FreeBSD: My Thoughts

hi everyone welcome back again to the channel and to a new video today i'm going to give you my thoughts about freebst if you remember a few months ago i did an installation video about freebsd and since then i'm using it fairly often and in this video i'm gonna give you my thoughts and my impressions about it so without further ado let's get going [Music] hi guys so here we are on the freebsd desktop so first i want to apologize if my face is looking in several directions i have the video camera here between two monitors so i'm trying to look at one monitor where free where freebsd is and the other one when i have some information for you so this is not a tutorial i'm not going to install for your freebsd from scratch i already have a video on that uh on the channel i want to just give you my impression here of freebsd because i've been using this now for a while and i've been installing this on several machines laptops desktops now to show you this i installed this on virtualbox because i can record very well the screen and have the camera good quality etc etc so i will give you my impressions of freebsd anyway i installed it on several machines as i said before so a general impression that i have about freebsd after using it for a while is that it's a very solid operating system and it feels really stable i don't know how to explain this in words but it feels really compact so when you're using freebsd you really feel everything comes from one place only and i guess this connects to the fact that compared to linux uh where basically a new linux distribution is composed by the linux kernel and then the distributions provide the rest here on freebsd you get everything from one source basically so every package that you see here on freebsd is packaged by freebsc itself so by the developer of freebst you have basically and mostly the same software that you find on a linux distribution it just feel that everything is coming down from one source only for everything which makes the system somehow more compact now there are some differences of course between linux and freebsd they are both unix-like operating systems but for example freebsd does not have actually an init system per se it doesn't have run levels it has instead a bsd style run level so to say uh so everything is uh in a xc directory under the rc uh directory where you have a configuration file with several scripts and when the computer boots it reads basically those scripts where it's the services needed to be started are there so there is one place basically that where everything is starting up there is no systemd there is no init there is no system five and so on so this makes it in a way very simple to configure because you just have to configure one file and basically that's it for these kind of things so freebsd feels as many people write also on the internet monolithic that means everything is one block so you get everything in one you get the kernel you get the packages you get everything what else in linux distribution you have of course the linux kernel and you get everything else from the distribution so this is one big difference but there are also many other differences and let me show you here for example if i open up a terminal this is by the way xfce which i installed from scratch in freebst i customize it a little bit you know me i'm not someone who customizes the desktop that much anyway but i just gave it a little bit of polish here and there and to me this is enough anyway and let me clean up the terminal here and let me go full screen also so that you can see better if i increase the font size and let me type in here cat slash etsy slash fstab have a look at the fstab file so you see for example here already a difference the file system type in this case in this installation that i have done is actually ufs so ufs is actually the unix file system it's one of the oldest active file systems and it was developed in the early 80s i think and today ufs is still the default file system in 3bst but of course it's not the original version it has been now enhanced etc etc there is also another possibility to have freebst installed with zfs so during the installation you can choose actually whether you want to have ufs or setfs and probably the next time i'm going to install freebsd i'm going to do it via the zfs file system because it has more features it was actually implemented by sun initially and it has several other features like pool management data integrity and performance improvements as well so if you're installing freebsd from scratch definitely go with zfs i think you'll have more advantages there but you can see here i have ufs and a swap partition basically i would say another big difference is the packaging system so we have here in freebst what's called pkg where you can install packages and the pkg package manager is very strong actually it's very solid so what you would do for example to install something here in freebsd would be something like sudo and then pkg install and then the package name that you want to install basically now just a note here i'm installing with sudo and not do as which is actually another package that has a pseudo functionality i'm using sudo because do as actually in freebsd does not implement the persist option so if i used to as i will have to type the password every time i use to ask pkg install which is annoying so i rather use sudo because it does not ask me the password every single time and install is for example the option to install a package if you are searching for something let's search for example let's type in search and the package name let's search for simple screen recorder for example any temperature here i need to enter the password once and it's going to search it and you can see it found it so i could actually go ahead and install it so it's very simple to install packages here absolutely no problem but the packaging system feels very solid now to update the distribution itself there is another command for this which is sudo freebsd dash update fetch you would fetch first the updates and it will check if there are any and if so in this case there are none but if so you would pull up the last command and replace fetch with install to upgrade your system so that's basically it for the main functionality it's very simple it's very straightforward and it feels really compact as i said before now boot times and shutdown times are a little bit slower than a linux distribution but that personally doesn't bother me that much anyway what i find it's a little bit challenging here in freebsd is actually installing on hardware specifically on laptops i actually had some issues with one of the laptops i have here which is a tuxedo laptop nothing fancy it has an intel integrated card it's a ufi system and i had to fiddle around with that to find a way actually on how to use the video drivers um because it's a ufi system then i found out on the wiki that you have to use the frame buffer driver which does not actually have 3d acceleration maybe i missed something in there but i managed actually to make it work but it was not really uh the optimal solution i have to say now i don't have any other laptops here to try out other drivers so i cannot really say how that will work but on a desktop machine all desktop machine that i have it worked actually out of the box with no problem now right now hearing virtualbox is working absolutely fine and i have to actually say also another thing is the wiki the handbook for freebsd is excellent you find every sort of information in there let me close this window and power up here firefox and let me search for for example free psd uh let's go to xfc this is the desktop environment i installed for example so let me change this to english and i'll go to desktop environments so here you can see it explains you basically how you can install gnome how you can install i think kde there you go and how you can install xfce so it's very simple it's very very clearly written for example to install oops sorry i clicked here something for example to install here gnome you just installed the gnome 3 package with the package manager if you want to use the ports and compile the software you can do that as well then you need just to mount one directory in the fstab file and enable the debug and hold here in the rc.com file and then enable also in the same file the gdm and the gnome services and that's it and then basically you just boot up and gnome is working out of the box now there are some actually issues that i had with the gnome desperate environment and also here in xfce that i noticed a few days ago some of the icons have some glyphs or they come out funny and i read in the forums that this is a bug actually in the packages and it's probably going to be taken care of very soon so nothing scary there and the same goes for kd for example you just installed cad a5 mount one directory enable the same services in the rc.com file stdm is already also included in the package here and then you'll have xfce uh sorry kdm and i keep clicking something here there you go and by xfc it's the same you just install the package you have also the xfc goodies package and uh you can also install also light dm and this is what i did here and you can enable also the debug service in the rc.com file and the same goes also for the light dm underscore enable in always in the rc.com file and don't forget to install also the light dmgtk greater otherwise it won't work and then you will have xse xfc up and running so then i installed here in this machine particularly i installed the materia key the material theme which is also available in the repositories as well as the papiro's icon team and this is how i got these icons here looking like this and i just installed also the whisker menu here on the bottom which is also available in the repositories um i have here also a standard panel which actually i didn't configure that much and i downloaded some wallpapers from the repository as well you can look them up in the freebsd repositories but what i wanted to show you also is the um freebsd if you go to the website here for bsd.org and very there is here somewhere uh let me check if i find it the documentation i think and you have the handbook so this basically explains you everything how you can install previously uh if you have troubles with network with other things accounts time zone services and hardening and so on you have everything here and i read actually not all of it didn't have to but i read through some of the pages for example to configure the sound system because i had some issues here in virtualbox and also the desktop environments because i didn't know how to configure those and i have to say they are really this wiki is really nicely written and it's very easy to understand for example let's go here to the x work configuration if you have any problem with x work you can come down here so quick start xor supports most common video cards keyboards and pointing device and so on and it explains you what to do step by step so it's very simple to read it's very easy to understand as well and if you have any problem also i definitely recommend you to go also to the uh forums to the freebsd forums they are absolutely great you'll find really some nice people there if you have any issue with freebsd there will be someone to help you out there so all in all um i've been using now freebsd for the last i think month or so not every single day because i'm doing most of the work on arch as you know on my main machine but i've done um beside garuda what i used um on a laptop i used the other desktop now it's here on virtualbox freebsd for other tasks and i had absolutely zero issue with it uh my feeling about my feeling about freebst is i really like freebsd as an operating system and i say here as an operating system not as a distribution because it's not it's an operating system it's really nice it's it's really solid it comes down from one place only it's uh it's very compact as i said at the beginning of the video and i definitely recommend you to try it out it's you know even you don't like it uh you you need to try it out to just to get the feeling on how the difference is with uh gnu linux distributions so as i said you know linux is the kernel and then we have the new uh system uh you know which makes the rest and then we have our distributions uh like arch like debian like ubuntu they're all derivative of the new linux system now another thing is that we have an upcoming version which is the 1300 the one i have installed is 12.2 which was actually released just a few weeks ago if i'm not mistaken or a few days ago i'm looking forward to see also what comes in the version 13. anyway when i started out with linux i didn't know freebst i just knew the name but i didn't know the os so actually i'm really happy that i tried it out and i will keep actually i will keep it in one of my machines because i'm curious to see how you know how it evolves and what new releases will bring etc etc thing is freebsd it's really i personally feel based on stability so you will not probably have the hottest features that you have on on a linux distribution but if you want to enjoy a free stable compact and very solid operating system freebsd is definitely worth a try it takes some time maybe to get used to it if you're coming from linux you know most of the commands are working also in freebsd but the system is managed differently because you have a centralized operating system so to say and so it feels a little different but uh if you're coming from linux some commands will be very simple you know it's it's you will have similar commands and the software itself the packages themselves are most of the names also are very similar to the linux distributions if you're coming from windows or mac os well mac os i mean it's part based on previous d so beside the the graphical interface which is completely different of course but uh if you if you have dealt with mac os on the terminal you know what i'm talking about freebsd is anyway part of the bsd is also in there if you're coming from windows this is going to be for sure a little bit different you will have to learn more about the operating system structure and so on but if you want to try it out i will definitely say go give it a try it's really a nice os the only thing you might have to consider is that configuring hardware in here can be a little bit difficult depending on the are depending on the hardware you have so you have to try it out and see my suggestion is try it out first on a virtual machine you can try this on virtualbox there is actually also a virtualbox wiki for freebsd which i followed when i installed it here on virtualbox and you can see here previous t as a guest in this case so i'm just going to click here and then it tells you basically what you need to do you need to install the virtualbox additions from the repositories and then enable enable these two services in the rc.com file which is the file as we said before that checks the scripts when the machine boots and that's all i had to do one thing though if you're trying this in virtualbox on linux remember to actually change the video driver let me show you what i mean um let me pull over here my virtualbox from arch linux and if i go here this is freebsd if i go under settings and under display you need to have vbox vga or vbox svga because if you're choosing v i think it's vm i think it's the name of the other driver virtual machine driver it's not going to be able to scale the display so you will have to go with vbox svga or with vbox vga and disable 3d acceleration and there is a reason for that that i read now i can't remember exactly what was that but it's because the i think the virtual virtual machine uh driver cannot uh assign a a number to the display or of some sort of explanation like that and that's why it cannot go full screen so you you select vbox vga or vbox svga and the scaling will work absolutely fine as you can see here this is a 1080p and it's carrying perfectly fine so once you have virtualbox installed and you install 3bst in here you can test it out you can see how you feel it about how you feel about it and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to you know keep it on a virtual machine and and try it out until you feel comfortable with it or you feel ready to go and try it out on real hardware it's really up to you for me personally i will stick with arch linux as you know already i love arch linux it's my favorite linux distribution and i probably will stick with it for the rest of the time i will have a pc but that doesn't mean and i don't feel blocked to trying out other linux distributions or other operating systems like freebsd on the contrary i'm very curious and i encourage everybody to to have a look because it's the nice thing that we have in open source uh software the ability to choose whether you know whatever we want to use and i think i think freebsd it's a fantastic operating system and i will also have always an eye to it anyway this is my take on freebsd i will keep using it as i said for a while and if i come up with something else that i notice i will definitely do another video about it if you guys are interested in an install in an installation video uh for how you can build for example uh you know the the kd desktop environment or xfc desktop environment let me know in the comments below i can i can definitely do that maybe in a live stream um because i have already a video on the channel on how to install freebsd i think with kde that's what i that's what i've done there but we can try to install it also with the gnome or xfce if you want to uh we can try that or i think they have also bspwm as a window manager so if you are interested in that let me know in the comments below and if you try out freebst let me know how it worked for you i'm curious to know your opinion as well and if you have any questions also let me know in the comments below uh i will definitely answer you as soon as i can so this is my impression about it's a nice operating system i really like it and i will keep using it for a while on my site desktop machine here so thank you so much for watching guys and i'll see you very soon in the next video [Music] you

Channel: EF - Linux Made Simple

Views: 21,650

Rating: 4.9504814 out of 5

Keywords: Linux, Arch Linux, Software, Training, how to install, install arch linux, install linux, tech tips, it tips, linux tips, UEFI, linux help, linux uefi, freebsd

Id: ZzjJwgq8mjo

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020