Switching from OS X to FreeBSD – Both Desktop and Laptop

http://mirrorshades.net/post/132753032310

by vezzy-fnord • 11 years ago

256 161 11 years ago

mikhailt3• 11 years ago

Wow, thanks for blogging this as I never heard of i3 before and it looks amazingly productive. Makes me want Apple to take the Split View further to the next level on both iOS and OS X, turn it into a tiling WM like i3.

masklinn• 11 years ago

Makes me want Apple to take the Split View further to the next level on both iOS and OS X, turn it into a tiling WM like i3.

OSX has third-party tools which go much further than split view. Divvy[0] for instance. They're a far cry from a true tiling WM, but they're way beyond what OSX provides OOTB.

[0] http://mizage.com/divvy/

rcarmo• 11 years ago

I'm rather partial to Moom[0]. Been using it and the same set of hotkeys (left half, right half, move window to next monitor, etc.) for a couple of years now.

[0] https://manytricks.com/moom/

mikhailt3• 11 years ago

Thanks, I've used Divvy and others like it before and stopped using them after some problems with OS X upgrades.

I'll try Divvy again and see if I can stick with it. i3 just feels like the integrated environment with better shortcuts that forces you to stick with it and get used to it sooner. I'll try to install it in VM and see if I'd like it there.

makecheck4• 11 years ago

I use "Window Tidy"; it's about half the price of Divvy and at least as far as I can tell it's just as easy to customize.

erikcw• 11 years ago

Hammerspoon[0] has replaced Divvy for me as an open source, lightweight and scriptable alternative. So far, very happy with it.

[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org

doomrobo• 11 years ago

I highly recommend i3. I used it on my desktop back home and I've tried to emulate it using Amethyst[0] on my Macbook but it's not nearly as featureful or stable.

[0] http://ianyh.com/amethyst/

rayiner2• 11 years ago

Use Divvy.

mikhailt3• 11 years ago

Thanks! I've used it before and will try it again, hoping OS X doesn't screw me over again with its upgrades.

makecheck4• 11 years ago

It actually drives me crazy that any application should feel it necessary to implement its own tabs and window layout.

The OS clearly could provide a way to group any number of unrelated windows with tabs, full screen or not, in any tiled arrangement, with more than a lousy 2 splits that are vertical-only. They just don't do it, and they've had decades to add what amounts to some rectangle management.

keithpeter3• 11 years ago

would X11 for Mac OS and then an i3 installation running under that be any good? I imagine only useful for X11 applications.

http://www.xquartz.org/

http://www.nrtm.org/index.php/2011/01/28/tiling-window-manag... (2013 so ancient)

I've not used MacOS since around 2011/12 so take this with a pinch of salt.

peatmoss• 11 years ago

No, trying to use OSX seriously with X11 is a pain. In principle, X11 should load up like any other full screen app. And, in practice it does. Keybindings are a bit annoying to coordinate between OSX's GUI and X11, but that's sort of livable.

The real pain is in managing the software that you'd want to run on OSX in X11. The best I've found is NetBSD's pkgsrc, but it's not great on OSX. Even if you are okay building from source, you'll find stuff breaks pretty often. Homebrew isn't really geared toward providing X11 versions of apps, so you can forget that. All in all, much easier to use Ubuntu or FreeBSD and get the benefit of a well-integrated package manager and an X11 environment that isn't a step child.

rayiner2• 11 years ago

How is the battery life on mobile? Pretty much a deal breaker for all non-Windows/Mac platforms on laptops.

4ad3• 11 years ago

I don't know specifics, but I know that it's better on OpenBSD than on FreeBSD. On Linux it's best. At least for Thinkpads.

asutosh• 11 years ago

This came at the right time, I was toying with the idea of switching to FreeBSD from Linux, for my daily driver. Also, I keep on hearing great things about i3. I'm currently using Xmonad and is pretty happy with it, except for the occasional glitches with some applications. The switch to a predictive tiling WM has hugely improved my work flow. should try out i3 sometime, just to see how it fares when compared with Xmonad.

pmoriarty8• 11 years ago

If your needs are simple, i3 is great. You don't have to know Haskell to configure i3, which uses just a very simple plain text configuration file.

My window manager experience:

X11 (back in the days before window managers, maybe, or was it Motif back in the day) -> something lost in the dawn of time -> enlightenment -> fvwm -> fluxbox -> openbox -> xmonad -> musl -> i3

(with probably a few more that I don't remember, and a bunch like KDE and Gnome which I've tried but never used daily, and some non-linux ones which I won't mention)

i3 has been the simplest and most hassle-free of them all. Then again, my needs have grown simpler over time. 90% of the time I have just one window taking up a full workspace, and occasionally I'll have another tile or floating window. I don't need the super complex or fancy window management features that Xmonad offers. If your needs are simple like me, try i3. :)

nextos2• 11 years ago

I think XMonad is somehow simpler. Core layouts are not dynamic, so if you typically work with just a few windows it's very easy to use.

Also, there's a certain appeal from typechecking your config, so if it compiles it should run w/o issues most of the time.

jen20• 11 years ago

With regards to 1Password, I have found the Windows version to work reliably under Wine (on Linux, never tried on FreeBSD).

sotojuan• 11 years ago

I've always used OS X and Linux in school, but for some reason I've really been curious about the BSDs. Would it be worth trying FreeBSD out in a VM? Unfortunately I don't have a spare computer that I can test stuff on.

2trill2spill• 11 years ago

I've always used OS X and Linux in school, but for some reason I've really been curious about the BSDs. Would it be worth trying FreeBSD out in a VM? Unfortunately I don't have a spare computer that I can test stuff on.

It can't hurt to try using FreeBSD in a vm, that's how I started using FreeBSD and now that's what I run on my primary development machine.

justinclift5• 11 years ago

Linux is absolutely a great thing for experimenting with, but once you're exposed to something that's planned/thought about... you get the sense it's an ever growing hodge-podge of utilities/functionality designed by people that don't really communicate with each other that well.

Computers are growing more powerful, they should make our lives easier. That's not the direction Linux nor OSX nor Windows is going in the last few years.

The BSD's each seem to take a more co-ordinated approach (better team communication?), so I'm personally hoping they do better over time.

Try out the BSD's in a VM. Some of the command line utilities you're used to in Linux need different arguments, or aren't as feature rich. (I really miss tree mode in ps for example). But, in general the BSD's feel much better organised.

Hope that helps. ;)

baq• 11 years ago

(I include the CPU fan because it made me laugh while I was installing it. So ridiculous.)

don't know what to think of that part... fans are serious business, nothing to laugh about. think about them before they die on you or you're toast.

tsuraan• 11 years ago

Probably a bit OT, but I just built my first new gaming PC since high school (late 90's), and I bought a highly rated fan; this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608... . Now, if you read that description, the outer fan is 120mm and the inner one is 140mm, but that really doesn't hit home until you open the box, and the thing is the size of your head. PC heatsink/fans have really come a long way over the past decade or so. I laughed when I saw my fan, too.

Albright• 11 years ago

Perhaps he was laughing about the fact that the fan has a name like a rapper from 1985.

andor• 11 years ago

Just look at it. It IS ridiculous.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n47WBQI31eE/maxresdefault.jpg

Laforet• 11 years ago

They are a pain to install but they worked through the sheer size and surface area. That said these tower type heatsinks seems to have gone out of the vogue after all. Back in 2010 people used to go out of their way to bake thermal grease, mesure wind pressure and do all sorts of crazy things to queeze an extra bit of heat dissipation out of them. Not the case anymore. A lot of well known brands have virtually disappeared over the past couple of years.

Efficient yet sensible heatsinks are still in short supply, and you have to look into overpriced server/workstation vendors to get them.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835184...

keithpeter3• 11 years ago

I'm happy that the OA found something that made them happy, but this paragraph caught my eye...

"OpenBSD was my first choice. I’ve used it for many many years in firewalling or routing contexts, I used to use it as a desktop – but the upgrade process sort of killed it for me. I didn’t want to deal with patching and recompiling my OS, or remembering to look at a web page for errata (or writing a script to do that for me.)"

Binary updates are available for the stable release of OpenBSD from M:Tier

https://stable.mtier.org/

Just thought I'd mention this. I have no connection with M:Tier other than that of a grateful free-loader &c

cperciva2• 11 years ago

Binary updates are available for the stable release of OpenBSD from M:Tier

Those updates are only useful to OpenBSD users who trust third-party binary blobs. I'm not sure that's a very large set...

keithpeter3• 11 years ago

Valid point, perhaps I'm too trusting as a Desktop sort of person.

tedunangst2• 11 years ago

Not really third party; just openbsd developers wearing a different hat.

jmnicolas2• 11 years ago

Well when you come from OSX, trusting third-party binary blobs shouldn't be a big problem.

0x09• 11 years ago

I had this same experience a few years ago, though more out of necessity (my very old hardware at the time was no longer being supported.) pkgng was brand new and immature and it was an opportunity to do some fun things like create my own pkg building infrastructure/server and an HFS+ FUSE driver that I still mean to share. But once the struggle to have a functioning system was through and the novelty wore off I went back pretty quickly. At that time BSD was caught in the middle of major open source projects breaking compatibility for systemd, GNOME was several years behind, and the realities of running software on what was treated as a perpetually second or third-class platform made it difficult to avoid unseen bugs or outright breakage.

Things have probably settled down a bit since then and I like the FreeBSD project in sort of an idealized form very much and wouldn't discourage its use (especially if staying within the mainline packages), but it is quite a lot of work, and when it came to choosing a secondary * nix to boot the next time I saved myself some trouble (believe it or not) and installed Arch. It's difficult enough to get something resembling the UX I'm used to without having to do it with a quirky shadow version of the software ecosystem. None of this is the fault of the project per se,* unfortunately it's just a natural consequence of usage share in an ecosystem already mainly comprised of volunteers.

I wonder if the author will feel the same after a bit of settling in.

*some of the pkgng bugs were but I would expect those not to be relevant anymore

gonzo• 11 years ago

I've been running FreeBSD with i3 on a x230 (i7, 16GB, Samsung 850 SSD) for about a year.

  jim@x230:~ % sysctl hw.physmem hw.model kern.version
  hw.physmem: 16826937344
  hw.model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz
  kern.version: FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #16 r290668: Tue Nov 10 23:32:07 CST 2015
    root@x230:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC-NODEBUG

gigabit Intel (em) Ethernet and a DELL U2713HM over DP when I'm at the desk.

WiFi works when I'm not.

Save/Resume works. Every time.

pkg(ng) rocks. The next version of pfSense uses it extensively.

atmosx• 11 years ago

In this kind of posts, I never see real reasons behind the switch.

There are window managers for MacOSX too. OSX could be customized to be minimal enough, etc. I am sure that you could do the same thing with Windows. Also note that minimalism != productivity.

cgag• 11 years ago

There is nothing like i3 on osx as far as I know. Im pretty sure you also can't customize it at all to the degree you can customize Linux and *bsd.

lstamour• 11 years ago

Amethyst is a nice tiling WM for OS X... Given that all it does is reposition windows rather than draw them, it's not a replacement, and sometimes gets in the way with incompatible apps, but works well if you're not using 10.11's support of side-by-side windowing, etc. I do hope OS X gets more flexible tiling window managers, but I don't expect it anytime soon.

rubyfan2• 11 years ago

I think he gave a good depiction of his experinece that prompted the switch. I personally understand and share the same frustrations.

FTA: Around OS X 10.9, though, things started going wrong. 10.10 improved a few of these things, but overall it just kept degrading. It’s slower, there are a lot of really distracting “features” I can’t seem to actually reliably disable: It’s tied into my phone, and my wife’s phone, so when she adds events I get duplicate notifications (deliver once being a fallacy, I suppose), disrupting me from my work. I disable this, but … It harasses me every day to upgrade. It desperately wants to just upgrade whenever it wants. More and more it acts like the Windows machines I’ve had to support over the last 20 years, which is deeply frustrating.

It regularly does things in the background without asking, consuming all my bandwidth (again: most of my work is remote, so I’m particularly sensitive to latency.)

And yeah: I’ve disabled all these things. They keep getting re-enabled, and so it’s not hard to take the hint.

lars512• 11 years ago

The last time I did something like this, I had a couple of reasons: I was sick of using VMs and adjusting their sizes to requirements, I wanted native docker support, I had trouble with some scientific libraries on OS X, and finally at heart I just wanted open source to succeed.

Each time I migrated to Linux, it cost me a lot of time. Some things wouldn't work well, others not at all, and some now-essential workflows (like 1Password) just felt awkward to replace. I needed to get stuff done, so I switched back each time.

The experience is not good without perfect hardware support from the word go. I've also come to believe that Linux on the Desktop would be better with a stronger paid software ecosystem around it.

makecheck4• 11 years ago

I definitely agree with the tendency of late to have to "shut up" OS X. They need to fire the person at Apple who thinks it's OK to abuse notifications for things like "Try out the new Safari!". And the choices are "Try" or "Later"!?!? It's definitely feeling more spammy. And the only real option for something like that is to shut off all of the application's notifications (and part of me is pretty sure they'll re-enable the crap on the next "10.x.1" update anyway so I grow tired of disabling it). "Growl" by contrast had very flexible preferences, allowing application notifications to be disabled per-notification-type if necessary.

meesterdude4• 11 years ago

"Try out the new Safari!" with choices of "Try" or "Later"

truly, truly hate those. I disabled all notifications and i am totally fine without them, and welcome the regained sense of control I have over my machine.

I dread every OS X update because of things like this. I've found it better to just not upgrade - which is only suitable for so long.

nextos2• 11 years ago

The last OS X I truly liked was Tiger. Simple and fresh. Wild success and iOS-ification have turned a great system into something less appealing.

kqr• 11 years ago

The ridiculous level of in-your-face-ness was basically the reason I switched from Windows to Linux a decade ago. I did run OS X a short stint back when it was version 10.5, and it's a shame to hear it's gone downhill since then.

rimantas• 11 years ago

  > 10.5, and it's a shame to hear it's gone downhill since then.

It hasn't.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

It hasn't -- technologically it's better than ever.

It's mostly people bored with what they have + romanticizing those "perfect" versions in the past (for which a quick Google search will reveal tons of similar complaints, including for Tiger).

squid_ca• 11 years ago

Also, could I please please please have the option to move the notifications to some place other than on top of my browser tabs? I know it sounds like this wouldn't come up that often, but it is literally every day that I get annoyed by this.

rubyfan2• 11 years ago

I've had almost the exact same experience. I am a prior OpenBSD desktop user, I thinking started around 2.6 or 2.8. I went to OSX 10.2 on iBook and have used it faithfully for years. I have the same feelings about the OSX feature bloat post 10.6. It's doing too many things I don't want and restricting my ability to change things I don't like. I've honestly felt they are trying to make OSX into iOS for a while.

I've been mulling the switch for a while now myself. I've contemplated Ubuntu but have sone reservations there. This post was great, anyone have insight on migrating iTunes or iPhoto to something that works on BSD or Linux? Or any insight on syncing iPhone to BSD or Linux?

jansc• 11 years ago

Yesterday, I spent some hours exporting my roughly 45.000 photos in my iPhoto library to a folder structure sorted by year and event. The tool I used is called Phoshare (https://code.google.com/p/phoshare/). The site says its no longer supported, but even with the latest OSX and iPhoto versions it seems to do the trick. I was able to convert faces to exif meta tags containing the persons name. Otherwise I did not have a lot of metadata in iPhoto. Now I'm heading over to digiKam or maybe some other tool outside the walled garden.

For my iTunes library, I first used beets (http://beets.radbox.org/) to fix the metadata of my music files, and now cmus (https://cmus.github.io/) as a music player. As an alternative music player I'm considering EMMS (https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/).

I don't know about alternatives to iPhone syncing. My iPhone died last week, and I'm waiting for my Fairphone to arrive in a couple of weeks.

fractallyte3• 11 years ago

Conversely, I'm using OS X Yosemite on a Dell laptop. (It started as an experiment: to see if I could get a working Hackintosh, solely for development. Now it's my go-to machine.)

I'm not getting any annoying notifications, or requests for upgrades (daily or otherwise). In fact, my experience is quite the opposite: this is one of the most pleasing computers I've ever used (having spent years on Linux).

Upgradeable RAM, SSD, wireless; real page up/down keys, matte screen. Most of the benefits of Linux, and even WINE works, for Windows software!

newjersey2• 11 years ago

How much effort was it to get it to work? Can you install xcode? I'd really like to play with swift and playground.

chrisper• 11 years ago

I have a Hackintosh and it's just like a real mac. Sometimes there are compromises that you have to make (like some hardware just doesn't work and it's easier to just buy a USB equivalent). I installed XCode and it works great!

It was pretty easy for me to set it up, some great people over at http://insanelymac.com/ helped me.

fractallyte3• 11 years ago

I selected the laptop very carefully: it's a Dell Latitude E6220, refurbished. With all the upgrades (SSD, wifi, even a new keyboard and case), it came to around $300 - laughably cheap!

It took a week to get it working. (All instructions at http://www.osxlatitude.com/) A physical copy of Snow Leopard is required. I encountered problems downloading Yosemite in VirtualBox, so access to a real Mac may be necessary. My local Apple Store had everything locked down, but a nearby PC store (also selling Apple) didn't! Initiating a download on the App Store added Yosemite to my account, and made it possible to continue the process back home in VirtualBox. Once I had a bootable USB flash drive, the installation was a breeze.

After that, just fiddling with drivers ('Kexts') and bootloaders - not too intimidating for Linux users.

Most importantly for the experiment: XCode works perfectly! I have a full dev environment, and I love it!

microtonal3• 11 years ago

I started using OS X in 2007 as a semi-successful attempt to run an HP laptop as a Hackintosh (can't remember most of the details). Jumped to Apple hardware because the experience was so much better back then.

I can't really identify with the writer of the article either. Sure, there are some annoyances here and there. But if simple things like 802.11n (we are on ac at home), sleep when you close the lid, etc. don't work, it's a no-go for me (I use my laptop for everything: programming, research, teaching, travel to conferences).

OS X has the virtue of having a good GUI, reasonable desktop security (app sandboxing, GUI isolation, etc.), good support for 3rd party applications, while I am still able to open a terminal.

jeffmk• 11 years ago

What model Dell laptop are you using?

fractallyte3• 11 years ago

Dell Latitude E6220 - more details in my other reply!

meesterdude4• 11 years ago

my mac died recently, and i tried to switch over to 100% linux. I already do all my dev in linux, so I thought it would be easy to switch. Nope. Ended up more headache than anything.

I hate what OSX is becoming, and sympathize with the author about feeling distracted by OSX. But OSX still manages to be the best, because everything else isn't there yet, although they are gaining ground.

So for me I dev in linux, game in windows, and do everything else in OSX.

I hope to either one day switch away from OSX, or to not need to. For now it's in a tolerable state, but every release has lead to more frustration than benefit; iTunes in particular is becoming increasingly less about your music, and more about everything apple. But of course you still need iTunes to sync your phone.

I hope, in the future of computing, there will be a cleaner separation between UI changes, features, and bug fixes. I'd like to be able to update OSX and not have anything actually change from my perspective; or at least be able to opt-in or out of such things. At the least, offering app themes so I can make iTunes look like v1.

pmoriarty8• 11 years ago

Users would have a smoother time transitioning to Linux if they first considered things like:

- Are you a regular end-user, a developer, a sysadmin?

- How comfortable are you with using the shell?

- How much unix experience do you have?

- What do you typically do with your computer? (Just word processing and surfing the web? Web development? Some specialized application like music making or art? etc..)

The answers to all of these questions would influence the decision to go with Linux or not. Naturally, the more technical knowledge and *nix knowledge you have, the more suited Linux would be for you.

Also, a lot depends on what Linux distro you choose. If you're a complete novice something like Linux Mint might be well suited for you.

How new and Linux-compatible the hardware you're trying to get Linux to work on also plays a role.

Which Linux distro did you try, anyway? And what were some of the issues you ran in to?

meesterdude4• 11 years ago

Actually, I don't know that those questions would have done anything for me. Certainly useful for more average users, though.

My issues were mostly with what I couldn't bring over. Certain apps like Omnigraffle, all my movies, music and photos are in OSX and some (but not all) could be moved over (thanks DRM) and even then, i've got an iphone I sync to, which is possible under linux, but not straightforward from what i read.

I still do all my dev in a linux VM and I. LOVE. IT. so much better than doing it in OSX, and i'm isolated from any OSX upgrades that might interfere with my development. But to ditch OSX entirely would require a lot of work, some sacrifice, and I'm not sure it's worth it in the end. At least, not yet. But it was an interesting experience, and I at least know what is keeping me in OSX and what it would take to move.

As far as distros; it was mint. ubuntu in general has good font rendering that other distros lack out of the box, and i wanted something that would just work more than something that required configuring everything.

justinclift5• 11 years ago

"...iTunes in particular is becoming increasingly less about your music, and more about everything apple."

This. 100 upvotes for this. If iTunes had a "local storage only" version, that doesn't share jack sh*t with Apple, doesn't potentially upload any sensitive info, doesn't try and force their crap onto people... (and the boundaries get moved with every single forced update!), that would be more than welcome. This is a huge pain point / bug bear for me at least. :(

compactmani2• 11 years ago

I don't think the post does an adequate job of why-not-linux. A distro like arch would be a natural choice for someone leaving OSX for a clean open-source (but pre-free) lifestyle, so I was surprised to see it (or something similar) not compared.

Otherwise, some nice choices there I have to admit.

i3 is my favorite WM. Going back to a desktop environment is like using a computer with missing fingers (works, but less efficient human-computer interface).

The X220 is one of the best thinkpads around, make no bones about it.

vezzy-fnord3• 11 years ago

The author listed non-invasiveness as a requirement, so that would presumably disqualify Arch on grounds of using ambiguously-named-software-that-provokes-flame-wars.

Admittedly, I'm not entirely sure how well Arch is on the "doesn't break" and "doesn't waste my time" scales. I've been using Slackware for too long to know.

(Also, he mentioned: "I tried running various Linux on my MacBook, but discovered everything I hate about managing Linux on a server platform is in fact amplified in a desktop context. It was less bad than I remembered from 10 years ago, but it was still a poor comparison to when OS X was good – again, for my requirements.")

compactmani2• 11 years ago

It need not be arch that is compared as I would personally prefer to compare only free distros.

The quote provided would be fine if the author explained what he/she didn't like about managing linux on a server and how it is amplified on the desktop.

kybernetyk• 11 years ago

Arch is really not the distro you want to run on your daily work machine. I played around with Arch and three times the system got wrecked by a simple update.

It's just too much overhead to study the daily release notes to find out if the official update will break your system or not.

Arch is a great system for people who like to work on linux. Just like oldtimers are great cars for people who like to to get their hands dirty.

4ad3• 11 years ago

Not the author, although I do know the author. But I'd chose FreeBSD as well for ZFS and DTrace.

jarboot2• 11 years ago

For those of you that might be professionals or adults that don't spend much time on 4chan/reddit, you should know that i3 is pretty popular with 4chan.org/g/ or reddit's linux subreddits. It's a pretty effective path for us young nerds to get into the linux ecosystem.

Beginners might learn vim to modify their ~/.i3/config, hex values for coloring their desktop, or basic CLI commands to add functionality to their keybindings. Maybe they want to add a customized weather applet to the bar at the bottom of the screen, so they write a shell script utilizing wget. Soon enough they're learning to install Arch Linux (because everybody else on that "Show off your desktop" thread is using it), and it's not long before they're a full-blown linux fanboy. That's at least the route I took.

It's not that i3 is popular among these communities because it's the easiest, but because it looks the coolest and offers the most amount of visual customization. But after getting used to it, there's an incredible amount of depth and usability that keeps you on it. I really can't imagine a more effective window manager.

If you're looking for neat-looking i3 setups, check out reddit.com/r/unixporn/ . If you're interested in getting started with it, somebody made a great tutorial for it at youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4 .

pmoriarty8• 11 years ago

Interesting. I've always used i3 because it was incredibly simple to use and configure, and because it was rock-solid.

It's interesting to hear that you can actually make it look good, as it's always looked very plain-vanilla to me. Making it do fancy things would be nice too, but I honestly don't have the time anymore.

Update: I checked out reddit.com/r/unixporn/ and was not particularly impressed. Sure, those screenshots look better than stock i3, but really nothing compared to enlightenment even as far back as the 90's.

All i3 itself has to offer are either a blocky, rectangular titlebar or no titlebar, with the windows themselves having a variable width border, with the colors of both the titlebar and border adjustable. That's about it. The rest of the screenshots just show various window/root backgrounds and transparent windows. It looks ok, but I wouldn't call it "porn".

That said, i3 is still great. Even stock i3 has been good enough for me, and like I said, I use it for reasons other than eyecandy.

platz2• 11 years ago

I don't think i3 is attempting to cater to these kinds of enthusiasts.. even from i3wm.org "The usual elitism amongst minimal window managers: Don’t be bloated, don’t be fancy (simple borders are the most decoration we want to have). "

Oh, i see some folks have forked their own version of i3 (i.e. i3-gaps) to add additional features for modding.

I think i3 should remain true to it's initial vision (i3 is primarily targeted at advanced users and developers.)

PeCaN3• 11 years ago

i3 is really nice, it looks good with the useless-gaps patch too. But it hardly has the most amount of visual customization, rather the contrary IMO. awesomewm, herbstluftwm, and others offer way more to tinker with. Its manual tiling and modal keybindings is what makes it nice IMO.

Recently I switched from i3 to bspwm, I really love the approach bspwm takes. Definitely the best designed window manager I've used.

pmoriarty8• 11 years ago

What advantage does bspwm have over i3?

bluedino• 11 years ago

my relatively simple professional needs:

A terminal OpenSSH Really, that’s it, for work.

Obviously a web browser, and a media player were nice to have, but as a sysadmin most of my day is spent at a shell prompt on some other machine. Very little of the development work I do is on my local machine, but is instead housed in a zone on some compute node in some datacenter

So why the quad i7, 32GB RAM, and 480GB SSD?

It seems like you'd take up less desk space, use less power, etc by just using a high-clock i3. He's using a dual-core i7 as a laptop. Why not an identical laptop in a dock at home?

totalrobe• 11 years ago

And what is the video card for?

ams61105• 11 years ago

Probably to ensure it's one that's well supported in FreeBSD, as much as anything.

vacri3• 11 years ago

I'm a sysadmin on an 8gb ram machine and a magnetic disk. I spend a lot of time with browser tabs for different things open, and today's culture of 'load the entire internet for every page' means that 8gb doesn't go far. SSD is a given over magnetic these days, and even for a terminal jockey, 480GB could be required if you play with a lot of data. I don't use that much and I have ~100GB in play. The quad i7? Why not, I guess. Obviously has some money to burn.

And if you read the very first sentence after the stats are listed, the author recognises that it's overkill.

1amzave• 11 years ago

So why the quad i7, 32GB RAM, and 480GB SSD?

It's right there in your quote:

...a web browser...

kenko• 11 years ago

So why the quad i7, 32GB RAM, and 480GB SSD?

"So… for what I need, a quad-core box with 32GB RAM is pretty ridiculous. But I’m hoping I can not do this again for quite for a years, so."

pmoriarty8• 11 years ago

<rant>

After decades of successfully avoiding MacOS, I was finally forced to use it on my work laptop a couple of years ago. And it was pretty much as bad as I imagined.

It's nice that it's a unix, but hardware-wise and in terms of the things Apple has done to completely bastardize the operating system has just been a nightmare for me, who's come from a die-hard Linux (and other unix) background.

First on the much-vaunted hardware superiority... I've had multiple high-end Apple laptops, and each of them have had tons of bizarre hardware issues, from keyboard locking up to OSX crashing whenever I plug anything in to the thunderbolt port.

The design of some Apple hardware is really awful as well. Examples: very easy to put a thunderbolt cable in the wrong way. This can become a nightmare when you have to deal with a bunch of racked mac minis. Opening mac minis (when they could be opened) was a nightmare too. Apple's ending their server line and making companies rely on garbage like the mac minis was a disasterous decision.

The OS itself is just really poorly designed and implemented, with tons of proprietary black-box processes that result in mysterious CPU spikes out of the blue, and make troubleshooting or doing anything custom or automating the monstrosity a complete nightmare.

I'm not a typical user, though. So take this with a grain of salt. If all you need to do is run Chrome and Photoshop, OSX might be great for you.

</rant>

pmontra• 11 years ago

Out of curiosity, why do your company need racks of mac minis?

RyJones2• 11 years ago

Build farms is what I used them for. Currently we rent three Mac Pros from MacStadium and run our OS X VMs there, which is much nicer than a bunch of minis. I hate Apple's OS X license.

pmoriarty8• 11 years ago

We use XCode to make iOS apps. XCode can only run on OSX (as far as I know), and Apple's EULA forbids running OSX on anything but Apple hardware.

Yet Apple no longer makes server-grade hardware, so we're reduced to using mac minis.

pepijndevos• 11 years ago

I have an iMac from 2008 that I still use, and a Chromebook with Linux chroot for carrying around. But for university I needed something more powerful and capable of running Windows software.

I decided to buy a second hand Dell instead of a new Mac for the reasons the author mentions. I installed FreeBSD on it and happily used it for Web browsing and software development.

But as soon as I wanted to do more specialised things, I immediately ran into problems. It also took several hours of frustration to get my dual graphics card to work at all, by essentially disabling one.

Right now I'm just running vanilla Ubuntu. It supports my hardware, and even runs most of the University software. I did not even bother setting up i3. I just want to do stuff, and not worry about my os.

justinclift5• 11 years ago

For me, OSX was really good up until 10.6 as well. I used to use 12 or more virtual desktops at a time though (for mental separation), so the massive reduction from having 16+ available at any time to 5-6 without scrolling... massively killed my mental organisation. That one change has reduced my lack-of-distraction immensely. And now with notifications front-and-centre... that's just not understanding people who need to be focused and productive. :(

Anyway, I've been trying out OpenBSD over the two weeks (using XFCE and -stable). It seems nice so far. Tried Lumina initially, but it just crashes for me very soon after launch.

Also tried compiling -current a few times in the last few days, as I'd like try out stuff with the new vmm subsystem (and maybe make libvirt work), but it's failing to compile every time (bare metal and OSX Fusion). I'm obviously doing something dumb, and will hopefully figure it out later / gain-a-clue. :)

Prob need to ask on IRC I guess. ;)

ams61105• 11 years ago

Use a snapshot instead of trying to compile -current yourself.

justinclift5• 11 years ago

Hadn't thought of that. Thanks. :)

unluckier• 11 years ago

"It desperately wants to just upgrade whenever it wants."

Do you think that it's better that operating systems get security updates or that they get left alone?

"Copy and paste is still a bit frustrating."

You really are just using SSH in a terminal, and FreeBSD apparently can't get that right? Copy/paste is pretty basic functionality, I'd think.

To each their own...

platz2• 11 years ago

I seem to prefer xfce4-terminal over urxvt

nodivbyzero• 11 years ago

I'm wondering why did you move to FreeBSD not ArchLinux?

eugenekolo2• 11 years ago

Or Noobuntu/Debian for a lot more support on average.

justinclift5• 11 years ago

As a "general" kind of point, after using both *BSD or Linux for a few weeks, the BSD version generally feels better engineered.

The command line utilities can be markedly different from the Linux version if that's what you're used to, but it's something that can be adapted to.

This is a "general feeling" kind of thing though. It seems to be a common sentiment, but may not apply to everyone. YMMV etc. ;)

vox_mollis• 11 years ago

My guess would be avoiding the scourge of systemd.

daddykotex• 11 years ago

If you are using the terminal a lot. I suggest you take a look at Pass[1]. I've been using it and I have absolutely nothing to say so far. It even works perfectly on my Android phone.

1 - http://www.passwordstore.org/

7Z7• 11 years ago

I've been using it and I have absolutely nothing to say so far.

massysett• 11 years ago

"The primary issue was I spent too much time telling OS X to shut up and leave me alone. Some of this is me and how poorly my brain operates these days – I’ve had 3 kids in the last 5 years. I don’t like to play the twins card, but having twins does something to your brain. The doubled up sleep deprivation and long, long periods of stress altered me in non-trivial ways."

He's going to spend a lot more time and energy installing and dealing with FreeBSD than he ever spent telling OS X to leave him alone. There are plenty of good reasons to use a free operating system, but these days "reduction in time spent" is never going to be one of them. Running an OS that is not pre-installed is always going to be burdensome.

It took him plenty of time just to select all that hardware--and then he had to actually put it together. And if anything doesn't work--good luck.

I understand what he's saying about focus but as an experienced user of free operating systems I can say that there are many things with them that can cause you to break focus. Already the post has discussed (0) problems reassociating with wifi, (1) bindsym to get the thing to lock when the lid shuts, (2) no satisfactory password sync app, and (3) bad copy/paste.

avar• 11 years ago

It doesn't make sense to purely think about it in terms of time spent. For instance I've been unhappy with Mozilla Thunderbird for years now, its performance is crappy, the search is slow etc. Finally a couple of weeks ago I took the time to spend two full days setting up mbsync+mu+mu4e+Emacs just the way I want, the setup is awesome, and my E-Mail no longer annoys me.

Sure in terms of pure time spent I'll probably take years to gain that back, but there's something to be said about not having a grating sense of annoyance in your daily life from the tools you use professionally, and that's worth more than just the time you save.

ams61105• 11 years ago

Very much so. Small but repeated or continuous annoyances have a cumulative effect on general sense of happiness.

I myself use fetchmail, notmuch[1], and emacs (with w3m for HTML messages) for my email. Gmail-like search and filter capabilities (I think better, actually) and the comfort of using emacs.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/

ams61105• 11 years ago

I've run openbsd for years as my main desktop OS. Really it doesn't distract me at all (far less than OSX or Windows do) and pretty much everything from installation to using software packages "just works."

I've used it on an older Dell Precision laptop as well, zero problems other than I needed to change the internal WiFi card to a supported one (other option would have been a mini USB wifi).

I've even run it on a PowerBook G4, honestly pretty sluggish there but it works.

Really for his claimed needs of "openssh and a terminal" I don't see why any linux or BSD would not have been totally fine. Any number of distros will do that fine out of the box with zero tweaking.

mhandley• 11 years ago

I switched my desktops and laptop from FreeBSD to OS X around 10 years ago, while running FreeBSD and Linux for my servers. The main reason was the "it just works" nature of OS X on the laptop. Too much hassle getting sound and WiFi working on FreeBSD back then, plus the need to share Powerpoint files with colleagues.

Well, I recently wasted several days with a failed 10.11 to 10.11.1 minor upgrade (short story: won't boot; restore from backup, redo upgrade, won't boot, clean install (boots), restore files from backup, won't boot, etc, long process of disabling kernel extensions left over from previous releases, eventually gave up, clean install, only restore /users, finally OK, but need to manually reinstall all apps). THis isn't my only OS X upgrade failure, but it was the most painful, and only a point release too. Also had an iphone 4 a while back get bricked from an OS upgrade, as a result of which I'm no longer in the iOS ecosystem, and quite happy about that.

So, Apple, no it doesn't just work anymore. FreeBSD, on the other hand - never a major problem with upgrades in 18 years of running it. Occasionally minor niggles, but usually because I didn't read the release notes. With OS X, it mostly works, but if it doesn't work, you're mostly out of luck.

I absolutely agree with the OP about it not feeling like it's under my control anymore. Unexpected 4.5 GB background downloads when I'm on a high-cost link - wonderful, thanks Apple, so kind! I'm spending about as much time now trying to turn off OS X features as I ever spend trying to enable then on FreeBSD.

jmnicolas2• 11 years ago

I'm spending about as much time now trying to turn off OS X features as I ever spend trying to enable then on FreeBSD.

This goes directly in my quotes trove, thanks :-)

vacri3• 11 years ago

Yes, free software OSes aren't just plug-and-play with their setup and take some upfront effort. But once set up, they don't tend to break or nag. The article is pretty clear in showing that the author doesn't mind troubleshooting, but what annoys him is having to keep turning the same thing off due to updates.

dengnan• 11 years ago

I think a more proper way of saying it, to me, is that "how the time is spent."

Spending 1 hour digging around the root cause of a failing driver is more interesting to a geek than spending 10 seconds closing windows.

Besides, if someone is experienced in a certain distro of a free OS, then it won't take too much time to setup his/her environment. I put most of my config files on Google Drive and it would just take me several minutes to setup my xmonad + vim environment.

dozzie• 11 years ago

He's going to spend a lot more time and energy installing and dealing with FreeBSD than he ever spent telling OS X to leave him alone.

It's not about spending time. It's about spending attention, and especially not controlling when you spend it. It's much more frustrating in the long run than having to put effort in configuring one's workspace.

znpy• 11 years ago

As a proud X220 user, i can confirm it is an awesome laptop.

As of window manager, I am giving stumpwm an extended try. No complaints so far.

ilurk2• 11 years ago

I tried running various Linux on my MacBook, but discovered everything I hate about managing Linux on a server platform is in fact amplified in a desktop context.

I'm curious on what problems does Linux brings that FreeBSD doesn't.

My main gripe with GNU/Linux distros is the whole package handling. Software stack complexity and the stable vs. new conundrum.

papertigers• 11 years ago

For one: http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_11_23-the_cantrill_strike...

ilurk2• 11 years ago

That is 2h. Could someone tl,dr please?

rdl2• 11 years ago

2016 might be the year of (open source, simple, does little but get out of the way) on the desktop/laptop/tablet/cellphone. But more likely, 2017-2018.

Security is the wedge. If something's complex, you can't tell if a failure is due to a transient fault, a bug, or an attack. If my Mac randomly reboots, the 99th percentile thing is not an attack, although a forced reboot is entirely consistent with many types of powerful attack.

microtonal3• 11 years ago

Security is the wedge. If something's complex, you can't tell if a failure is due to a transient fault, a bug, or an attack.

In the meanwhile, each X11 application can read other X11 applications' keystrokes or obtain its windows contents. Moreover, the desktop security model is still 'an application should be able to touch everything in a user's home directory'.

So, honestly, I don't think security is a good argument for BSD or Linux on the desktop or laptop, especially compared to OS X (which has GUI isolation and application sandboxing).

Wayland will improve things a lot, but it will take some time before it replaces X11 completely and everywhere.

fulafel• 11 years ago

Unix apps running under the same user account run in the same security domain, so a security boundary in the window system does not help by itself.

Qubes OS is currently the best thing for this on the desktop. OS X sandboxing has proven to be pretty porous.

rdl2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I believe in system-dedicated or system-high. Physical machines dedicated to very specific tasks, all at the same level.

Virtualization is sort of at the level where you can then virtualize those dedicated machines (Qubes style), but there's an argument for dedicated $20 computers, too.

aexaey• 11 years ago

Totally agree with i3wm choice.

Regarding terminal emulator glitches - may I suggest "simple terminal" [1]? It might seem a bit brutal by requiring to recompile the whole thing every time you change config and to apply a patch to get a working scroll-back [2], but than - it compiles in under a second, and how often do you reconfigure your terminal anyway...

[1] http://st.suckless.org/

[2] http://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback

greggarious• 11 years ago

My main concern at this point is Creative Suite. Photoshop remains the king of image editing - GIMP simply doesn't cut it.

If I could find good RAW editor, I'd ditch OSX in a second.

corv• 11 years ago

Or even a viable alternative to Lightroom...

4ad3• 11 years ago

Hell, I want a viable alternative to Lightroom on OS X!

peteretep2• 11 years ago

    > FreeBSD won’t sleep the laptop if you close the lid.
    > Kind of a deal.

Kind of a deal breaker, from my angle

Then there's the stuff about 1Password. I feel his pain. Only I also use Things.app and OmniOutliner and DayOne, and a bunch of other apps that sync with my iPhone, which - frankly - you can pry from my cold dead hands.

OS X has definitely been getting more irritating, and don't get me started on the new Apple TV, of which I foolishly bought two.

But that I can lie in bed, and without touching anything say "Hey Siri, remind me to send John a birthday card", and it'll show up in Things.app tomrrow morning ... the future is here.

knite• 11 years ago

I've been considering the new Apple TV - could you share what you dislike about it?

peteretep2• 11 years ago

I watch a lot of TV series. When I say "Homeland" to it, it takes me to a page about Homeland in general. From there I have to select a poorly named button to say "I want to see the episodes I own", and then I have to scroll along with no visual indication of which I've watched. When I hit Menu from that, I'm dropped in to the main menu, with no obvious way back. If I go in via TV Show from the main menu, it's a different UI that works more sensibly. This and 101 other minor irritations with the UI just get between me and my content.

qbrass• 11 years ago

Suspend on lid close actually does (or should) work on that laptop. It's just not enabled by default because suspend doesn't work on everything.

Adding:

  hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=s3

to /etc/sysctl.conf should enable it.

melted• 11 years ago

This should have been named: "How to waste two weeks trying to save 30 seconds and still end up with a subpar set-up."

jkelsey• 11 years ago

FreeBSD is indeed awesome. Given a choice between working on a BSD or a Linux environment, I will always choose the BSD option. However, for my main computer, there's just too much missing on the BSDs for me. I get the desire to have complete control over your computer, and there certainly has been some questionable corporatism bleeding into the Mac UX in the last couple of versions. Regardless, I'm back on a Mac after years of running FreeBSD (and trying various flavors of Linux). The experience, for me at least, is lovely. The hardware is awesome, the desktop environment is elegant, and the software ecosystem is very healthy.

ntrepid8• 11 years ago

These same issues are what drove me to use Linux for my Desktops and Laptops. I don't use it on my MacBooks because the hardware is not supported well, but on a Thinkpad or a Dell it's a first class experience. I definitely prefer Linux on a Dell XPS 13/15 over OS X on a MacBook. (The Apple hardware is still better, grumbles....)

asmodian• 11 years ago

What's with all of the code of conduct talks these days?

How does a code of conduct make a difference?

ayberkt• 11 years ago

No one's mentioned OS X's "do not disturb". Just set it to be turned on after each login so you have permanent do not disturb.

hollerith• 11 years ago

"The primary issue was I spent too much time telling OS X to shut up and leave me alone."

23 months ago, I disabled Notification Center, which unless my memory is playing tricks on me, stopped all interruptions (notifications) coming from Apple. My IM client can still get my attention by bouncing its Dock tile. I disabled Notification Center with the following command line: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist; killall NotificationCenter

Since I'm still on Mountain Lion, I don't know whether the tactic described above will work on newer OS X versions. And since I don't know how to tell Software Update to install OS updates without interrupting me, OS updates including security updates tend to go un-applied on my Mac longer than they normally would.

Even after I disabled Notification Center, there were a couple of interruptions / notifications (of the availability of updates to Firefox) via a library called Growl that was linked or incorporated somehow into my Firefox app, but since that hasn't happened in over a year, I probably figured out how to stop it (probably by my spending $2 to install the Growl app from the Mac App Store and using that app to disallow notifications from Firefox).

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, it has been over a year since any notification has appeared on my Mac, which is how I like it.

cyphunk2• 11 years ago

I used to say I moved to OSX because with who wants to spend N days configuring a window manager that could be spent on something productive. Now, every *.Nth OSX update I have to spend a day or two just unconfiguring the feature creap.

cyphunk2• 11 years ago

on the other hand, just installing updates to existing packages in a linux distro such as linux will break everything. I guess we forget that despite OSX getting worse over the past 6 or 7 years nothing else has really gotten any better.

Switching from OS X to FreeBSD – Both Desktop and Laptop

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