PC-BSD becomes TrueOS | Hacker News Reader

PC-BSD becomes TrueOS

trueos.org

58 pointsEnindu30 comments

Why would this OS (or any OS) follow FreeBSD-current ?

This is negative because it just encourages the bad practice on the part of FreeBSD to release 2 or 3 or 4 stable point releases, based on the assumption that "anyone who wants anything should just use -current".

At some point there will be the (absurd) necessity to start bundling a "super current" release because there has to be a test platform, but at the same time everyone is using -current in production and you can't break it too badly.

Or I guess they can just break it badly one of these times and a lot of people get screwed.

There is a deep, deep cultural problem in FreeBSD that just doesn't ever go away and it can be summed up by saying: FreeBSD is an OS by, and for, FreeBSD developers.

We'll be up to 5 point releases when 11 hits in a few weeks. Sayeth the new arrival to FreeBSD org: "What the fuck, which one am I supposed to use?"

    LATEST RELEASES
    Production: 10.3, 10.2, 10.1, 9.3
    Upcoming: 11.0

Edit: To be fair, it's worth mentioning that 10.2, 10.1 and 9.3 will sunset on 1/1/2017, so we'll be left with a slightly more sane set of production releases at that point.

I was going to ask if you could pinpoint a more precise problem, but then I read your username rsync, given the amount of ZFS you used this is properly something quite true.

I have respect for BSD and am very thankful that there is more than just Linux (my preferred OS). One thing that I've noticed is that, warranted or not, a lot of BSD users seem to suffer from an inferiority complex. On some BSD podcasts I listen to for example, hosts and guests often drop little jabs at Linux etc, it seems very immature and unnecessary. This naming choice puts me off more than anything, might as well have called it SuperiorOS or BestOS, but I wish it luck.

Well and good. The ® slapped everywhere is very annoying.

Indeed. I don't understand why they do that (it was already like that before the brand change). It just scares away many potential users (people who have already used Linux, like open source etc.).

It's not like their management is clueless either. The project is sponsored by an advanced technology company (https://www.ixsystems.com/).

Their website isn't mobile friendly either: https://i.imgur.com/eZn7HEW.png note that fucking floating share buttons.

There are 21 ® on the front page alone! Insanity.

pc-bsd.org (Just as OTT with &reg) still seems to think TrueOS is the server flavour only. You'd think they'd make sure a rebrand shows on both sites at same time.

iX don't have ® all over the place on their own site, or FreeNAS so it must be a PC-BSD choice.

pc-bsd.org

Huh? Did you type that correctly? It takes me to a site titled SAMAA TV, that has lots of Arabic on it. Something from Pakistan?

Edit: apparently the computer centric site is http://pcbsd.org/

How long till it's forked and prefixed with "TheOne"?

At that point, I'd half expect it to be named "NeOS".

So why would one want to use TrueOS instead of FreeBSD? When it was still called PC-BSD some people claimed ease of use, but I never understood that; since it used the same ports as FreeBSD, you could install the same ports or packages on FreeBSD.

Now they abandoned this desktop focus. So what is the selling point here?

I use PC-BSD on my desktop. The reason that I chose it over FreeBSD is due to their upgrade process and their use of ZFS boot environments (beadm). And the fact that X "just worked" with their installer.

In terms of packages and uppdates: The way a pkg update on FreeBSD goes is that you do pkg-update && pkg-upgrade, and it updates your packages in place. In PC-BSD, it makes a new clone of your current root environment, and does the upgrade there. It makes this the new boot environment, and at reboot, you boot into the updated system. This is much cleaner, and allows you to easily roll back in the rare event of something blowing up.

I hope TrueOS keeps this.

Ugh, The name reminds me of Tru64 from DEC in the 90s..

> It makes this the new boot environment, and at reboot, you boot into the updated system.

So you have to reboot to apply the changes? Sounds familiar :)

You can always overwrite in place (that was how it worked before beadm), but it's riskier.

Unbelievable, right? One could instead do a zfs snapshot and retain everything. You don't even need zfs for snapshots. UFS could do it for ages.

> beadm

This is how it works in FreeBSD too. At least that's how I do it. beadm is not mandatory, nor is used "by default", but it is there, it's the only way I update.

So I see no advantage here.

> Ugh, The name reminds me of Tru64 from DEC in the 90s..

So I wasn't the only one!

They didn't abandon the desktop focus. That's "TrueOS Desktop."

The desktop focus has not been abandoned.

I've experimented with a PC-BSD desktop in the past. It was significantly easier to get going than setting up FreeBSD from scratch. While the FreeBSD documentation is excellent, there's a lot to do to make it a functional graphical desktop, and PC-BSD does all that stuff for you.

Underneath it's still FreeBSD, so I couldn't see any reason not to use it.

FreeBSD took me an afternoon to set things up, but that was one afternoon in a decade.

My impression is that the desktop version still has the desktop-centric focus. Maybe that's an incorrect impression.

Wait -- TrueOS follows FreeBSD-CURRENT?

How...brave.

What happened to NextBSD that ixsystem propose not long ago.

IIRC NextBSD is just an internal branch integrating some Apple technology including a launchd port and in-kernel Mach IPC.

Thou shalt have no other OS before Temple OS. The One True OS.

God said so. He also said: zygote elephant narcissism verify plunge rackmount giraffe helicopter amazing turkey sociable

How pretentious can they be.

  "Although it's a household name for so many"

I chucked when I read that.

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