BSD Challenge

You had me at

You lost me at

:wink:


That said now I wanna try it with R9 270X. :thinking:

4 Likes

That actually sounds pretty interesting.

Yeah it works pretty well.

That’s my major gripe with Linux actually. You want bleeding edge package X? You need to run a bleeding edge distro… or compile from source.

Compiling from source via ports is braindead simple in FreeBSD, and even without doing that the packages tree is updated independently of the OS.

1 Like

It’s like an extreme version of Arch forumes. If you don’t RTFM or read the FAQ and the answer to your question is there, your question will at best be ignored. At worst, you would never dare to ask a question on the mailing list again :smile:

I know, don’t judge lol. It’ll take some time before I learn xmonad :wink:

2 Likes

Challenges challenges. GDM doesn’t seem to be able to load gnome-session. It seems to be a driver problem, because vesa driver works fine. I removed GNOME and installed Xfce and started it with xenodm. It comes up, accelerated and all, but the mouse is weird. It’s got the cross icon all the time and doesn’t seem to change. Gotta hit the mailing lists and see what’s going on. Until then, here’s a screenshot!

3 Likes

Cursor issue solved. It’s amazing what one can achieve by modifying xorg.conf.

3 Likes

And just like that, you have my attention again. :wink:

5 Likes

I been using Pfsence and Freenas for over a year now, its been pretty rock solid.
Never used it for the desktop. I like what has been said about it for the desktop, but it seems its really limiting like gaming and windows gaming with Passthrough. at least i have not seen anything about it

1 Like

I used to run desktop FreeBSD several years ago. It used to be OK, gaming definitely not the best, but a few years ago with the DRI rendering infrastructure stuff, FreeBSD got left behind significantly. I’m unsure as to whether it caught up at any point.

If you’re wanting a desktop that has good video/3d support as much as it pains me to say it, you’re better off with linux.

Which is why i’m running Fedora myself these days.

I have used Linux on a off over the years.
This year i have Fedora set up on a small Lenovo Thinkcenter that i been learning on. I just wish i had more room to use both my windows box and Linux box at the same time, it will be that way till i get a better system and run windows in a VM.
I been trying to get X2go running but i keep running into errors i have yet to figure out. my plan was to use X2go so i don’t have to keep two keyboards and mice around on my desk.

1 Like

Has anyone seen this project?

[https://github.com/The-Homura-Project/Homura](http://Homura is a launcher that makes it easy to run Windows games/launcher easily on FreeBSD)

1 Like

Very nice. Looks promising. Seems to have a lot of visibility as well. With this and Bhyve having GPU passthrough maybe more people will make the switch to a reliable, stable, secure system.

1 Like

2020-07-26 13_50_10-TrueNAS - stormax.imperiumom.xyz

does this count?

2 Likes

They also acknowledge problems and fix them. KDE Plasma had bizarre memory issues. If I left my desktop locked overnight, I’d wake up to 20GB of RAM being used.

Now, though, 4GB at me using Firefox pretty heavily (three discourse forums open) and reading a really large PDF. That’s on par with Linux imo.

Tiling window managers are still the go to for a “small build”, and I use i3 on OpenBSD. I used Awesome and i3 on FreeBSD for a long time, but I wanted to go back to a DE real quick. Really happy with how far KDE Plasma has come on FreeBSD.

I also want to add to this and say that their documentation is often worlds above the documentation you find on a Linux based system. I don’t want to turn this into a mud slinging match, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD man pages always have examples and top notch references.

I am revisiting ZFS to get a handle on pools and encryption. We might have a new edition to the family (he’s a good boy, I hear, lot of threads and throughput. Gets along with BSD license and has an affinity towards non-ECC RAM). When I ran a ZFS RAID 1 with VMs the performance seemed less than optimal. It was awful, if I’m being honest. Turns out it may have been a hardware issue, with the motherboard, and not a ZFS or software related issue. So I am going to try it again with four 2TB drives. I know that’s not “a lot” but it is for me.

Anyway, testing on a single drive now (yeah, yeah) to create some pools and see how the encryption works with other pools. I heard some bizarre things like if you encrypt the root then all other pools are encrypted and will hurt performance? I don’t see this being the case, but I’m still at the early stages of learning.

While we’re fan boying I am using Absolute FreeBSD and ZFS Mastery as references and guides during this experience. Michael W. Lucas really knows his stuff. Absolute FreeBSD is probably the best book on systems administration I’ve ever read.

4 Likes

RaidZ is not optimal for performance-sensitive virtualization workloads. Mirrors are preferred, and careful attention to block sizes goes a long way.

1 Like

That’s the plan, 8TB total but split into 4TB.

I’ll dig into block size recommendations. It’ll be a while before I build the new rig (probably January). So I have time to read and practice.

I seen this and thought it was quite interesting use case for external backups.

Forbidden Arts of ZFS | Episode 2 | Using ZFS on a single drive

1 Like

I been wanting to learn more about BSD I’ll have to grab that book.
I don’t have problem with GNU Linux, but everything lately feels really disjointed to me.
since BSD been working great for NAS with Jails and router, i want to see how much i can do with a BSD as a desktop,

3 Likes

Well, hopefully now i’m finally giving it a go for my general-use server. I was pushing my luck so far with my ‘old’ server, I’ve decided to buy this new machine, and since I want the reliability and confidence from zfs, along with avoiding the linux distro frustrations, BSD it is.

Will be doing pretty much everything (serverland) that’s not SBC suitable on here, so going for a reliable 4tb storage pool, game servers, potentially a virtualized desktop (if I have enough resources after the game servers), general ‘run this software’ machine. Expect extensive jails and bhyve! (provided I don’t break it too bad, and move back to debian)

screenfetch

Not sure why the storage reads 1.3T with only a root-on-zfs 120gb ssd, and an unmounted 500GB drive, but once I get some time with a 3d printer to get drive caddies, storage will be 4tb.

2 Likes