Thursday, December 22, 2016
FreeBSD vs Linux
FreeBSD vs Linux
I really wanted to like BSD. I tried my best, I got in there and dug in with both hands and installed FreeBSD 9 starting from a base install pulling down ports and compiling them. after many hours of tinkering, fixing errors and compiling package after package optimizing my system for the Atom architecture I finally had a bootable system that would bring up the GNOME desktop only to find that many things that work on virtually every other OS ive thrown at this netbook just dont work; things like my synaptics touchpad (cant turn off tap clicking no matter what I do), ACPI settings (wont wake on resume after I close the lid), and I cant enable compositing (using Metacitys compositing results in pegged CPU usage, and Compiz simply wont enable at all due to lack of a decent driver).
I dont like to give up on something, but those issues could have probably been overlooked or remedied in time, but FreeBSDs complete lack of anything like a Network Manager or WICD was the last nail in the coffin. To be fair, I did try to use wifimgr which is essentially a script based GUI for several iwconfig functions, but no matter what I did, if I tried to use it my wifi interface would crash. I could bring up the interface manually however provided I knew the SSID and security type of the network I was connecting to. Thats all well and good for at home, but this is a netbook not being able to connect to wireless networks on the fly is a deal breaker.
Good bye BSD. Maybe one day Ill use FreeBSD to run a home server (Lord knows I need one to administer file sharing and ssh to the outside world) but in encounter with FreeBSD on my netbook, however brief, Im not convinced of FreeBSDs potential as a desktop OS, at least not on ultra mobile devices like mine.
Im not trying to bash FreeBSD at all. My experience with the OS enlightened me to some concepts and design aesthetics that truly make a lot of sense logically. Linux is like a patchwork quilt of small applications built on top of a frequently updated monolithic kernel. BSD on the other hand is more like the foundation of a building, the kernel and all base applications are a cohesive unit which creates a substantially more stable system than Linux. Separate parts of the base system are not updated individually, instead the whole base system gets updated as a cohesive unit which leads to a much more standard platform to build upon and inherent stability and security benefits thereof. In theory, BSDs micro kernel architecture should be more efficient than the Linux kernel, but only time will tell whether one is superior to the other.
As I said, I tried really hard to like FreeBSD. I wanted to use it. I wanted to replace Linux with FreeBSD on my netbook, but unfortunately several of the amenities that make mobile computing possible on Linux just arent there for FreeBSD. I would have been happy if there were at least a network manager but there is not.
It looks like (for now at least) that Ill be going back to Linux on my netbook. Maybe Ill start with a base install of Debian and cherry pick packages to install. The bottom line is I became fed up with Ubuntu over a year ago and have limped along waiting for something better to come along, but in reality the only new developments are stop gap temporary solutions, most of which are offered by Linux Mint. As much as I tried to like MATE desktop, I simply dont foresee it lasting very long if for no other reason than the absolutely retarded naming of things. Cinnamon and MGSE seem to be redundant projects that attempt to accomplish the task of un-fucking the damage that Unity and Gnome Shell have done to desktop usability, and falling well short of the mark. I think that after the dust settles, the solution will be for the Gnome developers themselves to build up the Gnome fallback to reinstate all the functionality of Gnome 2.3x.
What I would like in reality, is a desktop that has all of the functionality and configurability of KDE4 that uses GTK. I am NOT a fan of using QT apps on Gnome or using GTK apps on KDE. Essentially what I want is Gnome2 on top of the modern kernel but that simply isnt going to happen.
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