TrueOS 17.12 Review – An Easy BSD

TrueOS review from a Linux user, honestly it was a very easy OS to get up and running.
TrueOS is a rolling release OS and comes in Stable and Unstable versions. This video is of Stable release 17.12 with Lumina desktop.

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[casual_citizen]

As someone who has never used BSD, even though you said it is most certainly not Linux, this looks exactly like Linux only with a smaller repository. It gives me the wibe "This is what Linux used to be like 10-15 years ago".

[CrustyAbsconder]

I used TrueOS in January as my only operating system on an Intel i5 mini-ITX for 6 weeks and I knew nothing of BSD and was a Linux novice.

I loved it and plan to build a dedicated TrueOS box. BSD is memory hungry. The ZFS platform allegedly allows enormous Terabytes of data storage. It was super-duper easy to revert to a previous restore setting.

They lack dedicated developers and dedicated fans. Meaning they are underated.

Their listerve forum is active and the developers will help you personally.

[michaeljamesmoore]

After a KDE5init meltdown last week (I still recommend trying Artix as the other comment does) I installed FreeBSD 11-STABLE with xfce and it is smooth sailing.

A video about vanilla FreeBSD might be more of a tutorial though. Some people don't mind dealing with rc.conf and .xinitrc, others hate it. I don't mind, but it isn't for everybody and sometimes you just want a seamless install from an ISO. GhostBSD is good in this regard. Thanks for the video.

[CrustyAbsconder]

Just as Linux users want to be free from Windows, many BSD fans want to be different than Linux. They call Linux dependency Hell "cruft." Most dont want systemd malware. The Lumina desktop is being designed/developed to work with the pecularites of BSD eventhough it is advertized as cross-platform.

In Linux, you can choose your system components if you insist. In BSD, a council of 600 nerds decides what those components are.

TrueOS uses the testing branch of FreeBSD, so you get versions of software that is about 6 months behind average Linux distros.

Other BSDs "not distros" ( GhostBSD and DragonflyBSD ) focus on similar but different objectives.

Using BSD gives one a nostalgic feeling as it works more Unix-like than Linux.

It also makes you feel nerdier.

[purgatoriprytania]

My eyes! I love BSD, and played around with PCBSD and FreeBSD some years ago, but this Lumina desktop is---at least on this spin---fantastically ugly.

[genblob]

Would you ever do a video on haiku OS? =)

[AndyJHiscock]

Thanks for the review. As you outlined in the video a few features you would expect to be installed and working out the box as standard are not included - Samba for file sharing, Blue tooth to name a few. What's with the Icons half are colour half are large black an white silhouettes, the whole GUI looks a complete mess!

Manually install a copy of BSD and installed a GUI after - believe me it is easier and a lot more user friendly.

[bradleypariah]

Lumina Desktop looks like the Enlightenment Desktop to me. I like the way Enlightenment works, for the most part. It's very flexible, but I feel like I have to be super gentle with it. Like it's on the verge of breaking at any moment. It seems that you can tell it to break itself, and leave yourself with no way of fixing it again. Fonts look jagged as well. I'm intrigued by BSD, but I'd want to run Plasma on it.

[alexriggs]

I now understand why Linux Mint is so popular, easy works every time.

[hristoyordanov]

Hello quidsup. Im not sure if this is the right place to ask my question, but could you please make a review about, which linux distro is best for gaming? Thank you in advanced and happy holidays.

[AndrewBryantPianoTuner]

OH! And Quiddy what happened to that Pint Session you promised???

[Tuishimi]

I used PC-BSD when it first came out and it used KDE, did everything I wanted it to do and did it well. What happened?

[frankc]

Why use BSD as opposed to Linux? I use my computer to watch videos and play games. I have Linux Mint on my machine. The one problem I have with Linux is running my Brother printer. The driver Brother provides doesn't really work too well in Mint and I am forced to keep a separate machine on which I run windows. Would I be better off with BSD? If so, why?

[Chrns]

LMFAO as soon as I heard you say something about a quote, I just knew it would be "BSD is what you get when...."
What's really funny is that Spatry used the same exact quote when he did his PCBSD video (perhaps that's where you heard the quote, either way it's pretty funny).

[Kneedragon]

That's sorta right and sorta wrong...
...
By the mid 1980s, UNIX was everywhere. But UNIX was an operating system for big computers. It would not run on a 286. Many people wanted a home-user version of UNIX, and the Hurd, (the Free Software Foundation) formed to create their own version of UNIX, which would run on a small pc. They started with the tool chain, and the compiler. Those they re-created brilliantly. Then they started on the kernel, and bogged down in being too ambitious. What they wanted was simply too complex and difficult. In 1991, in Finland, a 19 year old computer science student called Linus Torvolds got an exercise from college, to write 2 small programs, and then have them alternate between them, a time share arrangement. At the time, DOS and Windows would hand over complete control of the whole computer to what-ever program was running at the time. What Linus wrote, took that control away from the 2 programs and gave it to a 3rd, which then alternated between the other two. After looking at this for a couple of hours, Linus realised that is the heart & soul of an operating system... So he started to write his own, inspired by a UNIX version he had at college - Minix. After a couple of days working on it, he posted what he had on a message board, online, and asked if anybody would like to help & contribute... People did.
What happened next, was some of the people who had started to help Linus, took the early versions of his kernel, and the tool chain of the Hurd, and put the two together. What that created, was a complete (brand new, somewhat bug infested) operating system.
Linus didn't create it, and the Hurd didn't create it, it was a combination of the two. And strictly speaking, none of them created it, because in 1969 Richie and Kernigan created UNIX, and got Brian Thompson to write the documentation for them. What the Hurd and Linus did, was create a reverse engineered backyard version of UNIX, which had open source code, and which would run on a 386, and which was free to download and use, and look at the source, change the source...
What that did was provide a working alternative to Windows. That broke Micro$oft's monopoly. That meant Microsoft (at the time) declared Linux the supreme enemy...
By 2000, most of the world's stock exchanges and financial systems, air traffic control systems, military systems and networks, and 90% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, ran on Linux. The Internet and the machines that control it, runs on Linux. Google runs on Linux. YouTube runs on Linux. Facebook and Amazon and all the big web sites run on Linux. Android is a version of Linux... the only thing that mostly doesn't run on Linux, is the desktops it was originally written for. And that's mostly down to the business practices of Microsoft.

[MrRicoh]

I'm very sad, I did not find a 32-bit kernel version for my poor computer: Dell GX270

[armanelgtron]

Surprised dolphin isn't available... hopefully pcmanfm-qt is, though.

[falafeldurum]

How the hell did you get an I downloaded 3 different iso's (stable, unstable, ...) but there was NEVER a GUI shipping with it.. The iso's had a size of 2, 3-2, 5GB
Please help me
I installed everything correctly in virtualbox but booting from the vdi virtual harddrive only starts a CLI that doesn't know what startx means..

[jeffreyjoshuarollin]

FreeBSD with MATE is better. I like KDE but full KDE wasn't out for FreeBSD, last time I looked.

[impermanenthuman]

Has there been any known malware breaches of true os? I wanted to run Qubes, but after looking into it it’s clearly a ‘power user’ only system, maybe not to just install it, but one wrong click and all sorts of spanners get thrown into the works, taking a power user to fix, with no known professional tech support to help a new user fix things
So I’m considering true os as a host system to manage VM’s of windows and couple Ubuntu Mate vms as a degree of ‘compartmentalization’ with security by obscurity with true os (free bsd) as a host system? I’m new to computers in general but need maximum practical security with reasonable privacy too, so does the above strategy seem plenty for a home business user until I’ve had months or years to casually learn to use Qubes? Any suggestions welcome and appreciated