine. Suspend (and wakeup!) works great on my Lenovo X220, no fiddling needed at all.

With X? Because the docs themselves say it doesn't work well with X [1]. Would you mind sharing your relevant config?

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/SuspendResume

No, I don't mind at all, but what would the relevant configuration files be? As I said, there was no fiddling necessary. The only thing I remember doing is putting `echo kern.vty=vt >> /boot/loader.conf`.

vt is the default anyway! (At least on EFI)

Didn't know that, thanks! I believe it wasn't when I started using the X220, but I'm not sure either way.

That is on 11.0. AFAIK it wasn't in prior releases.

It really depends on the system.

I recently got my hands on a Acer Aspire E-571 (Haswell i3-4030U) and suspend/resume in X with i915kms literally just worked installing FreeBSD 11.0-RC3 from installer and xorg/xdm/openbox from packages, no config file touched (apart from adjusting the keyboard layout and setting the lid_close_state sysctl to S3).

What does not work on it yet is the Elan trackpad, since it is the version that is connected via i2c.

It really depends on what kind of development you do. It's great as long as the tools you need are actually supported. And the tools would presumably work the same on linux so it's more a matter of what kind of system you prefer to administer. I just switched to linux on my main machine after 12 years due to getting hooked on the jetbrains crack. That and the lack of dart-sdk/dartium. I'd switch back if those two things got supported.

sudo pkg install intellij :-)

PyCharm/RubyMine/etc. aren't officially supported, you might be able to get them to work by manually doing the same things the intellij port does. But pure IntelliJ IDEA works perfectly.

I tried the community edition a while back. Can't remember much by now but it definately was'nt the same experience as the commercial one. (Actually I'm using the phpstorm edition).

I use 11-rc on Thinkpad X220. Compare to Linux I miss a lot native Dropbox client (Currently I use rclone, but it is not convenient: sync dropbox->local, change, sync local->dropbox). Skype probably will work via Linux emulation, but I haven't tried yet.

Update: also almost all closed source products are not available for FreeBSD, e. g. I'd like to try Jetbrains CLion - it has version for Linux, but not for FreeBSD.

I'm running CLion on FreeBSD, have never had any issues with it.

Linux emulation works pretty well.

I do not think Android dev on freebsd works that well

My understanding was that various android emulator features that are better at supporting on Linux or Windows, and do not work on FreeBSD. Happy to be corrected though.

Also if your development depends (or benefits from) ATI device drivers, freeBSD (or any BSD for that matter) is not the best choice.

I'd be interested to see if Android can boot in bhyve.

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