My first success with FreeBSD reddit / freebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ray1992xD · 2023-09-19 21:05 Today I finally managed to get Gnome working on FreeBSD. I have always wanted to experiment with FreeBSD! It feels new and oddly familiar. IIRC Linux was derived from Unix. I attempted something like this 7 years ago but failed and then figured I should first get to know Linux better before attempting again. The installation of FreeBSD is kind of straight forward. Like Arch, it drops you into a shell when you reboot after the installation. Then there is the setup of Gnome and other tools such as Sudo and Nano. I had to look up a guide from a YouTube video to get Gnome working. When I landed on the desktop for the first time, sound and mouse support were working out of the box. The display section of Gnome settings reported the default 1920x1080. The refresh rate is reported as 0. Not a big deal, but if you ever attempt this, take note of this. No 2 systems are the same however. The OS feels really sturdy and it performs great for the i3 8gb system with integrated graphics that I am running it on. YouTube 4k is too much to ask for the system but I never watch 4k anyway. It used to run Win7, so given the age of the machine, it's forgiven. I'm going to get some good hours of exploration out of this Build I guess. Is there any BSD-only software that is out there to explore? What other great stuff would you recommend on this OS? All in all, I'm not disappointed! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ImageJPEG · 2023-09-19 23:28 It's pretty awesome! Just an FYI, thought. Linux doesn't have any lineage from UNIX. It was originally designed to be an opensource, UNIX like system. FrdeBSD, on the other hand, can trace its roots from BSD UNIX. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vogelke · 2023-09-19 23:32 If you don't already have a web presence, why not set up your own local webserver, experiment with some content, and then mirror the content to (say) a Digital Ocean droplet? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PharmerDon3855 · 2023-09-20 12:51 I've recently had success installing FreeBSD with a KDE5 desktop using the desktop-installer program. There is an awesome concise guide ([https://nudesystems.com/install-freebsd-with- kde/](https://nudesystems.com/install-freebsd-with-kde/) ) that walks you through the entire process from downloading Free BSD to configuring KDE. The installer also has options for 13 other desktops built in. The only struggle I had was with editing using VI (more used to VIM), but with a little more research this worked out also! Runs great, fast and reliable, (avoid using the Wayland option) and has been my daily driver for about 2 weeks! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- radams409 · 2023-09-20 17:22 Don't setup on a droptlet, such a waste you can easly come and get a VPS for next to nothing as we offer FreeBSD and we have been enjoying FreeBSD since 2001. Feel free to hit us up if you have any questions at https://cloudnium.net or you can ping me directly. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mirror176 · 2023-09-20 21:04 BSD and Linux are two different groups with BSD being Unix developers porting UNIX to PC while Linux was PC developers writing a clone of UNUX for PC. for 4k video, maybe trying different codecs from youtube, and trying them in a separate media player (browsers are better than the days of flash-hardware acceleration, but they are still a lot of bloat) may be worthwhile. Videos can be downloaded with www/yt-dlp and passing it the correct options lets you list (-F) and download selected audio+video codecs. Videolan put enough work into av1 CPU optimization efforts before any GPU hardware could play it that I'd be surprised if multimedia/vlc does not already handle 4k on your hardware (at least with some encoding options that youtube very likely restricts itself to). I haven't looked lately but remember they had opensource devenopment of their decoder in open IRC chat. As for BSD specific software that is fun to play with, it depends what your interests are. pf (came from OpenBSD) is good firewall technology. If you use terminals and need to work remotely or want things left up while killing X, tmux (don't know history but now developed as part of OpenBSD) allows terminals to attach/detach to it freely without just closing the programs ran within it. If you want to do stuff with virtual machines, bhyve is quite popular and BSD-only though comes with limitations. Jails allow you to 'sandbox' things within your system; poudriere uses it extensively to create/destroy clean environment for building packages from the ports tree which is the tool used by the FreeBSD project to build packages that pkg only users get. If what you want to run turns out to be a Linux only program which is closed source or has too many things to make it practical to port it to FreeBSD, there is a Linux compatibility ABI which may be able to run it (and some ports entries make use of it already which should have 'linux' in their name; there are still things not ported from Linux which could be and some ports are not up to date so if you dig deep enough then you will find there is work to do.. If we can know more about your computer interests then we can suggest software, otherwise explore the base system and browse /usr/ports (or [freshports.org](https://freshports.org) if you opted to not installl it) for a list of things people have working here. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- phosix · 2023-09-20 22:15 Just to give some info on the whole Linux ≠ *BSD and why it matters to you as a user: Except for some very specific implementations (like Android), Linux usually uses the GNU (GNU's Not UNIX, lovely recursive acronym) environment for the base user interface. This includes the command line and a few shells, like bash. This environment was specifically designed to mimic UNIX, but as the acronym very explicitly states, it is *not* UNIX. FreeBSD (and indeed all the other extant releases of BSD) is directly derived from the Berkely Software Distribution UNIX. For probably 90% of what you're likely to be doing, the differences will be negligible. Some commands will behave just a little bit differently than what you might expect if you're coming from a Linux background. Some commands will be competely different, to the point of frustration if you follow any Linux-centric tutorials. Just be aware there are differences, and when you run into them it can be like a brick wall. Trust the FreeBSD man pages over any online documentation or tutorials you might find. The longer you stick with FreeBSD, the more differences you'll encounter, until you eventually realize the two are as different a citrus and pineapple. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CoolTheCold · 2023-09-21 07:37 Back in the days I needed to interact with FreeBSD servers, it was quite annoying for me to deal with order of arguments for cli tools. Say I do `tail some file.txf` and then add `-f` , so becomes `tail some file.txt -f` - works on GNU, but required to put -f first on BSDs, hitting my muscle memory and mental power. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nmariusp · 2023-09-23 02:10 \> Like Arch, it drops you into a shell when you reboot after the installation. When installing Arch Linux, I use archinstall and that installs KDE Plasma Desktop 5 correctly. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu6z- X\_hngI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu6z-X_hngI) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ray1992xD · 2023-09-23 08:09 Amazing stuff! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- grahamperrin · 2023-10-04 18:25 Thanks, > awesome concise guide (https://nudesystems.com/install-freebsd-with- kde/ ) that walks you through the entire process f It's good, but not really *concise*.