
2020 OS Migration - protomyth
https://project-trident.org/post/os_migration/
======
yjftsjthsd-h
Money quote: "Project Trident will rebasing with Void Linux."

Which is... _fascinating_. Switching out upstreams is one thing, but they're
switching _kernels_ in the process!

EDIT: more comments from finishing reading:

Looks like they do broadly intend to work with the Void upstream, so I'm quite
pleased (as a Void user) that there will hopefully be more people
contributing, especially on the musl branch.

> We will not be creating a migration path from the FreeBSD-based Project
> Trident to the new Void-based version. Please be prepared to copy your user
> data (/home/*) to a temporary location like a removable drive before
> installing the new version and copying the data back.

That's quite unfortunate. In particular, if they do integrate ZFS into Void
including boot environments, there shouldn't be any reason they can't do it in
place; just install into new filesystems and mount the old `tank/usr/home` as
though nothing had happened. Unfortunately you would still lose direct binary
compatibility, since Linux doesn't have a FreeBSD personality to use, but I
don't see why you should need a new pool or home.

~~~
turndown
IMO a migration path between kernels would be expecting too much out of an OSS
project, but maybe I just have lower expectations for these things.

~~~
mysterydip
It's probably not a matter of technical capability to implement, rather
lacking the support staff to handle all the requests they get when edge case
users have a failed migration.

~~~
red_phone
I think they’re trying to get around this by explicitly saying there will be
no migration path, but it’ll be interesting to see whether they actually get
away with that.

~~~
cwyers
They are a niche distribution of a niche distribution of one of the BSDs. They
are moving to being a downstream of the 40th most popular Linux distribution
by DistroWatch's measures. What is there to get away with? I suspect most of
the people using this are the ones making this decision.

[https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity](https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity)

------
robbya
Not familiar with Trident or Void, this announcement seems like a bit of an
identity crisis.

From the home page:

> Project Trident is a desktop-focused operating system based on TrueOS. It
> uses the Lumina desktop as well as a number of self-developed utilities to
> provide an easy-to-use system that both BSD beginners and advanced system
> administrators can feel comfortable running 24⁄7.

But after this change they are dropping BSD and TrueOS configuration tools.
I'm curious how many users would stay through this transition (lots of other
Linux OSes to move to instead).

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ysleepy
It is a bit weird to see this written as if it wasn't crystal clear that the
linux kernel is the only alternative.

Why not just say it?

"Sadly the graphics support is still lacking on FreeBSD since all the driver
development is very linux specific, we therefore decided to switch kernels
because graphics is a major part of the user experience."

~~~
auvi
doesn't nvidia release FreeBSD graphics drivers?

~~~
trasz
It does, and the FreeBSD ports of open source Intel and AMD drivers are
getting close to their Linux upstream. Pretty much the only thing that’s
seriously lacking is Nouveau.

~~~
newnewpdro
What about all the arm-oriented mainline GPU support like panfrost, freedreno,
etnaviv, vc3/4? Things are really picking up in this department...

~~~
trasz
I'm not sure, to be honest. I don't remember any news regarding FreeBSD ports
of those.

Having said that, if they use the same frameworks as the x86 drivers, the work
on Intel and AMD ports should make porting them easier as well, since it all
revolves around linuxkpi - shims that provide Linux-compatible API for kernel
code.

~~~
floatboth
Someone would have to add the FDT (OFW) stuff to linuxkpi, and that's a lot of
tedious work :(

Not only that, there's often some kind of dependency between GPU/display HW
and platform clocks/IOMMU/etc blocks that we might have completely different
drivers for. This embedded crap is super messy, why can't everyone use PCI for
everything inside the SoC >_<

------
artfulhippo
I see why one would run Trident over plain FreeBSD on a workstation. But what
is Trident offering on top of Void?

~~~
jdc
Apparently it has had good selection of precompiled packages available.

------
protomyth
Does anyone know what their relationship with iXsystems is and will this
affect iXsystems BSD work?

~~~
stock_toaster
From what I understand, the relationship was that project-trident was built on
top of trueOS. ixsystems sponsors trueOS.

I dont think there is a direct relationship other than that, aside from
ixsystems apparently also supplied some forum hosting for project-trident
(more correctly: a subforum on their forum)?

------
ahbyb
This site would benefit from higher contrast and thicker fonts.

~~~
michaelmrose
This is a nice way of saying it's nearly unreadable to the point where i
wonder if it looks radically different on the developers device.

~~~
ahbyb
I don't find it to be "nearly unreadable" myself, but yes it's difficult. I
think it depends mostly on the quality of your monitor, and on how it is
calibrated.

~~~
smacktoward
It's the contrast, or lack thereof. Black text on a gray background is going
to be hard to read on any display.

