Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmort253 | Hacker News Reader

I tried FreeBSD on ARM64. I couldn't get the browsers, like Firefox or Epiphany, to load without crashing. I'm not sure if it was something I was doing wrong or if the ARM ecosystem just isn't well supported yet. I was also running in a VM with QEMU.

On the surface, FreeBSD sounds cool. I liked that I could boot directly to a console and then run the GUI only if I wanted to. Everything felt more modular. It reminded me of the days before Windows 95 when I could just use DOS to save precious memory and CPU bandwidth.

Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else. Maybe it was just because it was running in a VM. Maybe it was because it's ARM. Not sure. I'd love to hear others experiences with FreeBSD on ARM.

View on HN

> I liked that I could boot directly to a console and then run the GUI only if I wanted to.

You can do that in Linux...

> Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else.

Not really? I think the BSDs are simpler, change less and are better documented.

Source: I ran OpenBSD on desktops in early 2000s.

> I think the BSDs are simpler, change less and are better documented

> Source: I ran OpenBSD on desktops in early 2000s.

From my experience witb BSDs on a SUN pizza box (also around 2000) : FreeBSD had the docs on the internet, not very helpful when you want to configure the network. OpenBSD was ok. Linux (my first choice) was slow as hell.

As a current OpenBSD user, the man pages absolutely blow Linux out of the water.

RTFM will go a very, very long way on this OS.

On that note, maybe I should try the other BSD flavors then.

> You can do that in Linux...

I think I _may_ have done that before. What I thought was interesting is FreeBSD just did that without any extra steps. When I "apt-get install" a desktop environment in Ubuntu or Debian and reboot, the desktop environment loads by default. In FreeBSD, I guess there's some startup scripts I would need to edit to start X and the desktop manager...

Yeah, Debian will auto-configure that for you. Distros like Arch do not.

Well, it depends on what you install. If you install just xorg and a window manager, it usually won't boot into it.

If you install GNOME or KDE that ship with a display manager, it will be configured to boot into it. That is what you would usually want though.

You can just disable the login manager on Debian and you'll start at the TTY every time.

Do you still have the core dumps and messages to stdout/stderr/dmesg?

If you're going to run it in a VM, why ARM?

Not OP by my machine is an M1 Mac, so ARM64 VMs are much more performant than emulated x86/x64 ones.

Exactly. I was on an M1 Mac, so trying to emulate x86/64 would have been painfully, unusably slow.

For simple console stuff on the terminal, it's ok. But when the GUI is involved, or anything with a lot of computation, having to translate all of the instructions from native ARM64 back to x86/64 and back takes a ton of resources and time.

Same experience with Browsers. Only Surf never dies.

Firefox on Sway with wayland enabled seems to lose the compositor connection almost instantly.

https://surf.suckless.org/

ah, the memories

this + dwn https://dwm.suckless.org/

then I said to myself "why am I wasting so much time tinkering with stuff that gains me nothing" and moved on in my life

Eh, I disagree. WMaker+Luakit makes my netbook work. Anything else under i686 it's a no-no.

I had the opposite experience with dwm. I don't like cycling through overlapping windows on the same "desktop", and I don't like taking the time to place windows correctly. With 2 screens, I have 18 "desktops", which is more than enough, and the automatic tiling is exactly what I want. On the other hand when I use GNOME/KDE/Windows I'm always losing lots of time navigating. Also I must have some kind of curse because even with high-end computers I've never had one of those run really smoothly. My current work laptop is on KDE, and when I use a shortcut to open a terminal it takes 200/300ms.

I think it also helps that I've never really tinkered with it. I took someone's build that had a few things I wanted, and I think that's it. In contrast, I spend more time on a regular desktop environment setting up shortcuts.

This, but cwm for floating instead of tiling, almost the same philosophy. Set keybindings, fire, forget. I use Wmaker because that was my first WM and I like it, but CWM it's my "failsafe" wm when things break.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com