FreeBSD 7.0 review

[JEM_staff]

Here we are at the moment of truth for the FreeBSD operating system -- the 7.0 release. This is what FreeBSD users and developers have been waiting for ever since the dark days of the 5.X series when the promises of superior performance, threading, and stability fell flat. Though each release in the FreeBSD 6.X series improved markedly in quality and performance, 7.0 has been widely anticipated as the release that FreeBSD fans can have confidence in. I wish I could say that FreeBSD 7.0 lived up to the hype.

FreeBSD 7.0 review

[jnash2001]

I don't get the "Modernize the command line experience" comment.
Are you saying something like framebuffer resolution in Linux?
I mean you like OpenBSD and there's no "modernization" on the CLI there.

[Valour]

Originally Posted by jnash2001

I don't get the "Modernize the command line experience" comment.
Are you saying something like framebuffer resolution in Linux?
I mean you like OpenBSD and there's no "modernization" on the CLI there.

I like FreeBSD too. Really, I do. I used to use it on both my desktop and my server. It's just that it has had so few quality releases in the past few years that it's hard to use or recommend it. I would love to switch back to FreeBSD on one of my machines, but it just never seems to work right on any of them.

FreeBSD was at one time the pinnacle of operating system innovation. It is now merely a reminder of the Unix legacy. I'd like to see it reclaim that title, but the way it's going to happen is by letting go of old Unix habits and patterns. One of those is the antiquity of the current command line technology. There is absolutely no reason why FreeBSD can't auto-detect a screen resolution and configure initial framebuffer support. Neither is there a reason why there can't be color terminal support included by default.

That's the real hey here -- *default*. You can make FreeBSD do just about anything, but how much time will it take? How much reading and research do you have to do to improve the command line experience in FreeBSD?

OpenBSD does not aim to be a general purpose operating system like FreeBSD does. It only claims to be a multi-platform, ultra-secure operating system. So everything else that it does extra is gravy. When you clearly define your goals and are skilled at bringing them to completion, it's easy to succeed, and so OpenBSD does.

[Carpetsmoker]

There is absolutely no reason why FreeBSD can't auto-detect a screen resolution and configure initial framebuffer support.

There is a reason, not auto-detecting this is more "fool-proof".
Many of my screens are 15"/60Hz CRT screens, which are, by today's standards, deprecated, when I use them to install some GNU/Linux distributions (Like Knoppix and Debian) I sometimes run into problems because they set the refresh rate or resolution too high, which can be difficult to solve at times.

Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages...

Neither is there a reason why there can't be color terminal support included by default.

color is enabled in the shell(tcsh) and terminal emulator(syscons) by default, ls however, does need to -G flag to display colors, this is no different from GNU ls which used by most (all?) GNU/Linux distro's, where you need to use the flag --color=auto to enable color.

That's the real hey here -- *default*. You can make FreeBSD do just about anything, but how much time will it take? How much reading and research do you have to do to improve the command line experience in FreeBSD?

What do you want to do with your system?

If you want a desktop system then most people probably want to use GNU/Linux, OSX, or Windows, instead of FreeBSD, FreeBSD is not the easiest OS and several stuff is lacking (flash9, x86 emulator, some drivers).
If you want a server then FreeBSD is, at the least, a viable option, if you want a good server then you will need to do a lot of reading and research and change a lot of options on ANY OS, this is not FreeBSD-specific.

[Valour]

So if FreeBSD is going to be solely a server operating system, then perhaps the project should state that goal specifically rather than try to be an all-purpose OS. Frankly I'm able to make a better desktop OS out of OpenBSD, which has better hardware support than FreeBSD.

But if I were to judge it based on server capabilities alone, I would still give FreeBSD a low grade. There's no default Web server, the default system configuration needs a lot of work to bring it to full functionality for a multi-purpose server, network hardware support trails OpenBSD and Linux, and it doesn't work very well on AMD64 hardware. What's to like about that? What advantages does that have over any of its competitors? If I want to do that much server work, I could go with Solaris instead and have the option of high-end training and business support packages. If I want to do less work, I could use a number of Linux distros, or OpenBSD. (I don't really know about NetBSD. For some reason, I just never got involved with it.)

FreeBSD used to have a lot of advantages. It had a head start on AMD64, it had superior performance, and if you go back far enough, it was the world's most high-tech server operating system. Today it is none of those things, though I hear that it is catching up on performance. Unfortunately, this is in an era when low-end server operating system performance is at an all-time low in terms of demand.

[Harmonoid]

I can't install FreeBSD 7.0 on dual Opteron system as well...
The "RELEASE" CD crashed during the boot attempt, the "STABLE" can't write to the hard drive and every command from the "livefs" CD fails with unsupported symbol error...
But what is really pissed me off is the fact that my post about these problems did not passed the moderation of FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org list!