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I give up. I gave it a good try, and kind of liked it. But it's just too painful, and I was beginning to feel like may hands were tied behind my back.
I especiallly liked the minimalism. Only a handful of processes running (as opposed to hundreds on my xubuntu machine). Fast and clean.
But I did not like the constant struggle for simple things. Mounting drives. Editing wpa_supplicant file to connect to wifis, like it's 1999. Everything is like pulling teeth; conceptually editing a file here or there seems like not too much, but if you don't do it for a month and can't remember how you did it, it is constant starting from zero.
ZFS is great, but I never figured out how to properly back out of a screwup using BE (boot environments). Today it finally bit me, as I tried to upgrade to the new release and got stuck. Apparently, others have too, on final 'freebsd_update install', and some report that the computer actually did it after 16 hours or so of blinking the cursor. I just can't be bothered anymore with crap like that.
And so I tried to restore the previous boot environment, but BE refused, and screw it. I popped in my old M2 drive with Xubuntu, and here I am, with 211 tasks running. Hell's bells.
2023-12-15 · 5 months ago
Back to hell then. How does it feel ? Like using an old dirty sponge ?
I too prefer a POSIX blend as opposed to a single malt.
Don't feel bad. Even among highly technically competent people, I've known far more who want a "ready to go" operating system than something they have to fine-tune in every detail, even if the benefits of the latter are legion.
Me, I love to tinker, and *nix flows through my veins. These days it's "normal" GNU/Linux distros when I must, GuixSD and OpenBSD because I want to.
And I still can get tired of configuring things, once in awhile.
Hopefully you learned a lot and have begun to appreciate what sets the BSDs apart.
Installed GhostBSD on a couple machines and really happy.
Had to try a couple of different usb wifi dongles on a few laptops.
I think my mistake was committing my ThinkPad to FreeBSD, an impedance mismatch. A stationary desktop with an ethernet cable would have been more appropriated for FreeBSD; a notebook that moves around to different networks and is often used to juggle drives just got too hard to keep up. Mind you, I don't used much of a desktop OS - dwm is enough for me...
have you looked at Void?
runit seems to really push it towards that svelt BSD feeling.
i have a T560 i run it on; htop shows 92 tasks & 880 meg memory in an xfce session w/ a few firefox tabs. to those ends i've been very satisfied, after maybe a year of use.
grain of salt, not my main machine, so no critical duties (just a spare/kickabout lappy), but i've had notably few issues with it, esp for a rolling release. wifi works just fine. selection in repos is pretty good, and i like xbps quite a lot (far and above apt for instance.)
could be worth a peek at anyway.
@stack I agree with @yvonne, if you want a Linux OS that feels BSDish but isn't too painful to manage and maintain, Void is one of the best out there and it's really performant. i still use it on one machine and xbps and runit are awesome. Despite being a rolling release type of distro, things rarely break.
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