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Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

I really support FreeBSD whenever I can, but not here. Linux, ubuntu specifically, out of the box can have an audio workstation ready to go within 10 minutes of installation. Not to mention you get a much larger array of software and VST plugins. When you consider hardware support, its almost a nobrainer. However FreeBSD is probably a bit more stable with jack in realtime mode.

10 years ago, I used to run Linux as my effects processor for my guitar and keyboard synth when I was in a band. That same laptop also ran projectm to display realtime visuals on our backdrop.

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I have a machine running ubuntu studio. While it is easy to get up and going, the upgrades over the years have not been smooth. I'm thinking about going back to FreeBSD because long term it is easier to upgrade. pkg is an amazing system that beats dpkg or rpm (it took 10-15 years to get ahead though)

> pkg is an amazing system that beats dpkg or rpm

What's your reasoning for this statement? I find poudriere[1] handy for compiling one's own packages from ports configured to fit one's goals, but I see nothing outstanding in plain pkg.

It has issues when there's an IPv6 address up (even link-local) but no egress v6 routing. It would hang and wait for a timeout when an IPv6 address is selected from resolved addresses. After a timeout - pkg connects to v4 endpoint but if there's several packages to be downloaded, it can fall back to trying to connect to v6 with the next package.

On the other hand, I've recently had Ubuntu 22.04 register Python-related packages which were not successfully installed, resulting in all dpkg/apt/apt-get commands failing due to py3clean script throwing tracebacks, until /var/lib/dpkg/status was edited and these packages were in fact installed and then removed.

[1] https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere/wiki

Not op here, but: I think the philosophy of ports and packages (shared with other BSDs) has an upside over dpkg and rpm in that you can customize options when you build from source. The downside is that building from source takes a long time.

If you follow Debian testing or sid, you will experience a lot of dependency breakage that I've never seen on a BSD, but that may not be dpkg or apt's fault so much as ongoing package maintenance causing those issues.

A lot of that is BSD has learned when to rebuild downstream ports, and they have a good ci system to rebuild them.

I don't know whar Debian does for the above.

That you can mix ports and pkg is a big deal. 99% of the time the default binary pkg is good enough, but that last 1% I can get the exact options I want.

I haven't used IPv6 with pkg though. (stupid ISPs).

> It has issues when there's an IPv6 address up (even link-local) but no egress v6 routing.

I have multiple FreeBSD machines, all of them with IPv6 up on link-local, and pkg doesn't hang at all. Even without valid globally unique IPv6 addressing, but valid ULA addressing (unique local address) and valid routing for IPv6 on an internal network, no issues.

It sounds like you've got some globally unique IPv6 addresses assigned to an interface somewhere and address selection (and thus the addresses returned from getaddrinfo) will return IPv6 first and try that before falling back to IPv4.

You can configure this address selection by using the ip6addrctl tool which will allow you to validate and change that address selection.

It is based upon https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3484

FreeBSD also has predefined policies you can set in /etc/rc.conf:

ip6addrctl_enable="YES" # Set to YES to enable default address selection ip6addrctl_verbose="NO" # Set to YES to enable verbose configuration messages ip6addrctl_policy="AUTO" # A pre-defined address selection policy # (ipv4_prefer, ipv6_prefer, or AUTO)

> It sounds like you've got some globally unique IPv6 addresses assigned to an interface somewhere

Single inet6 address up is fe80::xxx. My outdated ISP does not provide any v6 connectivity. But my cellular (other) ISP provides v6 and I use tethering while traveling, so would like to avoid disabling INET6.

> addresses returned from getaddrinfo) will return IPv6 first and try that before falling back to IPv4.

It's random with no v6 preference.

ping6 fails immediately upon attempt to reach outside world:

    ping6: UDP connect: No route to host
    ping6 2606:4700:4700::1111  0.00s user 0.00s system 50% cpu 0.005 total

And here's an example[1] of how how pkg hangs for about a minute when it selects unreachable v6 address.

[1] https://bsd.to/NuYu/raw

Would love to see a write up with more detail on this! I love Ableton but it does not play nice with Linux.

Wonderful idea, I shall commit to a blog post about it and share it this week. I will note that oss apps do not hold a candle to most professional apps. That said, you can make all of the popular effects yourself, you just really need to understand your synth/vst/daw

I have very bad experience trying to run windows VSTs on Linux with wine - since then (2011) i switched to windows. Is it better now?

If you actually need Windows VSTs in your workflow, then it would still be best to run Windows. However, yabridge is pretty amazing these days (still, however, utterly dependent on the ever-shifting sands of what Wine does).

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