

FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux? (2011) - ari_elle
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_games_bsd

======
vermaden
I am one of those strange people that still prefer FreeBSD to any Linux
desktop/server distribution.

I also used Linux for several years before I started to learn and use FreeBSD,
and sometimes I still use Linux, but only when I am payed to do so.

After several years with FreeBSD I even tried to move back to Linux, hearing
all these 'advertisements' how good it is on the desktop, how painful FreeBSD
is on the desktop etc.

So I used Ubuntu Linux for a whole year on the desktop/workstation without
using FreeBSD. My experiences with that quickly got me back to FreeBSD, let me
tell You why. First, hangs and crashes that was fixable only by reboot, the
sound mostly. I did not turned of that workstation, as that was not needed, so
every 2-4 days I was forced to do the reboot just to have the sound back. No
matter if I used that sound (play music) during that 2-4 days or the machine
just stayed idle, it hanged anyway. Reloading the ALSA modules did not help.
Maybe it was a bug, but I always was 'up-to-date' and ALSA and the kernel were
upgraded many time, even two time to the 'next big release'.

The other 'awful' thing is the updates. They work the same way like in
Windows, for 9/10 times, they fix things, but on the 10/10 You end up with
totally broken system that even can not boot, and like with Windows: "With
minor problems reboot, with major problem reinstall."

That never happened to me on the FreeBSD land every upgrade/update of the
FreeBSD's base system succeed.

There are other distributions You say ... yes there are, but which ones? Linux
Mint is basically the same as Ubuntu, but with different default GUI and with
some more codecs loaded in by default. I also have an allergy to anything that
Lennart did, so for example Arch Linux is dead for me because it uses systemd
and pulseaudio. Fedora 'the Lennux'? No thanks.

The whole Linux ecosystem seems broken to me because of all the things
explained here: <http://www.pappp.net/?p=969>

Also, I do not longer want to go back to OSS vs ALSA discussion, where OSS
from the FreeBSD base system just works for me with everything I do and ALSA
does not on so many ways.

I do not want to 'flame' again the 'initrd' mechanism in Linux where some
drivers are in the initrd and some other are in the kernel and others are in
the modules, but modules are not for initrd but just kernel, the kernel and
initrd is under /boot but the modules are under /lib/modules /... this is just
plain mess for me.

On FreeBSD You have one directory with kernel and modules /boot/kernel period.
No other subkernels like initrd just to boot and then pass the machine to the
'real' kernel. Using FreeBSD on the desktop requires knowledge and experience,
and that makes it hard to use as a desktop/workstation. PC-BSD tries to change
that, we will se how far can it go with it.

A lot of people ask, why You use FreeBSD when there is Linux?

I would ask the opposite, why You use Linux when there is FreeBSD?

I have here ZFS with latest 5000 version, yes, this is the next version after
ZFS v28, this is ZFS Feature Flags.

I have ZFS Boot Environments with sysutils/beadm, the same way as it works on
Solaris (even better), so I can create a bootable snapshot and destroy
everything in my system, even rm -rf /* but after the reboot I may choose to
boot from BE created just before that disaster and ... nothing happened.

I do not use DTrace, but many probably do. Jails are very nice thought. I
already spoken about OSS in the base system, I already written about
deterministic and reliable upgrades. I can also repeat the 'known' properties
of FreeBSD like great documentation, great community, a very logical attitude
in OS mechanisms and filesystem hierarchy ...

FreeBSD is no panacea to all operating systems problem, it has its own issues,
the FreeBSD team has a lot of less resource (and hype) then the Linux world,
but taking all the 'cons' and 'pros' its a lot less painful to use FreeBSD
then to use any Linux.

If You are interested in FreeBSD desktop workstation, then check these:
<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=35308>
[https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-
how-t...](https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to/)

... and I do not want You to see this comment as Linux bashing, these are just
my thought about using Linux and using FreeBSD.

Regards, vermaden

------
rgbrenner
FreeBSD may or may not be faster than Linux for gaming.. but it does not
matter -- freebsd is NOT a desktop OS. I've been using it for 15 years, 14 of
those years on my desktop. Buggy desktops, no binary updates for ports, etc,
etc. The entire thing is an exercise in frustration.

A decade ago, you could use FreeBSD on a desktop and it would be more or less
similar to a Linux desktop. But Linux has more resources, and has invested
more than FreeBSD into the desktop.. and FreeBSD has focused their limited
resources on the server.

Today it's not even a contest. FreeBSD, if you like it, goes on a server.
Linux on the desktop.

Need a workstation to develop the software for your FreeBSD server? - use
Linux for the workstation and compile it on a FreeBSD build server. (I'm not
kidding.. I actually use this setup for work...)

~~~
astangl
Some of us still use FreeBSD on a desktop (well, maybe you don't consider
xmonad a desktop...) But your point is valid -- it can be an exercise in
frustration.

The big advantages Linux has now are mindshare, funding, drivers, and people
that devote a lot of time to coming up with OS versions with binary packages
that all work well together, so users don't have to build software from
source. With FreeBSD that's theoretically possible, but if there's a big
public repository of prebuilt binary packages for the latest (9.1) release, I
am not aware of it, and my system doesn't know about it. So upgrades can be
painful if you have a lot of ports and your machine isn't super-fast. And
running into errors in the middle of the process seems par for the course --
then you get to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it.

I have heard good things about PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) though. Apparently
it's much more user-friendly for people looking to use it as a desktop
environment.

~~~
rgbrenner
"if there's a big public repository of prebuilt binary packages for the latest
(9.1) release, I am not aware of it"

FreeBSD had a security breach shortly before 9.1.. so some of their hardware
was offline. So packages were not available at release. They expect to make
them available at some point. Then you can install out of date packages (since
packages are frozen at release), and rebuild half of them to fix security or
serious bugs.

"I have heard good things about PC-BSD"

I have also heard good things about PC-BSD. I've played with it a bit, and it
seems promising. I haven't used it enough to recommend it.. but it seems like
it's worth a try if you need a FBSD desktop. Definitely more promising than
the other BSD desktop efforts I've seen over the years (all of which are dead
AFAIK).

------
tedunangst
As interesting as several pages of graphs are, it'd be cooler to read an
explanation as to why. Superpages support in FreeBSD? Linux 2.6.38 should have
supported it too (as of that version), but perhaps less well?

Also, why did they use different motherboards? For that matter, what the hell
is the purpose of providing the page two table of system details if you're
going to crop half of it away???

~~~
snogglethorpe
A brief summary of Phoronix benchmarks: nice graphs, meaningless results.

[Seriously, Phoronix benchmarks are often _very_ badly designed/executed. I'm
not sure whether it's because they really are completely clueless about
benchmarking, or because they just don't care.]

~~~
reefab
They also have a tendency for linkbait headlines and repeating themselves in
articles with slight rephrasing to increase the page count.

Those tendency combined with the sometimes enormous amount of graphs makes a
lot of page views for them.

~~~
ajross
This part is true. It's a spammy site, and annoying.

The criticism of the benchmarks, though, is out of line. All benchmarks suck.
Why? _Because benchmaking is hard_. It takes a ton of patience, a ton of
diligence, and a ton of hardware. It's easy to sit back typing on the one
laptop you use, running one OS, and whine about someone's inability to be an
expert across dozens of environment.

Yet we all want benchmarks, as evidenced by this post. If you guys really
think Phoronix benchmarks can be improved (and obviously they can), I'd
appreciate it if you'd get off your MBP's and post some.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Where should I be going for Linux news other than Phoronix? I constantly here
bad things about it, but I also constantly find out about things that I
wouldn't have otherwise. I feel "bad" for reading phoronix or something but I
don't know what else to read, and LWN ain't cutting it.

~~~
ajross
Well, that's the thing. They're the best out there. So personally, I give them
some latitude with the spammy ad-driven experience. Most of their numbers are
just "more of the same", but occasionally they break something truly
interesting and everyone rushes to explain it. This particular post wasn't one
of those times though.

------
mappu
If you read the comments on the article, it's pointed out that the results are
virtually identical to a previous KDE-vs-unity benchmark (PC-BSD was using KDE
for this test).

------
ari_elle
I guess it might interest some people that this article also was discussed on
FreeBSD forums:

<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26204>

There also is a section in the FreeBSD Handbook about how the Linux
compatibility layer works:

[http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/li...](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu-
advanced.html)

------
antihero
Whereas actually they are comparing the speed of Unity in 2011 (notoriously
slow) with KDE. This is really dumb, they should be using the same window
manager at least.

I mean, they should at least install the same packages on each system if they
want to compare "BSD" with "Linux", otherwise this benchmark is spectacularly
flawed.

------
franciscoap
Do note that this article dates from September 2011.

------
jaxb
IIRC they haven't turned off compiz on Linux.

~~~
sliverstorm
I should hope that wouldn't matter if you are running fullscreen...?

~~~
Hello71
In _theory_ it shouldn't matter.

In practice, with the current subsystems, it's hard enough to composit (?)
windows, let alone unredirect fullscreen windows. For example, there's a
tunable in KDE to "unredirect fullscreen windows". Guess how well it works?

[https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?longdesc=unredirect&lon...](https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?longdesc=unredirect&longdesc_type=allwordssubstr)

------
Qantourisc
I'd start with a different distro then Ubuntu ... iirc that has indexing
running in the background ... not going to help :(

