BSD & Other Non Linux / Windows / Mac OS Thread - FreeBSD / OpenBSD, Genode, Haiku, HelenOS, Intel AIX etc.

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TroonsDid911

TroonsDid911

kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 6, 2021
I noticed BSD and other niche operating systems that aren't just a Linux distro don't have their own dedicated thread. Ive been looking at trying out a non Linux system for fun on some old hardware and came across some classic autistic sperging.

Apparently FreeBSD got infected with troons and woke shit pretty hard while the developers have been criticized for ignoring security vulnerabilities and making questionable decisions during the development process:

FreeBSD Politics Problem

Criticism of FreeBSD Security Vulnerability

Aside from watching autists fight each other, I thought I would make this thread to discuss any operating system that is not a direct Linux Distro or Mac / Windows. Yes that includes TempleOS but Im not sure if that has its own thread already or not.

What has been your experience with these operating systems? Any oldfags here to call us niggers for not writing our own compiler in the 70s?
 
I wanna hear more about these fancy BSD jails, I think it sounds cool as shit
 
GhostBSD, despite it apparently not stacking up to the old DesktopBSD, still looks like the best starting point on the FreeBSD desktop migration.

I tried it out on a live USB intended for installation, never really installed it, but found what it offered out-of-the-box rather cozy.

It isn't overloaded though it isn't as fleshed out as Linux Mint, but it might be the best FreeBSD has as a desktop starting point.

MidnightBSD is a horrid, inconsistent nightmare for this use case however and it's a damn shame.
 
Anti Snigger said:
I wanna hear more about these fancy BSD jails, I think it sounds cool as shit
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I came across this article where someone goes over the stuff they like about FreeBSD, including Jails:


Does anyone know anything about Oberon? Just came across it while I was reading about TempleOS. Its both an operating system and a programming language and kind of sounds similar to TempleOS in terms of how closely linked the OS and language are but Im not nearly tech gifted enough to comment.
 
Trans Fat 41g said:
GhostBSD, despite it apparently not stacking up to the old DesktopBSD, still looks like the best starting point on the FreeBSD desktop migration.

I tried it out on a live USB intended for installation, never really installed it, but found what it offered out-of-the-box rather cozy.
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It's not free from the BS that's been plaguing Linux, like Xorg vs Wayland. Other than that, it does what it says on the tin, so might be a good starting point. I do not recommend the Gershwin variant, though, that weird MacOS recreation attempt.
 
Curry Teafag said:
It's not free from the BS that's been plaguing Linux
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Yeah I think it uses PulseAudio which is... yeah.

At this point anything intended to use either for a desktop experience isn't really safe, I think NetBSD and OpenBSD are more "free" in that regard.
 
I’ve been looking deeply into the Hurd recently. Despite all odds it’s still trucking along, the biggest “recent” developments being it being incorporated into Guix and gaining extra driver support by running portions of NetBSD’s kernel in its userland.
If I had a spare computer I’d see about doing a Hurd From Scratch, or figuring out how to get a GuixSD install using Hurd up an running. Both should be possible, potentially without too much hassle.
 
In the early 00s I played around with AtheOS. I can remember being blown away that a solo developer had written his own multitasking OS with a GUI, journaling filesystem, SMP support and TCP/IP stack. At the time, I thought it had real potential and become a daily driver OS. At some stage the developer got busy and stopped working on it. A few community members forked it into Syllable, but sadly it never gained traction and development eventually died off.
 
I've wanted to try something like Free BSD for the longest time but I think I'd get frustrated with unsupported packages and incompatibilities for desktop usage. On the contrast, I would like to try out macOS for server usage. 4chan has been doing it for the longest time
 
That reminds me... I should drag my old DEC AlphaServer out of storage, see if I can get it working again with something like a BlueSCSI, and install the latest version of NetBSD.

I know I should install OpenVMS because muh purity, but it's much easier to download NetBSD than it is to jump through the ridiculous amount of hoops required to obtain an OpenVMS hobbyist license.
 
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August Levasseur said:
I’ve been looking deeply into the Hurd recently. Despite all odds it’s still trucking along, the biggest “recent” developments being it being incorporated into Guix and gaining extra driver support by running portions of NetBSD’s kernel in its userland.
If I had a spare computer I’d see about doing a Hurd From Scratch, or figuring out how to get a GuixSD install using Hurd up an running. Both should be possible, potentially without too much hassle.
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That's interesting they are using BSD licensed code to get it moving. I last looked at it a few years back when I took an operating systems course using Minix and Minix too incorporated NetBSD's userland to modernize it but still has some issues such as the current release has a broken Xorg driver, no USB stack, and etc.
 
ellroy said:
That's interesting they are using BSD licensed code to get it moving. I last looked at it a few years back when I took an operating systems course using Minix and Minix too incorporated NetBSD's userland to modernize it but still has some issues such as the current release has a broken Xorg driver, no USB stack, and etc.
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My understanding is that some graduate student made a master’s thesis about splitting the NetBSD kernel and its drivers into separable components, such that the drivers could be run in the kernel or in userland under a microkernel. This is called the NetBSD Rumpkernel, and it’s made it quite useful for developers who don’t want to have to reimplement stuff like that from scratch.
What I find more interesting than the BSD licensing is that some of those drivers depend on proprietary firmware to work. I would assume the Hurd devs took the time to pull that stuff out before sticking it in their system, but they don’t say anything about it. From what I can tell NetBSD’s API for using firmware images is pretty explicit so it wouldn’t be hard to figure out where it’s located.
Did you know NetBSD also has a module for running Lua scripts in the kernel? Found that out while I was looking into the proprietary firmware issue.
 
Well, I got a spare computer and gave it a good college try with Hurd, but I didn’t end up with much to show for it. I first tried the Debian images. Debian/Hurd is probably the easiest and most commonly known way to boot the Hurd, it’s just a shame that apparantly none of their images are set up to be booted from EFI. There is probably a way to rejig them in place to work, but if I’m gonna go that technical, I might as well just install Guix/Hurd instead.
Speaking of which, that went ever so slightly better. I used the GuixSD installer image (By the way, Acer C720 chromebooks have Atheros wifi chips so they work under Linux-libre, and they’re literally $20 on ebay. I have two bc my charger broke and it was cheaper to buy a charger with a laptop than just a charger) and set to work. Guix’s OS config has a lot of Linux-specific configuration options, but also some Hurd-specific ones as well. I got a very basic config together and went to install, and sadly this is where my troubles began. Most of the system could be installed via precompiled binaries, but for the handful of things that needed to be compiled, they all failed. I checked the logs, and in every case it seemed to be related to missing headers. I’m not sure if this is a Guix issue not setting up the containers right, or a Hurd issue not supporting those headers, but I’m not familiar enough with Guix to fix that problem anyhow. Plus, Guix only supports (for now at least) the 32 bit Hurd.

Hurd From Scratch is still on the table, but for now I put Haiku on the laptop and called it a day.

I really love Haiku. It is easily the most normie friendly non-mainstream OS. If it weren’t for stability/hardware issues, I’d say it beats out a lot of Linux distributions, even supposedly noob friendly ones, for ease of use. BMessage, I think, is a great example on how good, basic, application-ready IPC is really important, something I think most of the Unix world really lacks that has held it back on the desktop. I haven’t read too much about Windows’ COM system, but from the little I have I think BMessage could be used in a kinda similar fashion, beyond just IPC, as like a universal binary format for data packages.
 
Phoronix: Linuxulator-Steam-Utils To Enjoy Steam Play Gaming On FreeBSD & Other Options (archive)
Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD.
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Trans Fat 41g said:
Yeah I think it uses PulseAudio which is... yeah.

At this point anything intended to use either for a desktop experience isn't really safe, I think NetBSD and OpenBSD are more "free" in that regard.
Click to expand...

I want to go on the record to say that while I couldn't wrap my brain around getting ALSA to work on Linux with consistent results across the board, BSD audio was practically a matter of following the handbook without extra steps even with selective OEM retardation, virtually zero effort beyond like one line of configuration settings.
 
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