It derailed the thread a little bit a few pages back
If it wasn't constant going on for idk how long at this point, and basically only him. then I would say sure. The only other people doing it are ones that come in, and are so blatantly obvious about their bating that it doesn't do much.
Understandable, but I think you're missing the big distinction here between Portage and the Ports collection of any given BSD project. Portage is a package manager unto itself, the Ports collection on any given BSD is almost always a collection of makefiles, patches, and metadata sorted by category hiding in the /usr hierarchy.
Unless I'm horribly mistaken, you're unable to fetch an entire collection of Gentoo ebuilds, tuck them away into the /usr hierarchy, then go cd /usr/ebuilds/www/firefox && make install clean. You have USE flags, SLOTs, profiles, equery u package-name, and all this other stuff in its place.
You aren't entirely wrong, in that you don't cd into the directory and run make. But portage is stored on the filesystem in a tree basically in the same way the ports collection is. But instead of /usr it's stored in /var/db/repos. also another thing I like about gentoo's portage. notice it's called repos. They also have overlays. Which are their own smaller directory stucture, that get overlayed onto the main portage tree if you enable them. they also go in that so the structure would be /var/db/repos/portage /var/db/repos/some-overlay-name, etc. which means you can extend and modify the portage tree you are using however you'd like. Or make your own local ones.
Also. I'm not sure if portage is really the package manager itself, or the entire system. Since most of the actual package management is done with the emerge command (also emaint which basically does things emerge can do itself). I don't know which would be the more correct way of stating it, but I think of portage as the entire thing together,
Is the BSD approach to the Ports collection tedious? Sure. Are there tools to automate various aspects of Ports management? Yes. Do these tools come anywhere close to what Gentoo has to offer? No. Is this a fundamental failing of BSD projects as a whole? Again: no. FreeBSD's approach to Ports management is very much in-line with the way traditional Unices of the BSD lineage did their shit. Modern conveniences like Poudriere and Portmaster were made to assist with Ports management, but it's very much an old school mindset sort of affair.
I didn't say it was a failing on the part of ports.
But I do think the tooling that is built around freebsd is more conducive to something like a server, or something that needs to distribute builds, to a fleet of computers or something along those lines. The kind of automated tooling seems like it was made around that idea. Which you could do with portage if you wanted, but I think portage gives you something more like what a regular user would want from a package manager than poudriere. Which was the closest thing I found while I was using it.
Again... you're way off base with what FreeBSD as an operating system even is, let alone what it's capable of OOTB vs. with Ports.
By default, FreeBSD doesn't ship with anything beyond core Unix libraries, utilities, the kernel, and associated kernel drivers. FreeBSD is a server OS... t
you sure?
I wish I could find the one I'm remembering. I specifically remember it being called an "everything operating system" or something along those lines.
I didn't say that for no reason. That isn't the only place I've seen them claim to be an everything operating system. Unlike something like openbsd. Which is actually honest about what it is, but they aren't. You can use openbsd as a desktop just as much as you can use freebsd. But openbsd is clear, they care about the server. I feel like if they outright said the desktop is an afterthought, I would cut it more slack. They do say a bit lower down, that it's "particularly well suited for servers" but that's in the 4th or 5th part of their faq, meanwhile twice above they mention it's for everything, from the server to the desktop. And they say it right at the top of the main page of the site, as the first thing you see.
And I know they said they are now actually putting in effort to making the desktop expereince decent. I think I mentioned that back a bit. Like I said then, I'll believe it when I see it. If I hear things have improved significantly since the last time I ran it. I might give it another chance. At the very least they are fixing wifi from what I've heard. Which is the only real hardware gripe I had with it.
This is how I know you never properly internalised the BSD concept of a base system because you're invoking Slackware while also saying all the shit that does not make it a singular, unified operating system.
It's not a hard concept to understand I was just saying slackware follows the same concept of spltting up where user installed packages, and distro provided packages go, along with actually keeping bin and sbin separate. I'm well aware of the idea of how bsd does the whole "complete operating system thing" that's all the people that use it talk about.
I'm not bothering replying to a lot of what you mention, because a lot of it I already know. I get the various bsd's philosophies. I've used them, I've read through their provided documentation. I've listened to people that work on at least freebsd's team give talks (recordings on youtube), I get the concepts.
And if you go back enough in this thread I've talked specifically about their design philosophy. And how I think it's what overall held the bsd's back. Well, that and slow adoption of new technology, slow adoption of multithreading certainly hurt them, also some things with the lawsuit stuff, but from what I've seen the impact of that was at least a little bit overstated.
Once again: you're more than capable of waxing poetic about Gentoo's myriad features, you're more than able to extol the virtues of Wayland with a standalone window manager, you're clearly capable of learning and internalising new shit... but you're continuously bashing your head against the wall with FreeBSD while claiming "FreeBSD sucks as a desktop OS guise." Obviously, it's Linux that's getting the mainstream attention for a potential Windows alternative. FreeBSD won't ever come close, nor does the project want to. Yet all the tools and manuals are there for you to convert a utilitarian foundation into a proper desktop setup.
My opinion of freebsd came from trying to use it as a desktop operating system. Multiple times. I didn't even bother trying wayland anything on it. I just got dwm to build, and all the other suckless stuff I normally use. And then went about setting up everything else I would normal expect to run on a daily basis. It's not like I just installed it, got to a console, and decided "hey this is different I don't like it". I don't mind having to put in a bit of extra work getting things set up. If I did, I probably wouldn't run gentoo.
Everything great about freebsd, and like I said before, there are a lot of great things about it. Don't really make it a great desktop operating system experience. They make it great for certain use cases. If I wanted to have a server, I would probably use freebsd (maybe openbsd, but idk I'm more familiar with freebsd already). But for a desktop, the only reason I can see someone running freebsd is because they want to say they run freebsd. I really don't know what anything it has would give you that actually makes it better or even as good as linux on the desktop. Which is kind of my point. It's just not a practical option, when you could just use linux, and have a system that doesn't need the same level of tinkering. Anyone CAN run freebsd for their desktop, but I can't say I would want to. The only reason I used it in the past was because I wanted to understand it as an operating system, learn what it has to offer, and see if it was a good option as an alternative for linux for the desktop specifically.
I did learn quite a bit while using it. Besides learning about how they do things differently than linux, I had to learn some things in order to just get some things to work. (I also learned if you mount a freebsd UFS filesystem on a linux distro, when you try to boot into freebsd again it will think the metadata has been corrupted so you will have to boot into a freebsd live iso and fix it, among a lot of other things like that). Outside of just learning the freebsd way of doing things, it was mostly reading through things, and doing searches, to just get things working at all. Like sometimes having to go through the linux compatibility layer, then trying to work out all of the things that would go wrong because of that specificaly. Like my kernel logs becoming so full of error messages that it pushes out anything useful I wanted to read from the buffer. And leaving behind zombie processes for every application that is launched through the layer. (and as far as I found, there is not solution besides running a cronjob to clean them up periodically, or killing them manually, which is a bandade rather than a solution).
If all i had to do to run freebsd was learn how they did things, I probably would have enjoyed the experience of using it, or maybe I would even be running it still, or at least have a drive with freebsd on it I use sometimes. But that wasn't the part of it that made me think it's not the best choice for a desktop operating system. It just isn't the best choice
