v 0.2
21 Mar 13
I've been using, reading about and playing with PC-BSD for two months now. What do I think?
PC-BSD is an excellent server and desktop operating system. I would gladly give my Parents such a system to use in their day-to-day lives. It is stable, easy to use and provides a large number of easily installed third party applications.
It is not perfect, mind you. An nVidia video card is highly recommended for a trouble-free experience, and the default desktop of KDE is strongly advised. Automounting of USB devices does not occur, and the tray application in KDE must be used to detect and mount these. Once the device is recognised and told to automount next time, you can use another desktop, however KDE remains the most reliable general desktop to use with PC-BSD. That is not to say the others don't work well, but KDE is the most mature in this circumstance. (and I say that as someone who was dragged back to admit that). Should you disbelieve me - go ahead and find out yourself. Automount has not worked in Gnome for some time, and the KDE tray app only mounts a USB device that it already knows about (in Gnome).
PC-BSD has introduced a "Rolling Release" concept. I have not been successful in having it work flawlessly and at this time would recommend against using it - stay with 9.1 for the moment.
If you would prefer to stay with FreeBSD, then I still recommend using PC-BSD to install the vanilla OS. Why? The PC-BSD installer makes installation using the ZFS filesystem really, really easy. If you can use ZFS then you should. It has many really useful features, such as dynamic use of the space to manage its partition scheme, System Snapshots and more.
Easy management of Jails via Warden makes administration of Servers really easy. You can have several Jails consisting of either BSD or Linux systems that you can snapshot or clone at your desire. Make no mistake, though - once you go beyond the desktop, you really do need to have as much knowledge as any other system, it is just that you can get that first setup done so much easier.
Perfect? Far from it.
Worth using? Most Definitely.
....... Later.
Thank you very much for your pc-bsd series of posts. I'm thinking of migrating my small business server to pcbsd and it's nice to read about someone else's experience. I don't know anything about zfs yet, but it's the jails I'm after. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThankyou for commenting - been a busy couple of weeks so things have been on autopilot somewhat ...
DeleteTo add to my thoughts - stay with 9.1 (ie don't follow rolling release) especially for a server. Two issues for desktops are that USB needs KDE to mount using the tray app, and the Flash plugin is old and not properly supported by Adobe any more.
The ZFS filesystem is a killer feature since it manages partitions, allows snapshots etc etc. Jails are excellent for servers, but do not always provide the server services you want - mileage may vary. I run Citadel in a Debian VM on Virtualbox for example.
Further .. I'm happy now with Rolling Release .. not perfect but ...
Delete.. and ZFS ... brilliant.