I figured I’d post my ramblings about recent OS evaluations here.
I’ve found FreeBSD to be a really solid server OS, and decided I’d like to try it out on desktop & laptop devices.
HP Z2 Mini G3 Workstation (test desktop system)
I’d been running various Linux distros on this for the last few years, and decided to go outside my comfort zone and try something different.
FreeBSD 15 and KDE - The base system installed nicely, but unfortunately, KDE failed to come up, as the graphics drivers couldn’t deal with the Intel HD Graphics 530 device.
OpenBSD - installed and came up nicely. Very old school, reminds me of my beginning with Linux/BSD in the 90s. Also very secure and locked down. I had to adjust system resource limits to be able to use my desktop normally. I installed openarena and tried to play but there was a weird bug that prevented movement with the mouse. No go.
Omarchy - I’d heard a lot about this one. Installed it, and found an OS that was very different, and indeed “opinionated” as advertised. It seems limited to the single user desktop use case. Interesting distro but not for me.
I’d heard a lot of hype about CachyOS, so I installed that. I was impressed. Beautiful install with KDE on Wayland, and BTRFS. The openarena FPS didn’t seem to be in the repos, so I downloaded the zip file and installed it under /usr/local/games. Amazingly, it worked really well. There’s a bug with openarena and Intel graphics, where the screen is too dark to see much of anything and it’s not adjustable, but on CachyOS I was able to see well enough to play, and the responsiveness was through the roof.
I’m sticking with CachyOS on that machine for now. Let’s see how it does over the coming months.
Lenovo T470 laptop -
I’d been running Debian, Mint and MX on this rig, and decided to install FreeBSD 15 and KDE. Initial install went perfectly. Installed KDE, no problems. installed firefox, chromium, telegram desktop, tailscale, and conky. Added a conky theme stolen from MX Linux. It was a beautiful thing. Then I did an update. That was the end of the KDE experience. The system was in a loop attempting to start Wayland, and failing. I could access the system remotely over tailscale and see that the Wayland server was crashing repeatedly on startup.
So, IMHO that sort of thing is unacceptable, Sure, I could have gone on the forums and spent a lot of time looking for a fix, and probably could have gotten everything working. But that’s not where I want to spend my time.
So the old thinkpad was reimaged with CachyOS, and that’s where things stand for now. I’ll see how it ages over the coming months.
Conclusion: FreeBSD has earned a place in my server room, but on the desktop I’m sticking with Linux. This stream of consciousness may or may not be useful to some, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Who knows, someone may find answers to things they’ve wondered about.
Sounds to me that very little has changed.
The BSD Unix operating system and the free variations have always been solid servers and rarely useful on anything other than a very common hardware configuration.
Same with performance, okay at best, hardly the efficient system the servers are known to be, so I am not at all surprised by your findings.
Well, you have to hand it to FreeBSD when it comes to disk I/O performance. And network performance seems to be pretty much on par with Linux. So it has a good niche as a file server, db server, web server sort of role.
But when it comes to a daily driver on the desktop, I prefer something that just works, and keeps working.
So my attempt at FreeBDS as a desktop went kind of well once I upgraded the VM Image to 15.0 instead of 14.3. XFCE and Lightdm, slick-greeter, and Xorg all installed fine. I tried installing Evolution and Claws mail, witch they both installed but even after installing DMA, then configuring it (DMA) I can’t get email. so yep I’m turning this into an Apache server. I do agree with J_J_Sloane it is a speedy little thing
As a fan of ZFS, I do occasionally read about BTRFS. The ZFS community is not fond of BTRFS for reasons. If I remember correctly, BTRFS continues to have issues with parity (RAID 5, RAID 6, etcetera) data integrity. I suppose BTRFS RAID 10 is considered reliable.
With that being said, BTRFS does interest me because it is not something hacked on by Ubuntu or as DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support). Do you have any stories…good or bad…about BTRFS either with a single disk or RAID?
I’d had a few weird experiences with BTRFS 15 years ago and hadn’t done much with it since then.
But recently I tried the Arch based CachyOS which uses BTRFS. The performance has been excellent, so I’m going to have to revisit performance testing and see how it goes.
It seems obviously inspired by ZFS, but apparently has some catching up to do in terms of maturity and features.
BRTFS is a great filesystem, wich consents to manage powerful and consistent system snapshots, but for what I know it’s getting a bit messy with fragmentation over time.
I’ve not had enough experience with it and I generally just stick with ext4 partitions, but I have used btrfs a few times and the performance was good and I did not encounter any issues. Perhaps I did not use it often enough or make enough changes to expose potential issues.
