Every few months I take a little time out and evaluate the GPL/BSD Linux(y) space for readiness and usability. Always these operating systems prove themselves out quite handily for their indigenous niche, which is behind the scenes and in server rooms.

I like to evaluate systems like these to see if they’ll ever be ready for a breakout performance on the much more visible stage of front-room existence.

I start with VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. I provide every VM about 4GB of RAM, about 40GB  of storage, and the understanding of what installation on a limited medium like this means for any OS. I won’t be pulling punches about raw performance, because in a VM, performance is not a priority. I evaluate these systems with the idea of “Mr. Average User” in my mind. How can “Mr. Average User” carry on with whatever I review?

Starting with FreeBSD 11.1, the installer was textual which was perfectly fine if a little low-brow. Most users are much more comfortable with pretty graphical installers right from the beginning. One oddity was that the FreeBSD boot manager did not detect the installation media and make the right choice to boot to the VM’s Virtual HD after primary installation was successful. I had to halt the system, remove the installation media, and start it again. Honestly if you were looking at a physical computer, the end user would likely remove the installation media from the USB port or DVD drive anyways, so this isn’t a problem. It does bear that Linux handles this much more elegantly.

The base system installs with CLI entry only. There is no GUI option, you have to resort to Google to get to that point. The command is fine, however getting into root if you don’t know how to by using “su” from a default install doesn’t work, your end-user account isn’t defaulted into the sudoers file, this could have been eliminated if I had added the right group to the plain user account, like “sudoers”, however I am unsure if FreeBSD follows that convention or not. In any case, all of this immediately drops the user into Google-Fu. We’ve already lost the most basic users now, and we’re only carrying on with those that have some geek experience.

Getting to the GUI level is a rather involved process. The nature of BSD has always been couched in my experience as “You get the system you asked for explicitly, not the one you implicitly assumed you would get.” So an installation of X comes with the core system and twm, a zero-frills window manager. Also, there are basic commands that need to be added with using the pkg tool, like vim and screen, although that is a lot less of a problem since other Linux platforms also don’t include some of these packages as default throw-ins. You have to install X, then you have to install your special Window Manager choice, like gnome3 for example. The actual installation is hands-off, which is very good to see, but users must come to FreeBSD with the notion that you aren’t going to get a polished Ford Mustang with just one ask. You should expect a stripped out Ford Fiesta without doors, first, and then add on extra components until you build yourself up to a Mustang.

I was finally able to get a Gnome3 X-Windows system up and running, only had to Google a few items, like adding my standard user to the wheel group for access to the su command, and then adding sudo and configuring that, to make it easier to add more software. There wasn’t any software management system in Gnome3, but I didn’t really look that hard for one either. The pkg installation routine is easy to understand and works well, generally. The one issue I did notice was that the mouse was quite difficult to use, but I expect that there would be some issues where it was a VM and I was asking it to run a lot of stuff all at once.

I find myself frequently referring to a metaphor from HG Wells’ Time Machine book. There are Morlocks and Eloi, and how the two groups can mingle as a way to discuss how these operating systems can be used by the two different kinds of people. FreeBSD is very much a Morlock system. There is no way a Morlock could find its way into an elevator, pick the surface, and have afternoon tea with an Eloi in terms of FreeBSD. In an Eloi’s viewpoint, FreeBSD is a smooth black box that makes little rattling noises, but beyond that is almost totally inert and worthless.

As always, FreeBSD is best for deep back office tasks. It has a lot of technical greatness, from the ZFS file system to the Fortuna PRNG, but it is best left to the basement level for the Morlocks to use. It would make an excellent server, but a terrible workstation.