FreeBSD 9.1 released [LWN.net]

FreeBSD 9.1 released

Posted Dec 31, 2012 12:22 UTC (Mon) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: FreeBSD 9.1 released by alfille
Parent article: FreeBSD 9.1 released

Agreed. It's not that it's difficult, it's just that it is so sparsely documented compared to other aspects of the system (where it really shines, FreeBSD is much better documented than a Linux distro of similar size).

FreeBSD really needs a default way to keep the system update, to install packages, and to upgrade release, and to document this clearly in the guide.

It's probably not even very much work compared to the monstrous work that goes into each release. AFAIK these mechanisms are in place and work well (but I've had more experience with OpenBSD myself where these things are always that smooth).

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FreeBSD 9.1 released

Posted Jan 1, 2013 7:20 UTC (Tue) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]

But after all the setup it feels like linux. FreeBSD 9 is no better than Debian stable or RHEL6.x series. Sometimes all the setup you do are just too much and pretty useless. For making the web Flash files to work, you 'll have to do a part of an old Fedora installation.I did setup FreeBSD 9.0 last year and eventually removed it and moved to Arch Linux for a bit until I finally settled at Debian Testing.

pkgng could bring FreeBSD back into the game, but it all depends on how reliable it is.

FreeBSD 9.1 released

Posted Jan 2, 2013 14:24 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

What keeps me away from the BSDs is hardware support -- USB peripherals in particular. FreeBSD also had a longstanding bug that caused kernel panics when USB devices were yanked. That has been fixed in DragonFly, and also reportedly in FreeBSD but I haven't tested. But I've got used to plugging in my HP printer to my Linux laptop and have it "just work"...

On the other hand I just switched to a minimalistic tiling window manager (i3) and am totally enjoying it. So maybe I should go back to FreeBSD or Dragonfly and get a minimalistic system with a modern filesystem. (Actually, I very likely will, when I get some free time, but I will continue to read LWN and to use Linux on at least one machine.)

I'm fine with the old ports/packages system. pkgng looks very promising, though.