Freebsd under windows 10

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 29 Aug 2017 01:31:43 +0200, CeDeROM wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 1:12 AM, Valeri Galtsev
><galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, August 28, 2017 5:58 pm, CeDeROM wrote:  
>>> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 11:45 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:  
>>>> I would rather go other way around: install FreeBSD on bare metal,
>>>> and run MS Windows, say, under VirtualBox.

+1

Or as pointed out by Polytropon, for some software wine could be used.
OTOH wine, even with helpers, might not be user-friendly for the target
group of Windows users migrating to FreeBSD. While shared folders other
than for most VMs might be without issues using wine, something
trivial as font sizes could be an issue. 

While vbox isn't the best VM available, its great advantage is
user-friendliness, shared folders with the host etc. don't require any
knowledge.

>>> That would be nice if FreeBSD had really good support for USB Device
>>> Drivers over Guest Additions which unfortunately brokenheartedly it
>>> does not :-(  
>>
>> This is not on FreeBSD but rather on the VirtualBox side IMHO...  
>
>Yup, FreeBSD has best USB stack ever! :-) Still.. not good enough USB
>support in VirtualBox to make it production.. and VirtualBox seems to
>have some bugs with each release :-(

Since I'm on Linux I can confirm USB issues with openbox are not
related to the host's USB support, in addition vbox does perform very
slow and apart from this there could be all kinds of issues with e.g.
graphic rendering for the mouse cursor, each upgrade is a gamble. The
ultimate solution to get rid of those vbox issues is to use the Oracle
VM VirtualBox Binary Edition (Oracle branded non-OSE version) and to
use a SSD with SATA 3, since it's the OSE version, that is most of the
times buggy. FWIW after software I need dropped Windows XP support, I
installed Windows 7 and instead of the vbox default vdi I use qcow. I
suspect that on a HDD with SATA 2 vdi performance better, but with the
SSD and the next generation of SATA it doesn't matter anymore.

Still a vbox issue are tasks where USB gets disconnected and
connected, e.g. upgrading iOS of a tablet PC connected to iTunes
running on the guest OS requires to reconnect the tablet PC by the
vbox's device menu two or three times during the process. Its better to
own a router and to upgarde iOS via wifi (without a router ad-hoc might
work, too, but for me it didn't ;).

Regards,
Ralf

PS:

On Mon, 28 Aug 2017 16:45:23 -0500 (CDT), Valeri Galtsev wrote:
>MS Windows is "bloated pig" (my friend sysadmin started saying that
>when Windows 2000 was released), Linux makes huge steps in that same
>direction

Linux is the kernel. You could build a kernel with a config that does
fit to your hardware, without modules for any other hardware, so your
build could build a very slim kernel. Regarding anything else, nobody is
forced to install a so called "user-friendly" distro. A headless
install without unneeded services IMO isn't bloated. My Linux needs 2
seconds to boot and it's not headless. I'm using openbox, no desktop
environment and I don't use unneeded services. For example, I don't
have Bluetooth equipment, why should I start a Bluetooth service? I'm a
command line user, why should I install gvfs?

To claim Linux became bloated, is like claiming FreeBSD became bloated,
because you have seen TrueOS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueOS#Recommended

I seriously doubt that for a headless FreeBSD install it's recommended
to use a "3D accelerated video card" ;).