What's the difference between ports and pkgs - A FreeBSD beginners guide!

[@arturorochoa9359]

I’ve been using gentoo for 4 years and I have always admired BSD Users

[@nikkonkde]

Is there a performance difference between the 2? Is the compiled version supposed to be optimized for the hw you are running?

[@mirror1766]

By default, no. If you modify performance options from those configure screens then you can make it better/worse accordingly when they are available. If you need a new thing now, you can always start building it from ports before you can start installing the package as packages are literally built form ports. For optimizations, you can go down the route of defining WITH_LTO=yes in /etc/make.conf to get link time optimization everywhere that doesn't specify itself as not compatible, you can custom define options trying to get things like -march=native. The more you tweak (through provided config screen or through forced variable setting), the more likely you will find bugs needing to be fixedand subtle bugs because of unnecessary tweaking when you just need things to work are not fun to track. I broke a database with a -O0 compile flag before; though likely fixable we decided upgrading the database to a newer version was a better use of time. A few notes of me breaking things (may be in a different state now) by applying options everwhere through make.conf: OPTIONS_UNSET+=JACK breaks audio/linuxsampler, OPTIONS_SET+=OPENCL breaks opensubdiv so broke blender, OPTIONS_SET+=OPENMP breaks imagemagick. Sometimes users need options to be nondefault just to make things work right: SDL option needed on fluidsynth to have simultrans play midi and needs SNDFILE set to read v3 compressed soundfonts and to export non-raw audio formats.

[@nexusanphans3813]

So basically, every package in the FreeBSD repository can be build ourselves by ports?

[@DaniedeJager77]

what about using `make config-recursive` when compiling something with many dependencies? That way you don't have to watch the screen the whole time to accept configurations. Different ways to achieve that too.

[@mirror1766]

If I recall, you may still have delays from screen to screen with that if working through bigger dependency chains. Using portmaster to get through things like config-recursive then portupgrade to do the building work was how I used to work though those when I needed to so that I wouldn't get many hours of build steps stuck at those screens during building.

[@throwaways8621]

Hello Gary. Thank You for the videos they are a great help. I am currently in the process of moving away from Linux Mint LMDE5 to FreeBSD 13.1. I have installed the OS, installed XCFE4 and I'm kinda stuck at the what next? stage. I was wondering if would you be able to make a step by step video with some application suggestions, configuration pointers and best practises for the setup of a daily driver desktop? Stuff like should I install Octopkg? How do I install LibreOffice, Firefox... How do I play videos, music... What if any codec's do I need to install? How do I do it?. I realise this would be a massive undertaking but It would have it's rewards, as i don't know about anyone else but this stage is the biggest hindrance to those moving over. Although the manuals are great and Forums very active a lot of the information can be confusing and contradictory to even someone with many years of computer use even with Linux. It would be amazing to have a one-stop go to video guide for all newcomers to FreeBSD.

[@mirror1766]

If confusing or contradictory is describing documentation such as the handbook, please considering opening a PR for it so that can be located and resolved.

[@ardhiatno]

Can we get pkg file from ports?

[@mirror1766]

Packages installed from pkg by default were created by a machine building the package by use of the ports framework. Ports is a framework used to build a package rather than download it as a prebuilt package.

[@jayx-q9q]

thx bsd noob here