Fear and Loathing in FreeBSD | Hacker News Reader

Fear and Loathing in FreeBSD

qorg11.net

87 pointsvermaden47 comments

Just wait until the author needs to use Bluetooth. Or set up audio so it automatically switches between the front and back output when headphones are connected. Or CUDA. Or 3d acceleration with official drivers.

I find FreeBSD to be a technically better operating system than contemporary Lunux-based OSes but hardware support and usability really resembles Linux space before "dumbed down" dostros like Ubuntu where everything worked out of the box, generally.

Pretty unfortunate to say the least.

I used FreeBSD as my main desktop OS from about 2003 to 2005, and I was very happy with it back then.

More recently (~2016-2017), I tried to install FreeBSD on an old ThinkPad, and I was not very happy with it. PC-BSD worked fine, but the upgrade/re-install to TrueOS broke; I installed vanilla FreeBSD, but that did not work, either, X11 kept freezing/crashing - at that point I gave up and installed Debian.

15 years ago, I positively enjoyed spending a weekend (or more) trying to figure these things out, but now I am old and grumpy and want my stuff to "just work"(tm). NB that I'm talking about desktop usage - my home server runs FreeBSD, and I could not be happier.

In fact, if I wanted to run a BSD on my desktop, I'd look at OpenBSD first (unless I want/need Bluetooth to work...).

> 15 years ago, I positively enjoyed spending a weekend (or more) trying to figure these things out, but now I am old and grumpy and want my stuff to "just work"(tm). [...] > In fact, if I wanted to run a BSD on my desktop, I'd look at OpenBSD first (unless I want/need Bluetooth to work...).

That's sort of my case, and given how I don't have much use for Bluetooth, I went with OpenBSD for the desktop. Couldn't be happier - it just works!

If I'm not in a mood to mess around with it, I don't have to: it gives me a nimble computation environment and steady upgrades. If I want to mess around, `cd /usr/src` and it's right there, ready to play.

In my experience, under OpenBSD hardware either works well or not at all. No "sorta-kinda works unless there's a lunar eclipse". So when it works, it just works.

It all depends on many aspects.

For example not so long ago I used Ubuntu MATE (whatever was latest) on my son's ThinkPad X220T.

I have three issues:

- 1st minor: After rotating screen MATE Panel moved in various places (xkill helps)

- 2nd minor: sometimes the Bluetooth or WiFi applet in tray area was 'doubled' (did not solved this one)

- 3rd major: after suspend/resume cycle I could not get WiFi to work (reboot required)

After failing to find solution for this WiFi problem on Ubuntu MATE I though that I will try GhostBSD there (based on FreeBSD STABLE) ... and these were my problems:

- 1st major: after suspend/resume cycle I could not get WiFi to work (reboot required) :>

So I left my kid with GhostBSD till now - also he likes the 'kernel messages' at boot comparing to 'silent' Ubuntu MATE boot :)

Regards.

> Lunux

> dostros

It seems your "i" is broken :-)

But yes, hardware (and software) support is the main reason I've been using Linux for the last 5 years after 15 years of FreeBSD. Back in 2000-2010 it would more or less suck equally on both so it didn't really matter, and the Linuxolator was good enough to run most Linux things (played a lot of Unreal Tournament on my FreeBSD box back in the day!), but today is situation is much better on Linux and has kind of stagnated on FreeBSD. This is not entirely FreeBSD's fault, but that doesn't change the end-result, and I have a lot of other things I want to do now than muck about with my system.

Generally everything after winmodems worked out of the box.

nvidia drivers work on FreeBSD. No CUDA, though.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

Can you elaborate on CUDA? I thought nVidia prided themselves on FreeBSD support.

Why the fear and loathing in the title? The article is pretty positive.

I use FreeBSD too as a daily driver and my experience was even better.

"Fear and Loathing in the Unrelated Movie Reference"

See also:

- "Everything you always wanted to know about the Unrelated Movie Reference (but were afraid to ask)"

- "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Unrelated Movie Reference"

- "Unrelated References Considered Harmful"

- "Make Unrelated References Great Again"

When attending a tech conference, you can typically find at least one of those for each day on each presentation track. The last one being an obvious new-comer in overused references. In late 2016 or so, I was at a conference where they had a run of several, _consecutive_ "Make X Great Again" presentations, all in the same room.

> "Everything you always wanted to know about the Unrelated Movie Reference (but were afraid to ask)"

Unfortunately I do not remember any relevant details, but I once came across an article that was titled "Everything you never wanted to know about $topic (and were smart enough not to ask)".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Veg...

It just means "My adventures with _". Actual fear or loathing is not necessarily involved.

How have you determined it just means “my adventures with”? The book and movie both deal with actual fear and loathing…

Because that's how people use it.

Thanks, I was not aware of that term.

I think it's because an earlier article of the author has the same title, but about OpenBSD: https://qorg11.net/openbsd.xhtml

Maybe off-topic but what I would really love to see would be for someone to start making BSD based smartphones. It is now easily starting to fit that platform as well not just the PC:s. And BSD lisence would make it possible to make profit in the progress. Free as in freedom. Everything open source. Sandboxed partitions. REAL crypto. No Googler Inside. Stick it to the Man. Everybody wins.

There was a BSD based smartphone [1], not sure it was any more open a platform than Android though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Hiptop

Only the last Danger device ran NetBSD; all prior ones used a proprietary, in-house OS. It didn't run any of the normal BSD userland, however, as Danger had its own Java-based userland and UI layer.

Danger was bought by Microsoft, however, right around the time the NetBSD phone was going to market. AFAIK the tech didn't continue much past the Microsoft acquisition. (Source: worked at Danger on the NetBSD project, but left shortly before the Microsoft deal.)

"Purchased by Microsoft in 2008 for 500M". And then the silence was deafening. Hmm...

Technically, you could build that on top of Linux, too, just like you could build an Android-lookalike on top of FreeBSD if you wanted to.

That being said, it would be nice, at least if the resulting system exposed more of its Unix guts, but I am not overly optimistic.

Just saying that the BSD license gives you more freedom for commercial activity over GPL. You can literally do what you want with it, sell it as your own product and all. I'm not the engineer type myself (yet), just a holistic thinker who gives a fuck.

I've been spotting BSD embedded in an increasing number of devices -- Playstation 4, Pioneer DJ consoles, hell Mac OS is built on top of it ... my guess is the missing piece is driver (and maybe developer) support

MacOS is not built on top of FreeBSD.

My post specifies BSD... I don't know which flavors the PS4 or pioneer consoles are built on either

I think 4.4BSD on MacOS

I'm surprised that network via DHCP isn't coming up automatically. Perhaps FreeBSD supports that and the author just didn't use it?

(I used FreeBSD a looong time ago, and am vaguely thinking of trying again one day, so it would be interesting to know.)

Yeah I was surprised the author did all the setup necessary to get their wifi card working and then resorted to manually launching dhclient and wpa_supplicant. All the author needed to add to their /etc/rc.conf (or /etc/rc.conf.d/network) is something along the lines of:

    ifconfig_wlan0="up WPA DHCP"

and then optionally add IPv6 (though the posted article seems to be preferring IPv4):

    ifconfig_wlan0_ipv6="inet6 accept_rtadv"

The installer asks you about your network configuration (no idea how it deals with wifi, though). If you answer "use DHCP", it just works(tm), at least for wired and virtual network interfaces.

Seems like a collection of personal tech notes that just trails off at the end, as one would expect from active notes. Why is this interesting to post here?

Because it's a living document about one's experiences. This is a potentially great future document, and a good knowledge base, if the whole information extracted and grouped under sections.

Also it shows the progression of feelings, and how things done in a relatively less used operating system.

I don't think we need to put frames around what is interesting and worthy and whatnot.

Lastly, the perspective got me by surprise:

- Ah just edit this file, then use this convoluted command and, you're on the internet. Ah, static IPs doesn't work, but at least DHCP works.

Just this perspective shows how we as humans get fixated to our ways and don't see the complexity inside the things we do. Also, it highlights how many cogs we align to make a system work, and we just underrate the required effort as "Just spend 4-8 hours to set this up properly, eh?".

I think I can go for more, but that's enough.

Did you notice it totally dropped off the front page?

There's a reason for that

Sorry, I don't follow post lifetimes. It was interesting enough for me.

However, I want to quote some parts of the guidelines.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Have a nice day.

Why did you quote those things?

let it go

Try reposting it once it is complete

That's not my post. Mail the author, if you wish.

Try not telling people what to do.

Why?

Because you get community policed if you do.

What a teribble atitude. Shame on you, go back to reddit pls.

There are a lot of posts that don't make it to the frontpage. Only the ones that 'we' as a community reading this forum find interesting do. Sometimes one has to accept that 'the community' might value one or another thing differently than the individual.

I, for one, find it interesting from the perspective of someone who has thought about giving BSD a spin, but never has.

From the HN guidelines [1]:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I think the submission qualifies.

Ironically, your comment probably goes against the guidelines though; and mine's probably not great, either. The overall idea seems to be "not too much meta discussion".

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I’m no longer a Linux user. Now I am a BSD user

Bless these fellows who still hang on. I was one of them for a time.

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