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Switching from Linux to BSD

Hey there,

The last few years I have been looking at the BSD's there are, out of curiosity and since Microshaft slowly but surely starts to poison Linux with their excuse for software it is becoming a need or want (not sure which). For years I am running Arch Linux (with XFCE) and it all works properly. Is there anybody here who made a similar switch and could you please tell me about the real differences between Linux and BSD and what your experiences are? For instance: are there things to look at or pay extra attention to while performing such switch and are there things one of you people can advise me?

Thanks in advance :-)

PS
I am not a technician or IT-guru, but an artist and I want to just keep on creating without weeks of installing and cursing at my screen. :-)

3 years ago by Maternitus with 5 comments

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  • Gozzin
    +11

    I've planned to try BSD for over 10 years,but have still not got around to it yet. I'm also not one and do enjoy art. I have a Bamboo tablet I use with the Gimp.

    • Maternitus (edited 1 year ago)
      +9

      Well, today, after work, I gave it a shot. In total three attempts at a FreeBSD install, with the first two attempts with KDE and the third with Gnome. It took me in total about eight hours to realise that FreeBSD is pretty much not installable, because I have my monitor connected to my videocard with HDMI. Also the drivers for NVidia suck ass and obstruct the system. After all those hassles, I gave up, because when people get older they tend to have less time left. ;-) And for fuck's sake, the FreeBSD community's credo is "Don't fix things that already work." And so I am back with my Manjaro and KDE. With all the configurations exactly as they were before I tried to replace it with FreeBSD. Back ups are a good thing. ;-)

      Aaaah, a Bamboo, aye! Cool! Here it's a Wacom Intuos and, of course, also Gimp (whose programmers deserve a Nobel price, I think). :-)

      Edit: Yes, I brought my Manjaro a nice bouquet of flowers to make it up. She didn't talk all too much. haha

      • Gozzin
        +12

        Thanks for posting all this...You sure gave it a go,that's for sure. Sometimes it's best to just do what you did and call it a day. After reading all that,I'm definitely not messing with BSD.

  • Maternitus
    +7

    Okay, a few years later and still not switched to FreeBSD. Two months back, I finally had the resources for an external harddrive that is sufficient enough to back up everything that is important to me (my art and projects, photos, archive of books and texts and a very extensive music archive). I have also learned from the FreeBSD documentation it is possible to read/write to ext4 filesystems albeit without journalling and encryption. For an "in-between-step" it is good enough, I can re-archive it with some back-and-forth copying, pasting and finally formatting the nescessary drives to a BSD file system.
    Anyways.

    I have a question: are there specifics to pay attention to when switching from Linux to FreeBSD?
    I'm also curious whether there are active FreeBSD users on SnapZu, you know, for posting/chatting and for acting really elitist towards Arch/Ubuntu/whatever Linux users. hahahaha
    I still see a switch as a postive evolution, what do you think?

  • Maternitus
    +4

    After studying on what several forums and sites advised, I will have to save up for a new external hard-drive and format that to ZFS (the BSD filesystem) in order to move my archives to, before I get on with completely switching. I can access ext4 (Linux filesystem), but only read-access and also with extra software, which I find bollocks. I am very careful with my precious archives since my blunder a few years back.

    So, for the moment this will be on a hold. Not really a pity, because it is good to do such things with care. :-)