George Neville-Neil - FreeBSD: Not a Linux Distro

George Neville-Neil presents the history of FreeBSD.
Slides can be found here: speakerdeck.com/digitalocean/...
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[@MathNerdGamer]

It always makes me happy when I see LaTeX used outside of mathematics.

[@HentaiNat]

I thought it was only used in BDSM

[@sharathkr]

@@HentaiNat You mean BSDSM?

[@drowningin]

BSD has the best documentation. If you ask a question and someone says RTFM they aren't being rude. They're just very proud of their manuals

[@kvv8197]

I agree, 100% the Handbook is well documented and most of the questions you might have, have been answered in the forum already.

[@ArsenioGut]

Even as a Debian user, I can't express *enough* how absolutely perfect the FreeBSD Handbook is. It's some of the best technical writing since K&R's C Programming Language.

[@hhthoj]

Totally agree. Not sure and not care who's the guy behind FreeBSD, but the philosophy and documentation is damn rigid.

[@barlscharkley5411]

Really? The 'F' in RTFM isn't rude?

[@christophmeyer3558]

Last time I used it it was outdated and I had to watch a youtube video explaining how to do it.

[@carlvonmisseisdacunha3123]

I don't know why the only cc language is portuguese, but as a portuguese speaker i'm really happy with this.

[@BenjaminCronce]

I loved the humor, along with the talk.

[@awa0927]

I’m a huge Linux fan boy and love these talks. BSD has a good philosophy vs the pure chaos of Linux.

[@viniciusfelix1197]

Real nice video! I'm learning about C programming, and saw a good implementation to avoid buffer overflow attacks when using strcpy and strcat, and it was made by OpenBSD, it's called strlcpy and strlcat.

[@mikeklaene4359]

Now that I am now retired I'll have some time to 'play' with FreeBSD. Was introduced to UNIX System V back in the late 1980's on TI 1500 systems. Love 'C' - not yet on OOP kind of guy.

[@douwehuysmans5959]

Read Linus Torvalds' rant on C++, funny stuff

[@drowningin]

It's quite annoying when people make the most basic programs OO

[@timewave02012]

You can get a lot from the C++ libraries and not have to write your own code in OOP when it doesn't make sense.

[@irisaacsni]

FreeBSD is a incredibly stable, fast, crash-proof Desktop system as a excellent server OS with a great engineers community.

[@1DJLNR]

indeed!!!

[@noobian3314]

for real, its a great linux distro 😉

[@ProgressiveTory]

@@noobian3314 smh

[@heiAMB]

@@noobian3314 okai

[@dlaci1]

Very nice keynote George!

[@DavidSabine]

This is an awesome follow-up to Neal's earlier presentation! (The video/blog post which followed your FreeBSD Launch in February.) Great to see the momentum.

[@DigitalOcean]

FreeBSD: Not a Linux Distro talk by George Neville-Neil (@gvnn3) kzbin.info/www/bejne/rajFgGebic6Yh7s

[@mdamaged]

Thanks, the first slide said it all! But, I'm sure the rest was good too.

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

Some people don't seem to realize that FreeBSD is actually Open Source BSD UNIX without the AT&T code.

[@1DJLNR]

Its KZbin users who seek attention have made video's for the sake of it giving out false information about a time they never lived, wiki is great but i see 80% false on there especially from my time of the early 80's..

[@ArsenioGut]

Who doesn't?

[@____-gy5mq]

When AT&T decided to pull its code out, the guys who replaced the code were the professors who closely monitored AT&T’s code and had access to it, atleast at the time of 4.3BSD. So the replaced code is pretty much the original, though not in name. Now don’t tell me this is the same as what Linus Torvalds did with the Linux kernel. Linus had no access to the Unix source, so he reverse-engineered the Unix kernel. I don’t call the FreeBSD job reverse-engineering.

[@NickEnchev]

Tried to get a basic FreeBSD install today, had nothing but issues with wifi config first (fixed it), AMD GPU driver conflicting with framebuffer, got Xorg setup with KDE5 and acceleration, most KDE apps were crashing. Just felt like everything was working against me. Really really wanted to like it, but went back to Arch. I'll probably give it another go when I have more time to waste.

[@gamer-gw9iy]

Hoping to see wider usage of freebsd in the future!

[@rockgardenlove]

This needs a recent comment -- great talk and FreeBSD is very nice!

[@IsmaelTisminetzky]

Thanks for this video

[@ohdude6643]

I've just installed FreeBSD a couple days ago (actually I am using it right now) - so far so good

[@jameshall5556]

How's it going?

[@unclearam2055]

I just installed FreeBSD 13 release on an lenovo Ideapad. So far just my wifi pci card is not supported. It's been a good system.

[@beat461]

I went looking in the menu of my panasonic tv and actually found a LGPL and GPL license in there. Apparently it's running AM-Linux

[@richard343s]

Interesting I had no idea what FreeBSD was before watchin this.

[@ChrisLeeX]

Absolutely amazing talk. Thank you for sharing this.

[@johnward2099]

Just spent a week trying to get BSD onto a 2007 Dell Optiplex with standard intel equipment. The FreeBSD basic system went fine as a text only system. However, efforts to install KDE, Gnome3 or Xfce just ended with no audio, failure to recognise the DVD drive, flawed packages and little community help. I love the structure of anything Unix and will try anything using a terminal but for now the Desktop Environments just are so "last century." At least anything Linux on older equipment just works out of the box as well as the apps. I can put MInt 19 on just about anything and that trumps any beautiful structure BSDs may have. Tried GhostBSD and TruOS, too. Wouldn't even install. Therefore, leave BSD to the servers and mainframes. The average Linux user is better to leave BSD alone for now. Sorry....Joe user shouldn't have to be a Cisco networking pro or assembler person to make one's workstation run on FreeBSD. No, BSD isn't Linux and has a way to go before it can be considered mainstream. Love the BSD Handbook, now if it only would work without endless tweaking.

[@elementalnova7418]

@Rishabh Bishnoi *Debian has entered the chat*

[@user-ir2fu4cx6p]

Same thing happened for Linux ~10 Yrs ago , the problem is with hardware companies not support this system

[@smorrow]

kek, 9front would work flawlessly on that.

[@oldpain7625]

This is an old comment but I wanted to respond in case you want to give it another shot. There's a PKG that can be installed with standard pkg install desktop-installer. Download that package and run it, and it takes care of everything you need to get X, a desktop environment or window/tiling managers, and your graphics drivers working great. Follow the prompts and you've got a rock solid system that is as easy as Linux.

[@pavelperina7629]

@@oldpain7625 I just tried, but. Running KDE requires several steps: VirtualBox knows that FreeBSD runs on a toaster, so it gives it 1GB of RAM by default. Also, default display must be switched to VBoxSVGA mode for resolution above 1024x768. Using more than one CPU for VirtualBox makes system likely to freeze sooner or later depending on the system load (might be VBox bug actually). Still KDE seems unstable: baloo_file.core, kcminit.core are in my home directory.

[@GregoryLyles]

Yes!

[@ManuelMontoyaRdz]

I'd use FreeBSD but my laptop has an ATI Radeon card and the driver only works on Linux. :-(

[@irisaacsni]

This is why there's a Linux ABI implementation in FreeBSD that now(FBSD 10.3) supports Linux x86-x64.

[@Ensue85A]

Haiku OS uses some FreeBSD stuff too... :)

[@ericespino7361]

Not mention of Netflix?

[@ianpulsford2295]

+Eric Espino Nor DragonFlyBSD, which is an actual fork, unlike PC-BSD

[@robertvuitton]

Which one more secure between FreeBSD & OpenBSD? I recently read something about OpenBSD having FBI pay to have backdoors.

[@drowningin]

Openbsd is. It's run by cryptographers. Didn't hear about that fbi thing. I know ssl was made by NSA but its implementation is peer reviewed code so may be secure unfortunately little you can do

[@tylerdean980]

Well, if I ever get a PDP-11, I'll make sure to run BSD 2.11

[@andrewlankford9634]

1995: FreeBSD: Not a Linux Distro 2015: FreeBSD: Still not a Linux Distro 1988: BSD: What the $@#% is "Linux"?

[@zandiskoul]

Me n George hit the gym and come back in 2020 with BuffSD

[@rajatkulshreshtha2912]

How is it now in 2020?

[@georkaiev]

nice

[@deim3]

What is the fundamental difference between FreeBSD and a Linux?

[@muhammadwaqarsiddiqui6731]

linux is just a kernel which runs on top of hardware, while freeBSd is BSD unix variant which is a complete Operating System

[@Zeturic]

While true, that doesn't actually answer the intended question. When people are talking about JUST the kernel, they always say "the Linux Kernel". I can't recall ever hearing the kernel referred to as simply Linux (aside from by overly pedantic assholes). When people ask about the differences between Linux and FreeBSD, what they're actually asking about is the difference between "the Linux Kernel + GNU userland" and FreeBSD. Attempting to pedantically correct them ("Linux is just a kernel [bla bla bla]") helps and informs no one.

[@alexxx4434]

“BSD is what you get when a bunch of UNIX hackers sit down and try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.”

[@smorrow]

@An Orange It's a clone, not a fork. Of course, Linux cloned 'rfork' as 'clone', so it would seem Linux people can't tell the difference.

[@pavelperina7629]

FreeBSD is completely different unix kernel. More conservative and more stable (by stable I mean, it's basically unchanged in 20 years - Linux renamed devices, completely changed init scripts, firewall changed like 3 times and so on).

[@mikewatson2270]

BSD doesn't run on laptops. Not on my laptops, anyway, despite multiple attempts over the last 10 years or so. No graphical environment, or not one worth using, and not much hope of wireless. The one honorable exception was Open Indiana a few years back, that installed on a logical partition on my hard disk (most BSD's demand a primary partition) and ran rather well. The most annoying part is that BSD's write some subpartitions (slices) on the hard disk, so after I give up on an installation I have to write zeros over all the disk before installing something else. Otherwise grub gets fits. So now I leave BSD's to people with bigger machines and wired internet. I learned my lesson. There is always a Linux distro running Xfce with a working wireless applet that is happy to share a hard disk with three other Linux distros, so that's what I will use until I hear of something better.

[@jiatongwu8808]

i use openbsd as my home router (adsl) nat

[@ultimacj]

Too bad M$ can't have this logic. This won't happen until developers change their ways as well these OS's can efficiently be a pure gaming rig for ALL games. Old and new.

[@deusbuda]

#FreeBSD

[@ArianKordi]

"lel iz fweebsd fwee?"

[@kennethjakobsen7295]

I love the BSD software, but i will never understand, the opposition to GPL.

[@logicawe]

Slowly on my path to FreeBSD evangelization

[@yethuraj4873]

Cool vedio Sir, I will Install Free BSD on my laptop. I am a Linux user, so I am the biggest fan of open source so I should try it.

[@wangjohn6480]

FreeBSD大神

[@DrewWalton]

RIP PC-BSD

[@hc3d]

I had no clue the big boys used FreeBSD. Not just some hobby project it seems.

[@fawkeyes5111]

since a few days i'm in the process of setting up freebsd. still i don't get the difference and why this difference is important (linux-unix) so i let this video run. 19 minutes in i'm so fed up with the vanity this person is spreading. like he mentioned many many many times he's working on this and that like he's a important person in the bsd world. that just made me rethink trying freebsd.

[@kvv8197]

He is a very important person in the BSD world... if still have problems to get FreeBSD working, let people know, ask for help... Linux is so nice, it works out of the box, FreeBSD is another story, but you can get nice setup if you have an afternoon to set it up...

[@adorenu1338]

Gotta dual boot freebsd along windows, so I can download free pirated movies on the internet without getting viruses.

[@frozen_tortus]

I'm exploring other options aside Linux, I'm coming from Ubuntu => Arch => ?, both of those distros are so bloated with shit its crazy.

[@wayneferguson14]

Try gentoo or slackware

[@abhileshxd621]

Wait isn't Arch supposed to NOT be bloated? Can someone elaborate please? Is it because of systemd? Former noob here.

[@frozen_tortus]

@@abhileshxd621 sorry, I used manjaro. Pure arch is not bloated.

[@abhileshxd621]

@@frozen_tortus Oh okay thanks for confirming.

[@TheWoogeroo]

Yet another FreeBSD dev using a Macbook. Maybe they need to title their talks "Mac OS X is not FreeBSD"? I'd be very surprised if he's not running Mac OS X, with BSD in a vm.

[@irisaacsni]

+TheWoogeroo Why someone that can buy a Macbook, will use FreeBSD as Desktop? Mac OS X is based on Darwin (BSD-based).

[@tcroyce8128]

+lem1676 do you design your own system which doesnt have any evil company components in it.

[@Typepov]

Lol none of you actually get what FreeBSDs target market is clearly...

[@irisaacsni]

*Surely* the target of FreeBSD is not _the typical enthusiast user of __*_nix_** ***_Desktop_***, but there's *some effort* put to make FreeBSD somewhat *_usable_* on Desktop

[@Typepov]

True. There is, but he uses that machine for lectures and presentations and then actually develops the networking stack on FreeBSD id say the dude is technical enough to use whatever he wants. And in this case use OSX because its a derivative and works out of the box for things like presentations and media.

[@BryonLape]

Big on documentation....must not be agile....

[@godofwinetits3826]

Its freeBSD time, since linux is becoming like windows

[@palanthis]

Made me chuckle. I love when "hardcore Linux nerds" run Ubuntu. You want Linux cred? Arch, Gentoo, Slackware or LFS, anything else is not hardcore, it's just clicking buttons.

[@puyatecla9903]

No, it isn't a linux distro it is a systemd distro

[@kmjameson]

Horrible lecturer ... make a great politician ...

[@Getz]

Its well known that FreeBSD is run by socialists and how this deters would-be contributors. I saw more videos with this game dude and drew the same conclusions as you.

[@getgle]

@@Getz What makes you think that?