Linux is a MIracle article

While I was working around with FreeBSD i couldn’t sotp thinking that what the majority of people who contributed to Linux did was nothing sort of a miracle. That Debian is so stable and works out of th ebox. FreeBSD desktop keeps crashing … THe cohesiveness.. of the whole system. Sipmly amazing.

Thank you to the OPen source Developers of the world

Thanks for your time, emergy and dedication.

Imagine this… 99% of the software systems hardware etc we use is based on open source systems. THis is code someone else wrote for free which companies use for their benefits. It’s like using the highway, houses, etc built by volunteers without paying.

My FreeBSD installation experience so far

TLDR; I think FreeBSD is a very interesting project. Gave freeBSD a chance, The whole installation setup is very complicated, it crashes, and it will put a lot of people away, even seasoned Linux users like myself.

I eventually gave up, took a break of a few days and because I don’t easily give up on things which don’t work I retried the whole proces. The whole user experience is ofputting at least. This is something for power users, or for people who want to learn ALL the informatin by heart. Don’t expect a system which just works like Linux provides with automatic configuration, neat user interfaces etc. You WILL have to do a lot of things in the command line and spend hours and hours.

I thought FreeBSD would have evolved from what I had to endure with linux 20 years ago, seems not.

If you installed FreeBSD and it won’t boot, neither do you find your boot device in BIOS, you need to follow the steps later in this article to remake the UEFI boot information

Installer quirks

I had to try to follow the installation sequence at least 30 times on 3 different devices (2 laptops, 1 VM) and it kept having errors at one point so I had to restart it, or it restarted itself from scratch and then did nothing anymore so I had to reboot. This is a very bad user experience from my point of view. 99% of users with no energy,time or experience will give up unfortunately.

THe installers is bare, really simple, reminds me of the old Debian installers. It does connect to Wireless which is a plus. Hoever, IF you enter the wrong pasword for wifi, you need to restart the WHOLE installation. And on some devices, it would not auto configure correctly, even if you choose manual, it would still crash unexpectedly or you’d get to the final installation (after you reformatted your disks) and it would say “oops can’t connect”. Why the f*ck doesn’t it test it’s connection earlier?

There are a lot of quirks. The installer crashes so you have to restart so often.

Sometimes.. the zfs dataset cannot be created.. either a USB issue, or IDK.

freebsd zfs adduser there was an eror creating 
zfs dataset failed to open zroot/home/user dataset does not exist there was en error while setting permissions freebsd installation

I thought tha the solution was to use the same password, but it kept crashing.

After installation was complete, my system found no disks so it could not boot. THe weird stuff was the bootable USB asked for a zfs password when booting from the USB! This made me think something went wrong and the installer put the wrong bootmanager UEFI settings in the wrong place! As if the USB tried to install the system on the USB. I actually experimented with 10 different things and found a solution, keep reading for it.

I had to rewrite the USB and eventually used 3 different versions and still had the same issue.

I reinstalled the freebsd about 30 times and each time hitting quirks and edge cases. I tried all boot options possible (uefi+bios, uefi only)

The freaking part of it all is actually

This may look noobish, but I’ve been using Linux for 20 year. I’ve installed tens of different linux distros and have a lot of Linux servers.

THis is preposterouslly complex and quirky. Yes, I had linux installation issues aswell, but heck, it eventually worked after a reinstall. What I did like is that at least the zfs encryption seemed easier.

No way to install a GUI from the base installation if you want to run this in a desktop environment. You have to go hardcore CLI. I get it, maybe most installs are on servers…

Buggy Wireless drivers

Either FreeBSD has buggy wireless drivers or I don’t know, but on one device, I had to use a separate wireless USB to finish the installation. So It might be a hardware issue.

Testing FreeBSD in a VM

I eventually gave up and went to install FreeBSD as a VM in QEMU libvirt. Well, thaqt prooved to not work either. I did the manual installation and had a /etc/fstab error that it couldn’t find /home. I tried splitting /home (/usr/home) and / to test it out. This is how I install all desktop linux systems unless it’s a cloud installation

I eventually gave up since I realized if I’d get issues with almost anything else.

No wonder people won’t adopt freebsd, geez, the installation process is legacy and it crashes on every single f*cking thing.

Sure, I think the freebsd zfs geli encryption system is nice because it simplifies encryption to avoid doing all those shitty things to set up luks+lvm+encryption on Linux (especially if reinstalling) but heck.

Retrospective,looking back at all the tens of different distros I’ve used over the time, I have to say that by far the best experience was always with Debian (except for the moments when drivers where an issue) It’s stability and security far out

The Manual Handbook - A learning experience

The plus points is that they have a pretty nice manual built with asciidoctor which allows you to actually review the steps for installation etc. You’re still expected to read the internet and manual to fix things yourself. I do think the FreeBSD experience is somewhat interesting since you can learn new things. I haven’t done so many manual steps since almost 15 years ago, and even then, most linux systems.

I think FreeBSD is a great learning experience if you have the time to debug everything yourself

FreeBSD installation succeeded but you can’t boot because no drive disk or UEFI info is found

As I detailed earlier, I think installer runs efibootmgr on the USB partitions themselve which explains why the newly set ZFS password is there. And If you go in BIOS you won’t notice your drive, like it’s gone.

The solution to make freebsd after an install actually boot to your disk is simple. Just open a shell from the live installer usb/iso. Also, keep note that you can’t do mkdir /mnt/efi as yuo will get a “cannot write to read-only system`

mkdir /tmp/efi
mount -t msdosfs /dev/ada0p1 /tmp/efi
sudo efibootmgr -a -c -l  /boot/efi/efi/freebsd/loader.efi -L "FreeBSD 2"
umount /tmp/efi

That’s kind of it.

Breaking it, fixing it.. going at it again

To FreeBSD or to Linux

If I where to start anew I’d probably pick FreeBSD instead of Linux for the cohesive system and for the full learning experience. Meaning I’d use freebsd for servers, desktop, everything!

So I’d recommend newcomers from Mac or Windows who never used Linux or Freebsd to choose a path

1. Use Linux if you just want to get things done, don’t care about doing anything but minimal command line work, use Linux Mint or Debian.
2. Use FreeBSD if you value learning how everything works,

There is also the 3rd path which is play with everything. Once you setup a Linux distro which is stable AND you’ve setup your tools, upgrading should be easy and without issues.

I dare say that choosing either one of those will lead you down a path where there is 90% similarity in the core linux/unix bash commands, how the filesystem is arranged,etc

Moving completely to FreeBSD from Linux right now is a very big chore which involves plenty of small vendor lock-in’s . Which are actually hindering productivity of any kind in the detriment of system administration, which has to be done but I feel like I’d have to invest too much time learning new things. There are pro’s and con’s to these things, and for a few days of using the system.. I’m both equally impressed yet also know I’d have to do much more.

Of course the following are just my own things, there could be others

BackUp Strategy

• Backup strategy of external Hard drives - I use LUKS encryption with ext4, freebsd doesn’t have support for luks/lvm. I’m left with 2 options:

1. Remake everything using ZFS + encryptino on external HDD. Linux ZFS support is almost there, so in theory I could use this as abackup.l In practice I ’ve never used zfs on external hDD’s so I have no idea how it will behave.
2. Use an ext2 system and use something like restic for encrypted backups with par2 parity in case of bitrot or whatever, this does suffer from some side effects. Ext2 should work on on both Linux and FreeBSD (other BSD) and even Windows in case of disaster recovery

NO Bluetooth

One thing which.. well I’ve been taking for granted for the past 1 year in LInux was bluetooth. It seems that in FreeBSD that isn’t simple to handle unfortunately. In the past I used everything by cable, but nowadays… bluetooth stuff is everywhere. Even for music headphones etc so I’d adopted it as it just works.

The problem in FreeBSD is that you have to manually use CLI tools to handle this. In Linux you just have a GUI which handles this, here you don.t

Exotic drivers

Well,exotic drives won;t

YOU CAN CHANGE IT BY USING FREEBSD

The more people adopt freebsd or a bsd variant, the more people report bugs and they get involved, the more it can increase in adoption leading to

My idea is to jump ship completely if I do make a choice, this might mean regretting the choice or ending up with too much complexity in my life. So oright now I’m trying to minimize this complexity