I’ve loved the concept of NixOS and its package manager Nix: a real innovator in Linux land (but not limited to). Having a package manager that allows atomic installations, rollbacks, multiple versions of the same package, isolated dependencies, customizable environments where to select specific versions of a package… brings real value. Is there something happening in this direction in *BSD? It would also be interesting to hear it and how the ZFS can be leveraged to allow more or less granular rollbacks.
Thank you, i'm thinking everyday of installing and learning FreeBSD and left Windows OSs forever, and every video of yours that i look push me to this direction a bit more. FreeBSD look's very nice and easy to use
I never thought that I'd live long enough to write this...but I've just enjoyed revision. - Imagine a well-polished apple where normally that naughty kid would leave a pig's eye.
When I first tried Linux decades ago after having tried FreeBSD, I was shocked at how bad the package management was. You'd have to manually download all the files and it wasn't at all clear to me which dependencies would be needed. Obviously, it has improved since then, but it is a bit of a mess with all the different types of tools are out there for use. FreeBSD does have a pretty decent selection of options, but all of them draw on either the pkg or ports systems, so they all have more or less the same number of programs to work with. You do have somewhat more with ports, but it's usually not popular things that get left out.
@Graham Bailey - you must have gone to a posh school, the one where I went to you would have only the apple core as some little scrote would have eaten it..... it was a good school, I heard it was approved :-)
I totally agree pkg is a brilliant packaging system (the opposite of cryptic as well), and man pkg is indeed the most important command. However, and for the sake of arguing only, I would like to add "man pkg | most" is better that "man pkg | less". 😆
Missed opportunity covering 'clean' but not 'autoremove'. I feel like 'audio' details lack updates; its cool that it is there but shouldn't we be at the point to where public CVE records get matched tp the ports/pkg system for autoinclusion instead of having volunteers entering this stuff? Thanks again for a great video!
`pkg prime-origins` will get you a list of packages needed to reinstall your current state as dependencies beyond the list would be autoincluded. `pkg query -e '%a = 0` will get you a list of manually installed packages. I use chocolatey to track as much as I can when on Windows so that I have a command there. My FreeBSD experience reminds me how much chocolatey is lacking tough.
is pkg able to fetch a previous package? say the gnuls in current pkg database is v9.x, then is there a way to fetch a v8 or even old v7 version gnuls?
It says that they need to be fixed, and that because they haven't it is advised to not install the package until it has. Many times a package can't be fixed if the upstream source is no longer getting worked on, and in many times like these the package becomes deprecated.
Hello, thanks for the insightful videos. Wouldn't you even like to do one about network management and tools? For me, this is the biggest stumbling block in FreeBSD on the notebook, where I often have to switch WLANs. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, I don't know why. And the WLAN in FreeBSD is always much slower than in other operating systems such as Linux or MacOS.
FreeBSD foundation has sponsored work that is in progress to modernize the Wifi stack; at present I think it is limited to 'g' performance even on devices supporting newer standards (n, ac, etc.). The foundation also has a wifi page which mentions using `ifconfig wlan0 up scan` and `ifconfig wlan0 ssid _Name of the network to connect to` though I haven't tried FreeBSD+wireless in years.
Pure stress @0:08 ! But seriously; Thanks for this. I’ve binged your entire channel over a week and am installing FreeBSD on a laptop that was exclusively Linux for years and have NomadBSD running on USB storage. The RPi is next. I’d love to see a video on how to make a standard FreeBSD install identical to NomadBSD. I plan to always work from a FreeBSD base.
It’s zero stress. You run 1 linux distro and it has 1 package manager. Most run apt. Rpm is a file format, not a manager. Yum was retired long ago. At most you can have your package manager and one other way, like FreeBSD. 😊
I've not thought of that...hmmm, I suppose you could download a port and unzip/install to a home directory in the same way you could download a source file, compile and run .... but I've not tried..... can I ask why?
@@RoboNuggie a (perhaps uncommon) case when this may be useful is when two users on the same machine want to have conflicting packages installed. But I'm asking mostly for the sake of testing my OS design prejudices: in the context of a multi-user OS I always found it strange that a user can't install what it wants in its "home"; couldn't it happen that core-system dependencies (libraries, interpreters) get broken by port/package requiring a different version? Sure, one could probably find workarounds as you suggested to install what it needs within a home; but given there is knowledge captured in `pkg` and the ports tree (dependencies, options, checksums, etc.) it would be nice to leverage it and perhaps as simple as running the process in a chroot?
Habit I guess....I'm that used to viewing documents that way... and I hadn't even thought about this until now, after you pointed it out....oh what a wally I am :-)
pkg doesn't install ports itself you need to build them using another tool like poudriere which is ridiculous. On Gentoo portage will let me install a package and select which options I want for said package globally which I know poudriere can do but again this is a separate tool not the package manager itself. pkg should handle installing ports from source itself, otherwise nice video.
I want to go completely to freebsd,but there are serious obstacles: laptop with amd+nvidia hybridgpu. Оpenvpn:how to use it, there is a client or a manual,months of searching, nothing... Graphic environments are a problem, they are either supported by unknown ones, such as kde ... Or they look disgusting and you need to custom from ports (untrusted software)or bugs... You have a lot of useful things on the channel, but not the essentials.
One thing that drove me away from FreeBSD was that I couldn’t play DRM content like Spotify or Netflix through the browser. Have you found a solution to this? I even tried the Linux Browser Script. But Brave wouldn’t play it.
