I've had the chance to meet several of the developers at the BSDCan conferences; kudos people, you really deserve it.<p>I moved to BSD world when Debian adopted SystemD and I am happy that I did. It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux. I really love it.
OpenBSD for the edge, and FreeBSD for internals and workstations.<p>The driver updates are very welcome too, getting my video card to work 4k@60Hz was a bit of a task finding the correct driver, but I see this update addresses that too.<p>Once again, thank-you to everybody who contributes.
I have been trying out FreeBSD 12 as a desktop using the "TrueOS" distribution[1], as a UNIX user it has been very refreshing. I did this because the Ubuntu 18.04 experience felt to me strongly that the Linux community was focused on turning the desktop into a Windows clone.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.trueos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.trueos.org/</a>
The biggest thing I'm waiting for with FreeBSD is the TLS sendfile work that Netflix has done. They have said a few times they are open to open sourcing it, but the code needs to be cleaned up.<p>Also I'm interested in whats been going on with concurrencykit[1]? I saw it got imported into the kernel a couple years ago[2]. What's the progress on incorporating concurrencykit?<p>[1]: <a href="http://concurrencykit.org/" rel="nofollow">http://concurrencykit.org/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/src/309260" rel="nofollow">https://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/src/309260</a>
My 10 year old Dell XPS M1330 with Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 and 4 GB RAM with original HDD still running strong, had 11.2 installed on it. I just finished updating it to 12.0 release without any issues. I have only good things to say. I use Xfce. The filesystem is ZFS.<p>A while back, I took a snapshot of /root and installed Gnome 3. It was too big for my laptop. I rolled back. The snapshot and rollback were amazingly fast.<p>I find FreeBSD more cohesive. I have not tried it on modern devices, but my experience with it on my decade old laptop and VMs is extremely positive.<p>A similar cohesiveness is achieved only when I handcraft my Arch. Maybe, it is just the feeling.
Neat! I haven't yet found the commit that did it, but it appears that dtrace's stop(), which was broken in 11.2-RELEASE, now doesn't cause kernel panics.<p>Also interesting:<p>> The dtrace(1) utility has been updated to support if and else statements.<p>I believe that it's only a change in the front-end parser and that logic of this sort is still implemented via the old predicate/multiple clauses trick, but some syntactic sugar is still welcome.
Aawww, I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it <i>again</i>? Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be.
Any practical advantage of using *BSD on workstation over Linux at this moment? I heard that most of BSD developers use macOS, so the hardware compatibility is terrible.
I setup my (decade) old laptop as a server running on FreeBSD. And the elaborate documentation is a real lifesaver, especially as someone who is new to the ecosystem. Even, for the obscure hardware specific setup (yea, looking at you sony vaio), I could find relevant information on their forum which interestingly had relevant information from ages ago.<p>Really great job guys and thank you! Can't wait to upgrade!
I was so close (about a nanometer!) to adopting FreeBSD as my desktop OS due to it's plethora of software, amazing package management, great usage of RAM, and roots in true Unix, but one sad day, I installed WINE. It was working with all the applications I expected it to, except for one... Steam. The WINE version was too old. I tried and tried again, even compiling it straight from the staging git branch, but it didn't compile. Alas, FreeBSD is my server OS. It keeps my at least a bit sane knowing I have FreeBSD somewhere in my home.
I was considering setting up a new desktop machine with either OpenBSD or DesktopBSD (which is based on FreeBSD). Does anyone have any recommendations on which to choose? Any interesting experiences using BSD as a daily driver?
As a long term FreeBSD user who was bitten by recent (8 up to 11) source update issues I would have loved a disclaimer upfront: "we broke it again" or "we finally got back to normal"....
"pNFS server support"<p>Very welcome suprise! I was excited about pNFS four years ago, but couldn't find any open source system to play with. Finally it is time for some mirrored pNFS testing.
Some of the highlights:<p><pre><code> * OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS).
* Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been
enabled by default.
* OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1.
* Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8).
* Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to
version 6.0.1.
* The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been update to version 4.46.
* The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation
option.
* The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default.
* The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and
MINIMAL kernel configurations.
* The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through
which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a
system panic.
* The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements,
drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.
* Various improvements to graphics support for current generation
hardware.
* Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by
default.
* The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate
TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer
TRIM messages being sent simultaneously.
* The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server
support.
* The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9).
* The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation.
* The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run withing a jail(8).
* Various Lua loader(8) improvements.
* KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.</code></pre>