the weird and merciless FreeBSD master

I am a linux user since about 2001.Now I'm getting bored of the penguin so, having grabbed a perfectly good PC that was about to literally hit the rubbish pile, I started messing around with FreeBSD. It is not by chance that its mascotte is a devil , even shell commands are not the same GNU stuff (oh the madness of the pw command... it is so weird it looks like a CP/M command and does way too many things.)
And the system is even grumpier and more unforgiving than linux. Linux is a stern master but FreeBSD... is Kill Bill's kung fu master Pai Mei , one error and you're in for quite some pain. Make some conf file inconsistent and bad things start to happen until all the system is royally screwed up.



After setting that machine up as a backup server for all my network I started exploring and wondered how it could run a desktop manager. Went for KDE (I only use KDE) and it appeared things were working alright until I realized I couldn't mount a thing nor burn a dvd unless with root (and wheel, and operator) privileges. Mess ensued. Then crashes and finally unrecoverable file system errors. In single user mode (WAIT.... NO RUNLEVELS ?? ) I managed to fsck all the partitions, no dice. Remounted /usr, purged all the crap but... at every boot things were going haywire more and more. My neighbours are luckily mostly big fans of loud profanities and blasphemy (Tuscany, you know).
It was freebsd 11.2 . Today I installed version 12 release , in the middle power went out for two hours and the pc wasn't even hooked to the UPS. Apart from the bad luck, one thing that impressed me was that the TOR service provides a proxy that is tenfold faster than the usual tor bundle. I used it as a local proxy for all the other machines and plan to reinstall it.

 

Enjoy your toy. I used FreeBSD back in the 90's. After the millenium I got one of those nice little netbooks that came with WinXP and shrunk the partition so I could install PC-BSD and Slackware, or Puppy, all of which worked great for me. I even installed them on my desktop unit, washing windud completely away. I stopped using BSD when they changed names and stopped supporting 32-bit systems. I had gotten a shiney new 64 bit machine and it kept locking up on me no matter what I ran on it, so I dumped it in the trash. I'm bummed about wasting cash on a brand new system, but trashing it still felt mighty good. I might go out and find a used 64-bit system I can tinker with, but no more new ones.

It's an adventure, but I still prefer my bicycle.

 

In the end I stopped obsessing over mounting usb drives as a nonprivileged user and getting the DVD burner to work, yes I installed KDE but rarely boot into the desktop, the machine is WOL-started by my other PCs and scripts take care of the backup process so I'm done experimenting too much on that machine.
Too bad the documentation is not very abundant and the "community" rather grumpy, because I was kinda curious about why permissions of interested devices keep reverting to their default values. I'll try on a vm eventually, so if i screw stuff up I can restore it instead of thrashing a machine already put to good use.

 

I bought a big usb harddrive that works brilliantly on my mac.

If you like linux i strongly suggest to buy a iMac