Can I use FreeBSD as a desktop system?

David Gruhk suvzer at gmx.com
Thu Jul 20 04:41:46 UTC 2017


On 17.07.18Tue 23:32, SOUL_OF_ROOT 55 wrote:
> Can I use FreeBSD as a desktop system?


There are 2 problems with FreeBSD.


1. We are without boot/mfsroot since FreeBSD 9,
so you can not start the installer from Grub.
This is problematic, if you can not use CD, FDD, PXE, USB booting.
You can start the NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux installer from Grub.

In this case you can use dd:
dd if=installed_in_other_PC of=not_boot_media_capable_PC
I am in this situation now, I hope the dd
or maybe dump-restore method will work!!!

Or, if you are brave, you can use the closed source Plop Boot Manager.
I am not daring, because it is closed source.


2. We have not LVM (deprecated, not recommended) with UFS,
only with ZFS, but ZFS has too big memory claim.
I don't dare use ZFS with 512MB-1GB (neither 4GB) RAM with a few 100 GB HDD space.


FreeBSD has a big advantage compared with NetBSD and OpenBSD:
3 month long supporting binary packages,
where you get only security and bug fix (quarterly branch).
Of course it would be better more months, or overlapping the quarterly packages,
but at the moment the project missing human resources.



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