
PC-BSD Evolves into TrueOS - jlgaddis
https://www.trueos.org/2016/09/01/pc-bsd-evolves-into-trueos/
======
godzillabrennus
The same excellent team at [http://ixsystems.com](http://ixsystems.com) is
behind this. I've not only had a breeze integrating TrueNAS gear into a VMWare
environment but I have personally had a FreeNAS mini for years at home and
recommend it for many SOHO users who want local storage.

------
karma_vaccum123
Hire a designer to make Lumina less ugly. Sorry I know that sounds harsh, but
it looks very 2005.

Make this install on modern laptops. I'm tired of being recommended five year-
old Thinkpads.

Fix those and I would consider overwriting my Ubuntu installation

~~~
cm3
> Hire a designer to make Lumina less ugly. Sorry I know that sounds harsh,
> but it looks very 2005.

I'm not trying to sound harsh and just have to respectfully disagree.

I don't use Lumina because I don't use DEs, but the looks of it are just
right. It's not a regression like most "styles" these days where it's
impossible to know half the time what's an interactive widget, or why suddenly
the designers think large empty white spaces and large widgets and titlebars
are a feature. If I'm at a desktop, I need a desktop environment, not a tablet
experience.

~~~
Osmium
> I don't use Lumina because I don't use DEs [...]

In fairness, that probably means your preferences will be very different from
those people who actually do use desktop environments.

I also think a lot of people (myself included) have a certain nostalgia for
older, leaner desktop environments. That doesn't mean they can't be designed
_better_ , with more polish, using those same older design cues.

~~~
wruza
I failed to see how control panel was any better in each 95/xp/7/10, except
that my enemies can't find anything in it just like me. I also fail to see how
w7 explorer became more 'convenient' without up button (and changing backspace
key to back) but with annoying Libraries that are not even folders. Or removal
of quick launch, so that icons on our taskbars now float and you search for a
button to start that app.

What you call polishing is just breaking familiar old-simple and building new-
super-innovated-final-solution _each year_. Leave us power users alone, you
hipsters!

~~~
creshal
> What you call polishing is just breaking familiar old-simple and building
> new-super-innovated-final-solution each year. Leave us power users alone,
> you hipsters!

I wish it was only confusing to power users. If it was _actually_ intuitive to
end users, it would have a justification. But no. I've yet to see a single
user who can wrap their head around Windows 7's virtual libraries and why
they're sometimes not acting like a real folder but most of the time do.

------
advisedwang
If anyone else was concerned that they are claiming this without actually
being affiliated with PC-BSD, check out
[http://pcbsd.org/development/moretrueos/](http://pcbsd.org/development/moretrueos/).

~~~
jlgaddis
Yeah, there's a post on the PC-BSD blog [0] also, but it just links to the
submitted URL.

[0]: [https://blog.pcbsd.org/2016/09/pc-bsd-evolves-into-
trueos/](https://blog.pcbsd.org/2016/09/pc-bsd-evolves-into-trueos/)

------
eeZi
> TrueOS® soars above the competition with advanced security features, such as
> PersonaCrypt and GELI disk level encryption, to keep your important data
> safe and secure.

Has it got kernel/userland ASLR yet?

~~~
urza
Does their ZFS implementation supports dataset level encryption?

~~~
AndyMcConachie
Both ZFS and ASLR are more interesting for servers than for desktops. I would
like ASLR on my desktop OS, but it's a rather high hanging mediocre fruit. WRT
to ZFS, I couldn't care less if it existed on my desktop OS.

~~~
woodman
> ... I couldn't care less if it existed on my desktop OS.

Then you either don't know about snapshots, don't care about data integrity,
or have a backup system in place and don't want to replace it with:

    
    
      zfs send zroot@snap63 | gzip > /mnt/remotebackup/snap63.gz

~~~
joseph
I remember just before Oracle took over Sun, OpenSolaris was a pretty viable
desktop machine. They had a feature called "Time Slider" that was built into
Nautilus. It was like Apple's Time Machine, only based on ZFS snapshots
instead of backups to a separate disk. You could slide a widget back to get to
a previous snapshot of the disk. OS upgrades also worked together with ZFS
snapshots so that you could atomically roll back to a previous version just
before the upgrade took place. It was all really awesome.

~~~
JdeBP
PC-BSD ... sorry ... TrueOS Desktop (and Server) has had that idea of ZFS
snapshots for "boot environments" for some time.

* [https://blog.pcbsd.org/2012/07/9-1-feature-multiple-boot-env...](https://blog.pcbsd.org/2012/07/9-1-feature-multiple-boot-environments/)

* [https://blog.pcbsd.org/2013/06/pc-bsd-status-update/](https://blog.pcbsd.org/2013/06/pc-bsd-status-update/)

* [https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/a-closer-look-at-the-changes-...](https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/a-closer-look-at-the-changes-in-pc-bsd-trueos-9-2-part-1/)

* [https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/the-revamped-life-preserver/](https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/the-revamped-life-preserver/)

~~~
woodman
Beadm first appeared in Solaris, long before it hit FreeBSD (and then PC-BSD)
- so the idea had been around for a while. The issue is fit and finish.
Solaris had it tightly integrated and made full use of it. I haven't used PC-
BSD for a very long time, but I don't remember it coming anywhere close to
Solaris in that regard.

------
ehPReth
Is there a way to download the ISO hashes over valid HTTPS? I'm not sure how
to verify the ISOs I've downloaded

~~~
niftich
FWIW, this reasonable request can be accommodated without necessarily setting
up HTTPS on the download site. The devs could post the checksums on a
distinct, 2FA-protected HTTPS site like Twitter, for example [1]

[1]
[https://twitter.com/coreinsiderprog/status/69213854723989504...](https://twitter.com/coreinsiderprog/status/692138547239895041)

~~~
mixedCase
Wouldn't it be easier to just setup an automated Let's Encrypt set up and
avoid depending on a third party website?

In any case, they could also just include the keys somewhere in trueos.org,
which does support HTTPS.

------
cies
Reading behind the link made me learn about Lumina desktop. I'm curious to why
it is not making use of the LxQt effort? They seem to be pretty close in
goals...

~~~
scrollaway
Development on LXQt's been rough lately. I really wish the Lumina guys would
have contacted us at some point, reached out to us.

There is a very big lack of manpower, lack of designers, lack of general
availability from sysadmins or developers competent at UX.

It saddens me greatly. I used to take care of releases, outreach and UX but
focusing on my company means I don't have the time to do that anymore. Despite
taking great care to reduce the bus factor as much as possible, right now,
LXQt is stuck without a release because there's nobody that both cares about
the project and has the time and skills to do this kind of stuff.

This is how the Linux desktop dies. A couple of "big" players doing their own
thing and a plethora of small players never trying to partner up with similar
projects. LXQt was successful for a long time because it was two small
projects that merged into a larger one, but people move on and the momentum
gets lost.

~~~
mixedCase
Just like LXDE and Razor-Qt merged, wouldn't it be a good idea for LXQt to
merge with Lumina?

It would not only ensure that LXQt's torch is carried on but also set a great
example to all other open source projects that merging provides as great a
solution as forking does, although for opposite problems.

~~~
scrollaway
Sure would be, unfortunately nobody's talking or available to actually do it.

The Razor-Qt merge wasn't an easy project - it took us almost 6 months to
complete.

------
okket
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12366140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12366140)
(6 days ago, 30 comments)

------
Fuzzwah
Maybe I'm getting old and my eyes are on the way out, but the readability of
this web page can be greatly improved by using the following custom css:

article { font-size: 1.4em; line-height: 1.4em; }

~~~
voltagex_
It's not just you: [http://imgur.com/a/CfFaS](http://imgur.com/a/CfFaS). Fails
WCAG AA accessibility for contrast. (even at your increased font size, I
think)

~~~
fnj
God save us from the insane low-contrast mafia. No, that's _not_ intended as
sarcasm.

~~~
type0
I really despise this trend. People who make such webpages completely
disregard the existence of users with bad eyesight and those who still use low
contrast TFT displays mostly because they can't afford to buy a fancy new IPS
panel or just don't know any better. We all should complain about it,
otherwise soon it might get to the point where you only will be able to read
some webpages on the newest 40 inch OLED displays.

------
walrus01
Having not followed the development of PC-BSD for the last 5-6 years, can
somebody please explain to my why they felt the need to fork FreeBSD? FreeBSD
by itself already has a really tiny market share, and to a certain extent many
things are much more easily deployed with better package management on a
mainstream Linux platform (Debian stable or CentOS 7).

OpenBSD has its own unique niche, but I don't see what great need PCBSD fills
that FreeBSD wasn't already doing.

~~~
kev009
Effectively, TrueOS _is_ FreeBSD, plus the work in progress graphics stack
that will eventually land in .org base or ports, plus an installer, plus some
opinionated settings (kernel build, /etc, /boot/loader.conf), plus some
original software (control panels, lumina DE).

This is a valid way to contribute to *NIX -- downstreams that push and pull
code to evolve the entire ecosystem.

------
qwertyuiop924
So, is this a fork, or...?

I know they're affiliated with PC-BSD, and I know that PC-BSD is a separate
system, but beyond that, I'm lost.

It looks like it may be an RHEL/Fedora thing, with PC-BSD being stable and
rock-solid, and TrueOS being bleeding edge. But I could be wrong.

Also, while Lumina looks kind of nice, if I installed this, my next step would
be installing either XFCE (the best full-on DE out there) or i3 (the best
tiled WM out there).

~~~
finid
PC-BSD to TrueOS is like BackTrack Linux to Kali Linux.

An evolved product from the same developers.

~~~
jyasmilsyade
PC-BSD

------
lifeisstillgood
How does this handle turning off Intel ME or the AMD equivalent ? Having a
always on PC on my motherboard not under my control does bother me ...

~~~
fnj
That has nothing to do with the OS. The Intel ME is nothing more than some
tech which can be leveraged/controlled by the BIOS/EFI - or not. There should
always be a setting to just turn it off.

The hysteria over Intel ME amuses me. The clamor should be for a simple on/off
switch to always be present in the BIOS/EFI.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
But A) can you trust the switch really turns it off

B) there is not yet a switch ... So what do we do now while we wait?

------
corv
Great decision unifying PC-BSD under TrueOS.

The real innovation lies in SysAdm:

A new way to manage your Server, Desktop or Cloud-based system. By exposing an
API via encrypted REST or WebSockets, it is now possible to remotely control
all aspects of your machine, including management of software, updates, boot
environments, users, backups, and more.

Truly a flagship FreeBSD "distro".

------
mikestew
I'd love to learn more! <Clicks "Learn More" button on main page> "Localhost
not found". No, not on an iPhone it won't be. EDIT: ah, good, looks like it
got fixed.

