DragonflyBSD, 4.8-RC available

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21 points·tiffanyh··5 comments

Not directly related, but has anyone here successfully gotten Gnome (3) to work on DragonflyBSD? I've tried several times over the past few years (dating back to 4.2, I think), and despite pretty much all other DE's working fine for me, I've never gotten Gnome to start up properly; GDM just hangs on a black screen instead of starting up, and when I try to manually start it with SLiM and the require .xinitrc, I just get a message saying "Oh no! Something went wrong" and then get sent back to the main login screen. I've never had trouble getting Gnome to start properly on FreeBSD on the same machines that I've tried this on, so I've never been able to figure out why it consistently fails for me.

Where does DragonflyBSD win right now? I haven't looked into it and seen a place where it fits.

I too would like to see someone more verse in the nuances of the various BSDs answer this question, but I'll give it a go.

DragonflyBSD is:

- focused only on x64 architecture

- has an extremely small but exceptionally talented team of developers

- has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite)

- Network performance is particularly good with Dragonfly [1]

[1] https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf

Edit: typo

But I've heard the same points like 5 years ago. What had changed on a big scale?

The benchmark's accuracy is debatable, as it does not put all parties in even ground[1], nor it list in detail everything used for all systems beyond Dragonfly BSD.

[1] FreeBSD's nginx port does not have a functional 'reuseport' compilation flag, which greatly impacts its performance in the benchmark, whereas Linux and Dragonfly BSD do have it in a functional state.

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