
Switching from OS X to FreeBSD – Both Desktop and Laptop - vezzy-fnord
http://mirrorshades.net/post/132753032310
======
massysett
"The primary issue was I spent too much time telling OS X to shut up and leave
me alone. Some of this is me and how poorly my brain operates these days –
I’ve had 3 kids in the last 5 years. I don’t like to play the twins card, but
having twins does something to your brain. The doubled up sleep deprivation
and long, long periods of stress altered me in non-trivial ways."

He's going to spend a lot more time and energy installing and dealing with
FreeBSD than he ever spent telling OS X to leave him alone. There are plenty
of good reasons to use a free operating system, but these days "reduction in
time spent" is never going to be one of them. Running an OS that is not pre-
installed is always going to be burdensome.

It took him plenty of time just to select all that hardware--and then he had
to actually put it together. And if anything doesn't work--good luck.

I understand what he's saying about focus but as an experienced user of free
operating systems I can say that there are many things with them that can
cause you to break focus. Already the post has discussed (0) problems
reassociating with wifi, (1) bindsym to get the thing to lock when the lid
shuts, (2) no satisfactory password sync app, and (3) bad copy/paste.

~~~
avar
It doesn't make sense to purely think about it in terms of time spent. For
instance I've been unhappy with Mozilla Thunderbird for years now, its
performance is crappy, the search is slow etc. Finally a couple of weeks ago I
took the time to spend two full days setting up mbsync+mu+mu4e+Emacs _just_
the way I want, the setup is awesome, and my E-Mail no longer annoys me.

Sure in terms of pure time spent I'll probably take years to gain that back,
but there's something to be said about not having a grating sense of annoyance
in your daily life from the tools you use professionally, and that's worth
more than just the time you save.

~~~
ams6110
Very much so. Small but repeated or continuous annoyances have a cumulative
effect on general sense of happiness.

I myself use fetchmail, notmuch[1], and emacs (with w3m for HTML messages) for
my email. Gmail-like search and filter capabilities (I think better, actually)
and the comfort of using emacs.

[1] [https://notmuchmail.org/](https://notmuchmail.org/)

------
makecheck
I definitely agree with the tendency of late to have to "shut up" OS X. They
need to fire the person at Apple who thinks it's OK to abuse _notifications_
for things like "Try out the new Safari!". And the choices are "Try" or
"Later"!?!? It's definitely feeling more spammy. And the only real option for
something like that is to shut off _all_ of the application's notifications
(and part of me is pretty sure they'll re-enable the crap on the next "10.x.1"
update anyway so I grow tired of disabling it). "Growl" by contrast had very
flexible preferences, allowing application notifications to be disabled per-
notification-type if necessary.

~~~
kqr
The ridiculous level of in-your-face-ness was basically the reason I switched
from Windows to Linux a decade ago. I did run OS X a short stint back when it
was version 10.5, and it's a shame to hear it's gone downhill since then.

~~~
coldtea
It hasn't -- technologically it's better than ever.

It's mostly people bored with what they have + romanticizing those "perfect"
versions in the past (for which a quick Google search will reveal tons of
similar complaints, including for Tiger).

~~~
ksk
How is it better than ever if people are complaining same as before?

~~~
coldtea
Because people complaining is not necessarily correlated to product quality.
Some people will always complain (in general), others will lament the changing
of favorite features (while others liking the new functionality more), and a
number will always have legitimate issues.

Is there anything to show that those "legitimate issues" are of graver
importance and more damaging than those complained about in the past? I've not
seen anything to justify that. It's mostly people not liking X or Y UI change
-- meanwhile the platform has record sales, so it doesn't seem to have lowered
its reach and popularity.

When people really get into the changes, like in John Siracusa's reviews, the
story is different. While they might complain about this or that change, the
overall verdict is positive for newer versions, especially including the non-
UI layer changes (kernel behavior, new APIs, etc).

~~~
ksk
I see. I agree with your view.

------
jarboot
For those of you that might be professionals or adults that don't spend much
time on 4chan/reddit, you should know that i3 is pretty popular with
4chan.org/g/ or reddit's linux subreddits. It's a pretty effective path for us
young nerds to get into the linux ecosystem.

Beginners might learn vim to modify their ~/.i3/config, hex values for
coloring their desktop, or basic CLI commands to add functionality to their
keybindings. Maybe they want to add a customized weather applet to the bar at
the bottom of the screen, so they write a shell script utilizing wget. Soon
enough they're learning to install Arch Linux (because everybody else on that
"Show off your desktop" thread is using it), and it's not long before they're
a full-blown linux fanboy. That's at least the route I took.

It's not that i3 is popular among these communities because it's the easiest,
but because it looks the coolest and offers the most amount of visual
customization. But after getting used to it, there's an incredible amount of
depth and usability that keeps you on it. I really can't imagine a more
effective window manager.

If you're looking for neat-looking i3 setups, check out reddit.com/r/unixporn/
. If you're interested in getting started with it, somebody made a great
tutorial for it at youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4 .

~~~
pmoriarty
Interesting. I've always used i3 because it was incredibly simple to use and
configure, and because it was rock-solid.

It's interesting to hear that you can actually make it look good, as it's
always looked very plain-vanilla to me. Making it do fancy things would be
nice too, but I honestly don't have the time anymore.

Update: I checked out reddit.com/r/unixporn/ and was not particularly
impressed. Sure, those screenshots look better than stock i3, but really
nothing compared to enlightenment even as far back as the 90's.

All i3 itself has to offer are either a blocky, rectangular titlebar or no
titlebar, with the windows themselves having a variable width border, with the
colors of both the titlebar and border adjustable. That's about it. The rest
of the screenshots just show various window/root backgrounds and transparent
windows. It looks ok, but I wouldn't call it "porn".

That said, i3 is still great. Even stock i3 has been good enough for me, and
like I said, I use it for reasons other than eyecandy.

~~~
platz
I don't think i3 is attempting to cater to these kinds of enthusiasts.. even
from i3wm.org "The usual elitism amongst minimal window managers: Don’t be
bloated, don’t be fancy (simple borders are the most decoration we want to
have). "

Oh, i see some folks have forked their own version of i3 (i.e. i3-gaps) to add
additional features for modding.

I think i3 should remain true to it's initial vision (i3 is primarily targeted
at advanced users and developers.)

~~~
pmoriarty
I agree. Which is why I was surprised to hear the parent poster say: "It's not
that i3 is popular among these communities because it's the easiest, but
because it looks the coolest and offers the most amount of visual
customization."

That's not the i3 I know.

~~~
PeCaN
Yeah it's not, I guess the guy uses the useless-gaps patch and maybe some
other customizations, otherwise it looks really average IMO (not necessarily a
bad thing).

------
justinclift
For me, OSX was really good up until 10.6 as well. I used to use 12 or more
virtual desktops at a time though (for mental separation), so the massive
reduction from having 16+ available at any time to 5-6 without scrolling...
massively killed my mental organisation. That one change has reduced my lack-
of-distraction immensely. And now with notifications front-and-centre...
that's just not understanding people who need to be focused and productive. :(

Anyway, I've been trying out OpenBSD over the two weeks (using XFCE and
-stable). It seems nice so far. Tried Lumina initially, but it just crashes
for me very soon after launch.

Also tried compiling -current a few times in the last few days, as I'd like
try out stuff with the new vmm subsystem (and maybe make libvirt work), but
it's failing to compile every time (bare metal and OSX Fusion). I'm obviously
doing something dumb, and will hopefully figure it out later / gain-a-clue. :)

Prob need to ask on IRC I guess. ;)

~~~
ams6110
Use a snapshot instead of trying to compile -current yourself.

~~~
justinclift
Hadn't thought of that. Thanks. :)

------
bluedino
_my relatively simple professional needs:

A terminal OpenSSH Really, that’s it, for work.

Obviously a web browser, and a media player were nice to have, but as a
sysadmin most of my day is spent at a shell prompt on some other machine. Very
little of the development work I do is on my local machine, but is instead
housed in a zone on some compute node in some datacenter_

So why the quad i7, 32GB RAM, and 480GB SSD?

It seems like you'd take up less desk space, use less power, etc by just using
a high-clock i3. He's using a dual-core i7 as a laptop. Why not an identical
laptop in a dock at home?

~~~
totalrobe
And what is the video card for?

~~~
ams6110
Probably to ensure it's one that's well supported in FreeBSD, as much as
anything.

------
gonzo
I've been running FreeBSD with i3 on a x230 (i7, 16GB, Samsung 850 SSD) for
about a year.

    
    
      jim@x230:~ % sysctl hw.physmem hw.model kern.version
      hw.physmem: 16826937344
      hw.model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz
      kern.version: FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #16 r290668: Tue Nov 10 23:32:07 CST 2015
        root@x230:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC-NODEBUG
    

gigabit Intel (em) Ethernet and a DELL U2713HM over DP when I'm at the desk.

WiFi works when I'm not.

Save/Resume works. Every time.

pkg(ng) rocks. The next version of pfSense uses it extensively.

------
fractallyte
Conversely, I'm using OS X Yosemite on a Dell laptop. (It started as an
experiment: to see if I could get a working Hackintosh, solely for
development. Now it's my go-to machine.)

I'm not getting any annoying notifications, or requests for upgrades (daily or
otherwise). In fact, my experience is quite the opposite: this is one of the
most pleasing computers I've ever used (having spent years on Linux).

Upgradeable RAM, SSD, wireless; real page up/down keys, matte screen. Most of
the benefits of Linux, and even WINE works, for Windows software!

~~~
newjersey
How much effort was it to get it to work? Can you install xcode? I'd really
like to play with swift and playground.

~~~
fractallyte
I selected the laptop very carefully: it's a Dell Latitude E6220, refurbished.
With all the upgrades (SSD, wifi, even a new keyboard and case), it came to
around $300 - laughably cheap!

It took a week to get it working. (All instructions at
[http://www.osxlatitude.com/](http://www.osxlatitude.com/)) A physical copy of
Snow Leopard is required. I encountered problems downloading Yosemite in
VirtualBox, so access to a real Mac may be necessary. My local Apple Store had
everything locked down, but a nearby PC store (also selling Apple) didn't!
Initiating a download on the App Store added Yosemite to my account, and made
it possible to continue the process back home in VirtualBox. Once I had a
bootable USB flash drive, the installation was a breeze.

After that, just fiddling with drivers ('Kexts') and bootloaders - not too
intimidating for Linux users.

Most importantly for the experiment: XCode works perfectly! I have a full dev
environment, and I love it!

~~~
newjersey
> A physical copy of Snow Leopard is required.

It happens that I have a 2006 Macbook (x86, not x86-64) running snow leopard.
I used to have the disk but I don't know if I still do. I'll look in the
process more. Thank you.

------
pmoriarty
<rant>

After decades of successfully avoiding MacOS, I was finally forced to use it
on my work laptop a couple of years ago. And it was pretty much as bad as I
imagined.

It's nice that it's a unix, but hardware-wise and in terms of the things Apple
has done to completely bastardize the operating system has just been a
nightmare for me, who's come from a die-hard Linux (and other unix)
background.

First on the much-vaunted hardware superiority... I've had multiple high-end
Apple laptops, and each of them have had tons of bizarre hardware issues, from
keyboard locking up to OSX crashing whenever I plug anything in to the
thunderbolt port.

The design of some Apple hardware is really awful as well. Examples: very easy
to put a thunderbolt cable in the wrong way. This can become a nightmare when
you have to deal with a bunch of racked mac minis. Opening mac minis (when
they could be opened) was a nightmare too. Apple's ending their server line
and making companies rely on garbage like the mac minis was a disasterous
decision.

The OS itself is just really poorly designed and implemented, with tons of
proprietary black-box processes that result in mysterious CPU spikes out of
the blue, and make troubleshooting or doing anything custom or automating the
monstrosity a complete nightmare.

I'm not a typical user, though. So take this with a grain of salt. If all you
need to do is run Chrome and Photoshop, OSX might be great for you.

</rant>

~~~
pmontra
Out of curiosity, why do your company need racks of mac minis?

~~~
pmoriarty
We use XCode to make iOS apps. XCode can only run on OSX (as far as I know),
and Apple's EULA forbids running OSX on anything but Apple hardware.

Yet Apple no longer makes server-grade hardware, so we're reduced to using mac
minis.

~~~
RyJones
What kills me is I worked with an ex-Apple guy - I asked how they do build
farms, and apparently it (is or was) commodity hardware. I didn't press on
what exactly that was but I was picturing something like an array of big HP
boxes running OS X VMs under something like ESX. This was 2011 or 2012 so I'm
sure things have changed.

It's good to be king.

------
0x09
I had this same experience a few years ago, though more out of necessity (my
very old hardware at the time was no longer being supported.) pkgng was brand
new and immature and it was an opportunity to do some fun things like create
my own pkg building infrastructure/server and an HFS+ FUSE driver that I still
mean to share. But once the struggle to have a functioning system was through
and the novelty wore off I went back pretty quickly. At that time BSD was
caught in the middle of major open source projects breaking compatibility for
systemd, GNOME was several years behind, and the realities of running software
on what was treated as a perpetually second or third-class platform made it
difficult to avoid unseen bugs or outright breakage.

Things have probably settled down a bit since then and I like the FreeBSD
project in sort of an idealized form very much and wouldn't discourage its use
(especially if staying within the mainline packages), but it is quite a lot of
work, and when it came to choosing a secondary * nix to boot the next time I
saved myself some trouble (believe it or not) and installed Arch. It's
difficult enough to get something resembling the UX I'm used to without having
to do it with a quirky shadow version of the software ecosystem. None of this
is the fault of the project per se,* unfortunately it's just a natural
consequence of usage share in an ecosystem already mainly comprised of
volunteers.

I wonder if the author will feel the same after a bit of settling in.

*some of the pkgng bugs were but I would expect those not to be relevant anymore

------
rubyfan
I've had almost the exact same experience. I am a prior OpenBSD desktop user,
I thinking started around 2.6 or 2.8. I went to OSX 10.2 on iBook and have
used it faithfully for years. I have the same feelings about the OSX feature
bloat post 10.6. It's doing too many things I don't want and restricting my
ability to change things I don't like. I've honestly felt they are trying to
make OSX into iOS for a while.

I've been mulling the switch for a while now myself. I've contemplated Ubuntu
but have sone reservations there. This post was great, anyone have insight on
migrating iTunes or iPhoto to something that works on BSD or Linux? Or any
insight on syncing iPhone to BSD or Linux?

~~~
jansc
Yesterday, I spent some hours exporting my roughly 45.000 photos in my iPhoto
library to a folder structure sorted by year and event. The tool I used is
called Phoshare
([https://code.google.com/p/phoshare/](https://code.google.com/p/phoshare/)).
The site says its no longer supported, but even with the latest OSX and iPhoto
versions it seems to do the trick. I was able to convert faces to exif meta
tags containing the persons name. Otherwise I did not have a lot of metadata
in iPhoto. Now I'm heading over to digiKam or maybe some other tool outside
the walled garden.

For my iTunes library, I first used beets
([http://beets.radbox.org/](http://beets.radbox.org/)) to fix the metadata of
my music files, and now cmus
([https://cmus.github.io/](https://cmus.github.io/)) as a music player. As an
alternative music player I'm considering EMMS
([https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/](https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/)).

I don't know about alternatives to iPhone syncing. My iPhone died last week,
and I'm waiting for my Fairphone to arrive in a couple of weeks.

------
meesterdude
my mac died recently, and i tried to switch over to 100% linux. I already do
all my dev in linux, so I thought it would be easy to switch. Nope. Ended up
more headache than anything.

I hate what OSX is becoming, and sympathize with the author about feeling
distracted by OSX. But OSX still manages to be the best, because everything
else isn't there yet, although they are gaining ground.

So for me I dev in linux, game in windows, and do everything else in OSX.

I hope to either one day switch away from OSX, or to not need to. For now it's
in a tolerable state, but every release has lead to more frustration than
benefit; iTunes in particular is becoming increasingly less about your music,
and more about everything apple. But of course you still need iTunes to sync
your phone.

I hope, in the future of computing, there will be a cleaner separation between
UI changes, features, and bug fixes. I'd like to be able to update OSX and not
have anything actually change from my perspective; or at least be able to opt-
in or out of such things. At the least, offering app themes so I can make
iTunes look like v1.

~~~
pmoriarty
Users would have a smoother time transitioning to Linux if they first
considered things like:

\- Are you a regular end-user, a developer, a sysadmin?

\- How comfortable are you with using the shell?

\- How much unix experience do you have?

\- What do you typically do with your computer? (Just word processing and
surfing the web? Web development? Some specialized application like music
making or art? etc..)

The answers to all of these questions would influence the decision to go with
Linux or not. Naturally, the more technical knowledge and *nix knowledge you
have, the more suited Linux would be for you.

Also, a lot depends on what Linux distro you choose. If you're a complete
novice something like Linux Mint might be well suited for you.

How new and Linux-compatible the hardware you're trying to get Linux to work
on also plays a role.

Which Linux distro did you try, anyway? And what were some of the issues you
ran in to?

~~~
meesterdude
Actually, I don't know that those questions would have done anything for me.
Certainly useful for more average users, though.

My issues were mostly with what I couldn't bring over. Certain apps like
Omnigraffle, all my movies, music and photos are in OSX and some (but not all)
could be moved over (thanks DRM) and even then, i've got an iphone I sync to,
which is possible under linux, but not straightforward from what i read.

I still do all my dev in a linux VM and I. LOVE. IT. so much better than doing
it in OSX, and i'm isolated from any OSX upgrades that might interfere with my
development. But to ditch OSX entirely would require a lot of work, some
sacrifice, and I'm not sure it's worth it in the end. At least, not yet. But
it was an interesting experience, and I at least know what is keeping me in
OSX and what it would take to move.

As far as distros; it was mint. ubuntu in general has good font rendering that
other distros lack out of the box, and i wanted something that would just work
more than something that required configuring everything.

------
keithpeter
I'm happy that the OA found something that made them happy, but this paragraph
caught my eye...

 _" OpenBSD was my first choice. I’ve used it for many many years in
firewalling or routing contexts, I used to use it as a desktop – but the
upgrade process sort of killed it for me. I didn’t want to deal with patching
and recompiling my OS, or remembering to look at a web page for errata (or
writing a script to do that for me.)"_

Binary updates are available for the stable release of OpenBSD from M:Tier

[https://stable.mtier.org/](https://stable.mtier.org/)

Just thought I'd mention this. I have no connection with M:Tier other than
that of a grateful free-loader &c

~~~
cperciva
_Binary updates are available for the stable release of OpenBSD from M:Tier_

Those updates are only useful to OpenBSD users who trust third-party binary
blobs. I'm not sure that's a very large set...

~~~
tedunangst
Not really third party; just openbsd developers wearing a different hat.

~~~
cperciva
I didn't realize the people behind that were OpenBSD developers. But don't you
make a distinction between the project and its members? In FreeBSD we're very
clear about things coming from the project itself (and built on project-
managed hardware) vs. things coming from individual developers.

~~~
tedunangst
Correct. It's not a project effort, but not very much would change if it were.

------
mikhailt
Wow, thanks for blogging this as I never heard of i3 before and it looks
amazingly productive. Makes me want Apple to take the Split View further to
the next level on both iOS and OS X, turn it into a tiling WM like i3.

~~~
masklinn
> Makes me want Apple to take the Split View further to the next level on both
> iOS and OS X, turn it into a tiling WM like i3.

OSX has third-party tools which go much further than split view. Divvy[0] for
instance. They're a far cry from a true tiling WM, but they're way beyond what
OSX provides OOTB.

[0] [http://mizage.com/divvy/](http://mizage.com/divvy/)

~~~
rcarmo
I'm rather partial to Moom[0]. Been using it and the same set of hotkeys (left
half, right half, move window to next monitor, etc.) for a couple of years
now.

[0] [https://manytricks.com/moom/](https://manytricks.com/moom/)

------
hollerith
"The primary issue was I spent too much time telling OS X to shut up and leave
me alone."

23 months ago, I disabled Notification Center, which unless my memory is
playing tricks on me, stopped all interruptions (notifications) coming from
Apple. My IM client can still get my attention by bouncing its Dock tile. I
disabled Notification Center with the following command line: launchctl unload
-w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist; killall
NotificationCenter

Since I'm still on Mountain Lion, I don't know whether the tactic described
above will work on newer OS X versions. And since I don't know how to tell
Software Update to install OS updates without interrupting me, OS updates
including security updates tend to go un-applied on my Mac longer than they
normally would.

Even after I disabled Notification Center, there were a couple of
interruptions / notifications (of the availability of updates to Firefox) via
a library called Growl that was linked or incorporated somehow into my Firefox
app, but since that hasn't happened in over a year, I probably figured out how
to stop it (probably by my spending $2 to install the Growl app from the Mac
App Store and using that app to disallow notifications from Firefox).

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, it has been over a year since any
notification has appeared on my Mac, which is how I like it.

------
asutosh
This came at the right time, I was toying with the idea of switching to
FreeBSD from Linux, for my daily driver. Also, I keep on hearing great things
about i3. I'm currently using Xmonad and is pretty happy with it, except for
the occasional glitches with some applications. The switch to a predictive
tiling WM has hugely improved my work flow. should try out i3 sometime, just
to see how it fares when compared with Xmonad.

~~~
pmoriarty
If your needs are simple, i3 is great. You don't have to know Haskell to
configure i3, which uses just a very simple plain text configuration file.

My window manager experience:

X11 (back in the days before window managers, maybe, or was it Motif back in
the day) -> something lost in the dawn of time -> enlightenment -> fvwm ->
fluxbox -> openbox -> xmonad -> musl -> i3

(with probably a few more that I don't remember, and a bunch like KDE and
Gnome which I've tried but never used daily, and some non-linux ones which I
won't mention)

i3 has been the simplest and most hassle-free of them all. Then again, my
needs have grown simpler over time. 90% of the time I have just one window
taking up a full workspace, and occasionally I'll have another tile or
floating window. I don't need the super complex or fancy window management
features that Xmonad offers. If your needs are simple like me, try i3. :)

------
peteretep

        > FreeBSD won’t sleep the laptop if you close the lid.
        > Kind of a deal.
    

Kind of a deal breaker, from my angle

Then there's the stuff about 1Password. I feel his pain. Only I also use
Things.app and OmniOutliner and DayOne, and a bunch of other apps that sync
with my iPhone, which - frankly - you can pry from my cold dead hands.

OS X has definitely been getting more irritating, and don't get me started on
the new Apple TV, of which I foolishly bought two.

But that I can lie in bed, and without touching anything say "Hey Siri, remind
me to send John a birthday card", and it'll show up in Things.app tomrrow
morning ... the future is here.

~~~
knite
I've been considering the new Apple TV - could you share what you dislike
about it?

~~~
peteretep
I watch a lot of TV series. When I say "Homeland" to it, it takes me to a page
about Homeland in general. From there I have to select a poorly named button
to say "I want to see the episodes I own", and then I have to scroll along
with no visual indication of which I've watched. When I hit Menu from that,
I'm dropped in to the main menu, with no obvious way back. If I go in via TV
Show from the main menu, it's a different UI that works more sensibly. This
and 101 other minor irritations with the UI just get between me and my
content.

------
sotojuan
I've always used OS X and Linux in school, but for some reason I've really
been curious about the BSDs. Would it be worth trying FreeBSD out in a VM?
Unfortunately I don't have a spare computer that I can test stuff on.

~~~
justinclift
Linux is absolutely a great thing for experimenting with, but once you're
exposed to something that's planned/thought about... you get the sense it's an
ever growing hodge-podge of utilities/functionality designed by people that
don't really communicate with each other that well.

Computers are growing more powerful, they should make our lives easier. That's
not the direction Linux nor OSX nor Windows is going in the last few years.

The BSD's each seem to take a more co-ordinated approach (better team
communication?), so I'm personally hoping they do better over time.

Try out the BSD's in a VM. Some of the command line utilities you're used to
in Linux need different arguments, or aren't as feature rich. (I really miss
tree mode in ps for example). But, in general the BSD's feel much better
organised.

Hope that helps. ;)

------
rdl
2016 might be the year of (open source, simple, does little but get out of the
way) on the desktop/laptop/tablet/cellphone. But more likely, 2017-2018.

Security is the wedge. If something's complex, you can't tell if a failure is
due to a transient fault, a bug, or an attack. If my Mac randomly reboots, the
99th percentile thing is not an attack, although a forced reboot is entirely
consistent with many types of powerful attack.

~~~
danieldk
_Security is the wedge. If something 's complex, you can't tell if a failure
is due to a transient fault, a bug, or an attack._

In the meanwhile, each X11 application can read other X11 applications'
keystrokes or obtain its windows contents. Moreover, the desktop security
model is still 'an application should be able to touch everything in a user's
home directory'.

So, honestly, I don't think security is a good argument for BSD or Linux on
the desktop or laptop, especially compared to OS X (which has GUI isolation
and application sandboxing).

Wayland will improve things a lot, but it will take some time before it
replaces X11 completely and everywhere.

~~~
fulafel
Unix apps running under the same user account run in the same security domain,
so a security boundary in the window system does not help by itself.

Qubes OS is currently the best thing for this on the desktop. OS X sandboxing
has proven to be pretty porous.

------
daddykotex
If you are using the terminal a lot. I suggest you take a look at Pass[1].
I've been using it and I have absolutely nothing to say so far. It even works
perfectly on my Android phone.

1 - [http://www.passwordstore.org/](http://www.passwordstore.org/)

~~~
7Z7
>I've been using it and I have absolutely nothing to say so far.

:D

------
pepijndevos
I have an iMac from 2008 that I still use, and a Chromebook with Linux chroot
for carrying around. But for university I needed something more powerful and
capable of running Windows software.

I decided to buy a second hand Dell instead of a new Mac for the reasons the
author mentions. I installed FreeBSD on it and happily used it for Web
browsing and software development.

But as soon as I wanted to do more specialised things, I immediately ran into
problems. It also took several hours of frustration to get my dual graphics
card to work at all, by essentially disabling one.

Right now I'm just running vanilla Ubuntu. It supports my hardware, and even
runs most of the University software. I did not even bother setting up i3. I
just want to do stuff, and not worry about my os.

------
jkelsey
FreeBSD is indeed awesome. Given a choice between working on a BSD or a Linux
environment, I will always choose the BSD option. However, for my main
computer, there's just too much missing on the BSDs for me. I get the desire
to have complete control over your computer, and there certainly has been some
questionable corporatism bleeding into the Mac UX in the last couple of
versions. Regardless, I'm back on a Mac after years of running FreeBSD (and
trying various flavors of Linux). The experience, for me at least, is lovely.
The hardware is awesome, the desktop environment is elegant, and the software
ecosystem is very healthy.

------
baq
> (I include the CPU fan because it made me laugh while I was installing it.
> So ridiculous.)

don't know what to think of that part... fans are serious business, nothing to
laugh about. think about them before they die on you or you're toast.

~~~
andor
Just look at it. It IS ridiculous.

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n47WBQI31eE/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n47WBQI31eE/maxresdefault.jpg)

~~~
Laforet
They are a pain to install but they worked through the sheer size and surface
area. That said these tower type heatsinks seems to have gone out of the vogue
after all. Back in 2010 people used to go out of their way to bake thermal
grease, mesure wind pressure and do all sorts of crazy things to queeze an
extra bit of heat dissipation out of them. Not the case anymore. A lot of well
known brands have virtually disappeared over the past couple of years.

Efficient yet sensible heatsinks are still in short supply, and you have to
look into overpriced server/workstation vendors to get them.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835184...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835184040)

------
aexaey
Totally agree with i3wm choice.

Regarding terminal emulator glitches - may I suggest "simple terminal" [1]? It
might seem a bit brutal by requiring to recompile the whole thing every time
you change config and to apply a patch to get a working scroll-back [2], but
than - it compiles in under a second, and how often do you reconfigure your
terminal anyway...

[1] [http://st.suckless.org/](http://st.suckless.org/)

[2]
[http://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback](http://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback)

------
compactmani
I don't think the post does an adequate job of why-not-linux. A distro like
arch would be a natural choice for someone leaving OSX for a clean open-source
(but pre-free) lifestyle, so I was surprised to see it (or something similar)
not compared.

Otherwise, some nice choices there I have to admit.

i3 is my favorite WM. Going back to a desktop environment is like using a
computer with missing fingers (works, but less efficient human-computer
interface).

The X220 is one of the best thinkpads around, make no bones about it.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
The author listed non-invasiveness as a requirement, so that would presumably
disqualify Arch on grounds of using ambiguously-named-software-that-provokes-
flame-wars.

Admittedly, I'm not entirely sure how well Arch is on the "doesn't break" and
"doesn't waste my time" scales. I've been using Slackware for too long to
know.

(Also, he mentioned: "I tried running various Linux on my MacBook, but
discovered everything I hate about managing Linux on a server platform is in
fact amplified in a desktop context. It was less bad than I remembered from 10
years ago, but it was still a poor comparison to when OS X was good – again,
for my requirements.")

~~~
compactmani
It need not be arch that is compared as I would personally prefer to compare
only free distros.

The quote provided would be fine if the author explained what he/she didn't
like about managing linux on a server and how it is amplified on the desktop.

------
ayberkt
No one's mentioned OS X's "do not disturb". Just set it to be turned on after
each login so you have permanent do not disturb.

------
ntrepid8
These same issues are what drove me to use Linux for my Desktops and Laptops.
I don't use it on my MacBooks because the hardware is not supported well, but
on a Thinkpad or a Dell it's a first class experience. I definitely prefer
Linux on a Dell XPS 13/15 over OS X on a MacBook. (The Apple hardware is still
better, grumbles....)

------
ilurk
> I tried running various Linux on my MacBook, but discovered everything I
> hate about managing Linux on a server platform is in fact amplified in a
> desktop context.

I'm curious on what problems does Linux brings that FreeBSD doesn't.

My main gripe with GNU/Linux distros is the whole package handling. Software
stack complexity and the stable vs. new conundrum.

~~~
papertigers
For one:
[http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_11_23-the_cantrill_strike...](http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_11_23-the_cantrill_strikes_back)

~~~
ilurk
That is 2h. Could someone tl,dr please?

~~~
digi_owl
somewhere around 0:20 it starts, but the only really interesting part is about
systemd. The rest is a rant that may as well be about "intelligent design"
(BSD) vs evolution (Linux).

People complain about Torvalds being "nasty" in emails, but i think Cantrill
really need to lay off the caffeine.

The audio versions are bad enough, but on the video he keeps ramming his face
into the camera.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_The rest is a rant that may as well be about "intelligent design" (BSD) vs
evolution (Linux)_

No, it's a lot of reasonable points about Linux interface quality.

Evolution is a proper model for observing biological reality. It is _not_ a
model for software architecture.

~~~
digi_owl
The way I see it is that any project that continues for long enough takes on
evolutionary properties.

You may have an initial design that fits perfectly to the task at hand at that
particular time and place. But either you insist on starting over from scratch
every time the task changes to even a minor degree, or you modify (evolve) an
existing design to fit the changed circumstances.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Only if your model has weak cohesion. Furthermore, some features are not just
things you can wait to evolve yourself into. You do not evolve yourself a
better event and I/O multiplexing model, you design it. Otherwise, evolution
leaves too many vestiges.

~~~
digi_owl
Starting to suspect that you and Cantrill are talking at a more fine grained
layer than i am with regards to design vs evolution.

------
unluckier
"It desperately wants to just upgrade whenever it wants."

Do you think that it's better that operating systems get security updates or
that they get left alone?

"Copy and paste is still a bit frustrating."

You really are just using SSH in a terminal, and FreeBSD apparently can't get
that right? Copy/paste is pretty basic functionality, I'd think.

To each their own...

------
jen20
With regards to 1Password, I have found the Windows version to work reliably
under Wine (on Linux, never tried on FreeBSD).

------
rayiner
How is the battery life on mobile? Pretty much a deal breaker for all non-
Windows/Mac platforms on laptops.

~~~
4ad
I don't know specifics, but I know that it's better on OpenBSD than on
FreeBSD. On Linux it's best. At least for Thinkpads.

------
atmosx
In this kind of posts, I never see _real reasons_ behind the switch.

There are window managers for MacOSX too. OSX could be customized to be
_minimal enough_ , etc. I am sure that you could do the same thing with
Windows. Also note that minimalism != productivity.

~~~
cgag
There is nothing like i3 on osx as far as I know. Im pretty sure you also
can't customize it at all to the degree you can customize Linux and *bsd.

~~~
lstamour
Amethyst is a nice tiling WM for OS X... Given that all it does is reposition
windows rather than draw them, it's not a replacement, and sometimes gets in
the way with incompatible apps, but works well if you're not using 10.11's
support of side-by-side windowing, etc. I do hope OS X gets more flexible
tiling window managers, but I don't expect it anytime soon.

------
cyphunk
I used to say I moved to OSX because with who wants to spend N days
configuring a window manager that could be spent on something productive. Now,
every *.Nth OSX update I have to spend a day or two just unconfiguring the
feature creap.

~~~
cyphunk
on the other hand, just installing updates to existing packages in a linux
distro such as linux will break everything. I guess we forget that despite OSX
getting worse over the past 6 or 7 years nothing else has really gotten any
better.

------
greggarious
My main concern at this point is Creative Suite. Photoshop remains the king of
image editing - GIMP simply doesn't cut it.

If I could find good RAW editor, I'd ditch OSX in a second.

~~~
corv
Or even a viable alternative to Lightroom...

~~~
4ad
Hell, I want a viable alternative to Lightroom on OS X!

------
znpy
As a proud X220 user, i can confirm it is an awesome laptop.

As of window manager, I am giving stumpwm an extended try. No complaints so
far.

------
nodivbyzero
I'm wondering why did you move to FreeBSD not ArchLinux?

~~~
justinclift
As a "general" kind of point, after using both *BSD or Linux for a few weeks,
the BSD version generally feels better engineered.

The command line utilities can be markedly different from the Linux version if
that's what you're used to, but it's something that can be adapted to.

This is a "general feeling" kind of thing though. It seems to be a common
sentiment, but may not apply to everyone. YMMV etc. ;)

------
platz
I seem to prefer xfce4-terminal over urxvt

------
asmodian
What's with all of the code of conduct talks these days?

How does a code of conduct make a difference?

------
melted
This should have been named: "How to waste two weeks trying to save 30 seconds
and still end up with a subpar set-up."

