My Frustration with PC-BSD
I recently decided to dump my 7-year old installation of Windows XP (that's right, never reloaded or anything on the same box for seven straight years) in favor of PC-BSD. Why?
- I use OpenBSD heavily at work and at home.
- I can't afford Windows7.
- I don't need much (apps, games).
- I like to try new, neat stuff.
- I need flash for hulu, youtube, etc.
- Those guys at PC-BSD are hot-to-trot that they have the solution for me.
So I tried it out- not even on my main home system, but on another, lighter one. And it performed... okay. There were times of sluggishness on the display-side, but I quickly chalked that up to a 32-MB built-in video card on an old Intel-865 board with a single core and 2GB of pc3200 RAM. I explained it away, I thought.
But I thought wrong. So I made the leap and loaded it onto my main workstation- it's actually very similar to the test workstation, only it's video card is a separate peripheral with 256 MB of RAM (AGP 8x). Otherwise, still on an 865 board, hyperthreaded 3 GHz single-core CPU, and the same 2GB of PC3200 RAM. I loaded it up, and held my breath.
I wish I was a pearl diver. Perhaps I could've held my breath long enough for what I was about to go through- continued in my next post ;)
tl,dr
It stank.
The system runs on KDE 4.3.5, and I'm not sure if it's KDE, FreeBSD, or a combo of the two (or other) that causes it, but the performance of the desktop system itself drops dramatically over a short period of time (20 minutes or so), to the point of being clunky. The interesting thing is that the video card was never 'pushed'- even when the system seemed to suffer from delayed reaction syndrome, the portions of the display sytem related to the video hardware worked well- the wavy movement and transparent tiling all worked fast and looked nice, once the system accepted that it had to perform those actions. It was really that bad.
Additionally, it really looked more like a Linux system than a BSD system. Running top revealed a slew of running processes, and perhaps that's all KDE's fault, but then perhaps PC-BSD should consider a Gnome variant. And OpenBSD.
Did I just say that? Gnome? OpenBSD? I did. That's what this follow-up post is being written on, and "I'm loving it". But before I go and gush, let me get the pain out of the way...
There are lots of missing features, or shall I say, a few really important features that are missing. It's actually painful suffering from lackoflash, the syndrome whose name I've coined for not being able to watch any flash-based video (read: youtube). I know, I know, it supposedly can be done. You just have to load the port that points to a non-existent location and an out-of-date version of the developed port. So out of date, not just the version number has changed, the name of the package itself has. Also the location of the package has changed, and while it looks like it spread to 5 different sites, only one works. With the wrong file for the port configuration. Sigh.
At any rate, there's also no video hardware acceleration. I can still push the graphical eye-candy limits of Quake III Arena, now re-coded as a totally free version, OpenArena. I can't push every setting to it's max, nor even most, without taxing the system. So there's the pain. Oh wait, and Firefox won't load Slate.com so I can read Hitchens, damnit. I had to grab Opera (the one without the bogus flash-plugin drama that I explained above). I've never used Opera until now. It's ok, but I felt great about never having to use Opera. Now I HAVE TO USE OPERA if I want to read Hitchens. I could RDP to my desktop at work and read it there, or even on my phone, but the desktop needs freaking Opera. Ok, enough of that and the rest of the pain.
Otherwise this is a great system. Sound works flawlessly. The system itself never crashes, and so far the only crash scenario I can recreate (actually, the only one I've experienced) is the Firefox-Slate scenario above. Otherwise not only is the system completely rock-solid, but it's not taxed in the least. An OpenBSD/Gnome desktop has a top output that's half of the PC-BSD installation (on the same machine, not that it should really matter). In terms of actual hardware resource usage, the CPU on the PC-BSD installation in normal usage hovered around 40 to 80 percent, with 1.8GB out of 2GB of RAM. The OpenBSD/Gnome installation on the same hardware is normally hovering at around 10 to 20 percent, and about 500MB of RAM used. The system has not crashed yet, and since I know the system "well" (2 other installations at home, 6 more at work), I am personally more comfortable with it. Having an all-OBSD network would be nice, and would really lend itself to learning the proper methods for upgrading (aside from wipe-n-load).
So there it is. I still have the hard drive with the PC-BSD installation on it. I also have another machine here in the lab loaded with it. I even kept my WindowsXP hard drive. But I think I'm going to duke it out with OpenBSD. I don't need massive graphics hardware acceleration- for Pete's sake, it's a 256MB AGP8x card, I'm not getting a whole lot out of it on any OS these days. I just want Hulu, Google Video, and Youtube back. So for now, it's toiling with Opera and the 7.x Linux flash plugin, and/or Gnash (which I had a spectacular crash-and-burn with the first time around). I'll get there.