Am 15.07.20 um 08:38 schrieb Judah Richardson:
My disclaimer: I run several OS's, have been a Linux fan during its
infancy days until I realized that there are other OS's that suit me better.
I am running OI on servers and desktop. I'd say OI is my 2nd desktop,
MacOS being my 1st and Windows 3rd.
I you want to run OI (or any other illumos based OS) you definitely have
to select your hardware, especially if you want to run a desktop.
My recommendation: use a desktop computer (no notebook) with NVIDIA
graphics card. Install from a text install image and after reboot run
first an update (pkg update -v) and after this (and another reboot) pkg
install mate_install. This will bring you X11 and Mate Desktop.
While using it you will find out how to find and install missing packages.
The hardware support for desktop computers (especially for notebooks)
had been limited on illumos's origin - OpenSolaris - and haven't gotten
better since the fork because commercial illumos companies are focused
on servers and enhancements for the desktop are only done coincidentely
by them.
I run both FreeBSD and OpenIndiana on their own bare metal devices, so what
I'm about to say is based on my own experience. I hope it doesn't upset
anyone.
On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 8:21 PM Lonnie Cumberland <[email protected]>
wrote:
Greetings All,
Hope that everyone one is well today.
Although I am assuming that this may not be the best place to ask this
question, I am wondering if there is an advantage of Openindiana (Illumos
based) or perhaps OmniOS over FreeBSD,
OpenIndiana advantages:
1. RBAC
2. Good documentation *for functionality inherited from Solaris* via
Solaris' docs
3. Stability
4. Zones
5. Unix (FreeBSD is Unix-like)
6. DE included in installer
7. TimeSlider
8. GParted (if you can get it to work)
9. More repos available than just the OS' repo
10. Crossbow (network virtualization)
11. mdb / kmdb (modular debugger is a special low level debugger - can
you single step into your running OS?)
12. BHyve and KVM (BHyve from FreeBSD and KVM from Linux)
13. Boot environments out of the box (addon on FreeBSD) - Update your
system on a different ZFS file system,
then boot into it and if something bad happened revert to an
older boot environment!
I don't want to live without this anymore!
14. CIFS/SMB implementation - inherited from Solaris and heavily
enhanced during the last months (by Nexenta)
As long as you don't want to run your own AD on your machine you
don't need Samba for serving or using SMB!
It's well integrated with the rest of the OS.
15. FMA (Fault Management Architecture) - well integrated fault
management that interacts with SMF
the next two are controverse:
15. SMF - the Service Management Framework - I'd say an init replacement
almost done right
16. IPS (Image Packaging System) - a package management system that is
special; very powerful but very slow (python) and for OI a resource hog.
That being said, somebody is working on an alternative
implementation that should increase its speed dramatically
(alpha test version hopefully by the end of the year).
or perhaps the other way around.
FreeBSD advantages:
1. Much better 3rd party package support (including recent Firefox
releases
2. Much larger userbase
3. Much better documentation of the OS itself (documentation of Illumos
itself is relatively lacking; Solaris docs remain the best resource)
4. Actual proper UEFI support
5. Much better hardware support
6. Lower RAM usage
7. Actual modern DE (I don't consider OI's MATE to be anywhere near
current gen) available and easily installed via FuryBSD 3rd party installer
(which is basically a stock FreeBSD installation with KDE included)
8. Single, well-documented control planes/locations for many critical
features
9. Much easier email notification setup
10. Jails
11. Can do UFS installation if ZFS isn't your thing. Wouldn't recommend
it, but it's possible
12. Config is a lot more straightforward and consistent
13. Behavior is sufficiently consistent and well-understood that
seemingly complicated issues can be more easily remotely troubleshot than
on other OSes
If I had to choose between the 2, I'd run FreeBSD because at least if I
have a problem there's a proper handbook and I'll get probably 5 replies in
r/FreeBSD or r/BSD instead 1 or 0 in r/Illumos and r/unix.
I am going to move from Linux to either OpenIndian or FreeBSD and seem to
be caught in the middle as both seem to have almost the same features with
exception that FreeBSD may have more support streams over OpenIndiana
although this could change as time goes on.
If you were migrating from Solaris, I'd recommend Illumos. Coming from
Linux, definitely FreeBSD. That said, you will lose some hardware and
package support on FreeBSD vs. Linux, and most tooling is built around
Linux.
I have been searching for a desktop that suits me best for a while.
Alas Windows and MacOs are declining in my opinion so it's now necessary
to find alternatives more than ever.
I have tried FreeBSD more than once; even GhostBSD, PCBSD, and TrueOS.
While they all had better hardware and software support compared to OI
they always felt very rough or unfinished. PCBSD and its successor have
been abandoned (at least as FreeBSD based OS's) and GhostBSD is (as far
as I can tell) a one man show.
FreeBSD doesn't seem to be intended for desktop. You can run FreeBSD on a
desktop but you have to do a lot of things by yourself to make it an
appealing
feeling. Thus, there are some desktop oriented FreeBSD derived
distributions.
Perhaps the only real advantage that I might be able to see is that FreeBSD
has more hardware support, but that may not be the defining factor for me.
This might be a bigger deal than you'd think. I recently went through a
fresh OI install and was more than a bit disappointed that in AD 2020 I
still can't achieve UEFI boot. To be clear, other OSes UEFI boot on that
same hardware just fine.
If you want to run OI you should choose your hardware wisely and be
aware of the fact
that we have only a limited amount of software packaged with IPS
compared to FreeBSD.
If you miss something essential for you then you either have to port it
by yourself (or convince
somebody to do it for you) or choose a different OS.
I am looking for that little gem in the rough, as it were, and do not
always believe that mainstream is the only stream that can yield a bright
future.
I run both of the above, in addition to 3 release channels of Windows, 3
Linux distros, and Android, because I love OSes and am fascinated by the
different approaches various projects take to solve the same problems.
You'll learn a lot regardless of which one you choose.
If you are really interested in OS's then you omitted one of the best
arguments for OI:
You can get involved in its development easily!
This is how I become a contributor to OI - I started to care for one
package. I got
a lot of help from others when I started and after a while I was able to
update and enhance
other packages I found outdated. The next step was to import new packages,
eg. fonts like jetbrains-mono and fira-code, because I wanted them packaged.
All you need for this is some free space on your machine and some time
devoting for it.
Of course you can also work on OI's documentation if you think it should
be enhanced ;)
- OI on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenIndiana
- OI's main repository for packages:
https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland
Regards,
Andreas
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