Ask HN: How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box?

10 pointsAlpinweis21 comments

After reading the recent posts on how people use their Mac and Dell/Windows I was just wondering if there is any one using FreeBSD as a desktop OS and how they use it. After being a Windows user for years I am now a FreeBSD/OpenBSD intermediate user interested in finding guru's advise on proper ways of using it.

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Not a guru, but I've used it for a while. Both as desktop and server. My main gripe is that FreeBSD doesn't have a reliable filesystem. FreeBSD still dies pretty horribly after a few hard crashes (power loss, whatever).

fsck? In 2008? No thanks. Messages about possibly corrupted inodes? How should that be my problem? I can't stress this enough, one day you will wake up and FreeBSD will refuse to boot. And that day will, by Murphy's Law, be one of those days where you have to get an incredible amount of real work done.

I'm a big fan of FreeBSD, ports, and the whole "do it right" and "proper documentation" philosophy. But until they get journalling right you should probably stay away.

(also: upgrading from FreeBSD 6.x to 6.(x+1) is incredibly painful. I don't think upgrading a 7.x system is going to be much easier. Reinstalling FreeBSD gets old fast, so you'll probably just shrug and stick with whatever version you already have)

ZFS has a freebsd port.

Experimental.

FreeBSDs filesystem is one of the most reliable filesystems out there. It is old, but still performs pretty well and the age transfers to reliability.

There are 2 things creating problems now, though: first, it does not use journaling (by default) leading to expensive fsck times on big disks. Second, it could have faster meta-data operations.

The filesystem has a construction such that a system crash can only lead to unreclaimed free space on the disk. If that is not the case, you are facing a hardware error. The primary role of fsck is to put back this free space.

Journaling is now experimental in FreeBSD. ZFS is experimental in FreeBSD. As soon as these stabilizes, the problems mentioned here goes away entirely. Note that "experimental" means that the state is equivalent to most things linux: the crap actually works but have not yet seen the strains of time.

upgrading from FreeBSD 6.x to 6.(x+1) is incredibly painful

With FreeBSD Update, it takes two commands, "freebsd-update upgrade -r <new release>" and "freebsd-update install".

Yes. You're comments about the filesystem and fsck and other things show you definitely are no guru.

Please explain. Do you have a better solution?

A data point: In five-plus years of using OpenBSD heavily (and occasionally FreeBSD on the side), I have never run into this. OpenBSD has "soft updates" (http://openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#SoftUpdates) on its filesystem, though, which has similar results as a journaling filesystem.

Sometimes fsck needs to run for a bit after a crash or power outage, but it has only lead to a 2-10 minute delay for me, not refusing to boot. Annoying, but hardly fatal.

I use FreeBSD at work and home. Its nice to have an identical setup on the laptop and colo. When I want to deploy something, I make a package file on the dev box and simply install it on the server. Desktop: window manager: ratpoison browser: firefox editor: emacs email: mew (runs in emacs)

Using it "on the desktop" is quite vague. What would you use your computer for? Somebody who wants a computer for checking email, shopping on ebay, and playing flash games is going to have different requirements than somebody who wants to make electronic music or do heavy video editing.

Have you looked at the FreeBSD Handbook? (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/) That will probably answer many of your questions. Also, the OpenBSD FAQ: http://openbsd.org/faq/

I've used OpenBSD on the desktop and servers for over five years. I mostly use it for programming (Emacs), playing music (mpd: http://mpd.wikia.com/), and nethack. I use Firefox and w3m for web stuff, dwm as a window manager, mercurial for vc, etc.

OpenBSD's focus on security keeps the core system simple, well documented, and straightforward to configure, so as to minimize the amount of obscure things that could lead to vulnerabilities. FreeBSD is also an excellent OS, but OpenBSD's clean and minimalistic design is more my style.

I don't use it as desktop OS anymore, but I used to during the 4.x branch. Most of those days annoyances are now gone like having to recompile java from source or using linux binaries of Mozilla/Firefox for flash (this may still apply).

I don't think it's very different from using a non ultrapolished Linux distro(like Debian). Choose your WM, install bash or (pd)ksh(tcsh sucks) and your prefered tools(Eclipse, LaTeX, Emacs, OOffice... whatever) and you're ready to work. I don't like GNU userland so for me that was a plus, but some people can't live without colored ls and a several megs vi, so your mileage may vary.

I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop.

Desktop environment: KDE3.

Text editor: kwrite.

Office suite: OpenOffice.

Web browser: Konqueror for most sites, Firefox for a few sites which don't work in Konqueror.

Email: Thunderbird.

Other communications: Kopete (for ICQ), aMSN (for MSN), ksirc (for IRC).

System administration tools: FreeBSD Update for base system security updates; Portsnap for updating the ports tree; portupgrade for updating installed ports; tarsnap (of course!) for backups.

Any particular reason you prefer Konqueror to Firefox? Do you feel it's faster?

Two reasons: First, it does feel faster. Second, I don't have flash enabled in konqueror, which makes some websites far less obnoxious.

About 10 years ago I started using a colocated FreeBSD system as the central location for all my email so the "desktop" that matters to me is whatever ssh window happens to have the screen session where my mh-emacs process is running.

I'm not sure it makes sense to use FreeBSD on the desktop. Not that it isn't perfectly capable mind, but if you want a BSD desktop or laptop there's OSX. I've FreeBSD running in a VirtualBox VM; best of all possible worlds.

i used to use FreeBSD until the pain kills me (had to rebuild kernel to activate nat)

openbsd generic kernel covers almost everything i need (no bluetooth support) - for complete hw support, i use ubuntu

overall, openbsd is simpler. Last week i just upgraded from 4.0 to 4.4 on remote machine in about 2-3 hours). I never bothered to upgrade before :D 400+ days uptime is normal

for desktop, i use dwm, firefox3, mrxvt, qiv, axyftp, vifm, vim (non-gui), mpg123, mplayer, ImageMagick, gimp, lighttpd, mercurial, newlisp, tightvncviewer (to control my Mac Mini GUI remotely)

had to rebuild kernel to activate nat

That hasn't been necessary for the past 3 years.

Xorg + fluxbox

emacs22

Firefox

And WIN4BSD when I need to test my work in IE or other Windows browsers.

I use FreeBSD for desktop and laptop. Never crashes in the four years I've been doing that. Anything I used to do on Windows I can do on fbsd. The only issue is Flash on web sites. Most of that is just ads so I don't miss it but the few videos I'd like to watch I can download and view them offline.

It's no different than running a Linux desktop and you are running the same software. The question is a little strange to me.

I don't. FreeBSD is dying. Haven't you heard?

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