Migrating to FreeBSD

[MattKingUSA]

I've still got my main gear in storage but I have done some testing on a mini PC and a laptop. I'm actually surprised how well steam proton works on FreeBSD. Anyway, I am looking forward to setting up audio. If one bsd doesn't work I will move to another depending on the hardware. At this point I have a FreeBSD system, a GhostBSD system (which is a themed FreeBSD) and an OpenBSD system due to needing a 32bit efi to boot the 64bit os.

Anyway, I'm still plugging along on FreeBSD. I've tested a large amount of programs that all work very well.

Here is a quick list of things I've used so far that work as expected. Some of the audio programs I've only loaded audio for playback or recorded quick clips. I don't expect too many issues with audio though.

Obs studio
Lmms
Audacity
Ardour
Qtractor
Gimp
Inkscape
Ne
Ranger
Mplayer
Wayland
Gnome
Icewm
Blackbox
Mate
Cinnamon
Lxde
Twm
Openrgb (for rgb gaming mouse)
Ffmpeg video conversion
Webcams
Wifi (not all chipsets work)

A few games
World of Padman
Open arena
Urban Terror
Serious Sam 2017
Hitman absolution
Hitman bloodmoney
Hitman 2

Etc etc

Other than a lot of unsupported wifi chipsets I've not run in to too many issues. Although OpenBSD does have support for 32bit efi and sdio wifi chips. But OpenBSD doesn't support Bluetooth and FreeBSD does. It's a bit weird.

The bsd now podcast did mention that BSDCan (Canadian BSD conference) will be having sessions about cross sharing more driver support between BSD systems. So that's nice to know.

I'm pretty stoked about getting in to the audio. Hopefully can start soon.

[folderol]

You should find Yoshimi runs well.
Just sayin'

[MattKingUSA]

Last time on FreeBSD, I had troubles running jack - even with OSS4...
I was told that FreeBSD is focused on stability and safety, not so much towards realtime performance.
What is the status quo now?
All debian packages as well as all Arch Linux packages were ported to FreeBSD?
At the same time FreeBSD kernel was ported to Debian?
Any kind of realtime patch still not available for FreeBSD?
If Linux and FreeBSD are both posix, what does that imply concerning compliance?
Is there 100% portability?
Would it be possible to modify a running Linux System into a FreeBSD one (or vice versa)?

Wow, that's a lot of questions. I would say that nothing has changed in the goals of FreeBSD as a project. But, there is work being done for real time and there is real time support. I'll know more once I've unpacked my audio gear.

I regard to porting systems, I know there is a gnu/linux that are currently porting to gnu/bsd https://www.hyperbola.info/ I honestly believe they have a lot of work ahead of them.

I have no idea what has or has not been ported. I have found that all terminal programs I use are available and there are many that originate with bsd also. As far as GUI programs, I've found very few are not available and they are mostly related to file system management.

FreeBSD is a server oriented OS. So, anything desktop/audio/gaming/video etc is not the main focus of the system. With that said, there are a massive amount of effort being made in those areas and I think that this is a great time for me to have decided to switch over. The majority of the work is already done on FreeBSD for basically everything that I am used to having on a Linux based system.

The majority of the projects are hosted on git hub for some reason. But there are so many, there are ports lists that you can find for the various BSDs that will outline what software is available and the amount of software is absolutely massive.

Now, in reality how these programs will perform, I've no idea yet. But as a desktop system I have not been disappointed. The first thing I noticed was the speed that the system runs. The terminal is so fast that my commands are typically completed before the enter key has come back to rest in the off position haha. OpenBSD is a different story, the security framework for package installation is a bit slower. But there are a lot of SHA256 checksum validations going on with their installer.

[Impostor]

Serious Sam 2017

aaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MattKingUSA]

I did a remix on a song with audacity using active effects. I used GhostBSD on kde. Literally zero stability issues or audio crackling issues etc. I used the internal audio for the work. The system is an HP ProBook G3 with AMD A10-8700. The track is ice frontier by skaven. This track was modified with permission from the author. The track was released in 1993 and produced on the commodore64. This track also won in a 1993 competition for multi channel computer music. Kind of cool. I first heard the song in penguin Command in 2002.

https://ethchat.net/matti/Ice-Frontier-By-Skaven.mp3

That url is going to be removed at some point because I have to update that install soon.

The original track
https://youtu.be/ZLCovsMzY9U

[Arkforest]

If we're not careful with this conversation, @GMaq might go rogue and rebase AVLinux on to FreeBSD... And then where would we be? For starters, he would have to decide whether to change the name or to just let it be a big lie.

Lol

It would be a funny way to get people to use a BSD

*from an AVL user

[j_e_f_f_g]

Alsa doesn't work on BSD, right? It's still OSS (the sound API).

And I know that the BSD folks haven't gotten Wayland going yet.

[MattKingUSA]

Alsa doesn't work on BSD, right? It's still OSS (the sound API).

And I know that the BSD folks haven't gotten Wayland going yet.

Wayland works on FreeBSD and you can install alsa. You can use pulse audio and pipewire too. There are many thousands of ports for FreeBSD.

And by the way I played Metro Exodus last night in 1440p at 165hz on FreeBSD using Suyimazu. Pretty legit.

Here's a link to fresh ports.

https://www.freshports.org/

I was pretty shocked to find how many ports there are.

[MattKingUSA]

I've got no place to do audio at the moment but plan to build a place very soon. It will be expensive so it may be a while yet.

But since I've switched over I have tried some games and they work rather nicely. There are two version of steam I have tried, Linux Steam (linux-steam-utils where the Linux kernel calls are translated to FreeBSD kernel calls and libraries etc) and Suyimazu (Wine running steam, Suyimazu can run a lot of other things like minecraft as well)

My internet is very slow so I don't have many games installed at this time.

I tested these titles with FreeBSD 13.2 on an Intel I7-3770 with a Radeon RX 5700 XT and 32GB of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM. And my display is 1440p at 165Hz I'm using LQXT desktop at 165Hz and everything performs nicely.

Linux Steam
Hitman Bloodmoney
Half Life
Half Life 2

Suyimazu Steam
Half Life 2 , Episode 1 and 2
Half Life Opposing Force
Hitman Absolution
Lego Batman , 2 and 3
Metro Exodus

So far the Suyimazu Steam works very well and the Linux Steam works very well, but not as well. I have done a few cross testing on titles between the two and Suyimazu seems to have the win at this time.

[j_e_f_f_g]

Your FreeBSD is using OSS (the audio system), right?

Have you installed alsa on FreeBSD? If so, does it work?

Did you test pulseaudio and jack? (Not just see if they install, but also if they produce sound).

If alsa actually does work, I wonder if it's the real, full alsa, or whether the devs made a fork that runs on top of OSS. If it's the latter, then it may not be 100% compatible. And the same with jack and pulseaudio because they would be running on a modified alsa. But if the devs actually did retrofit alsa to bsd, that would be a big deal. This had never been done before because alsa uses too much stuff that's available in linux, but not unix.

[MattKingUSA]

I use pulse audio for my sound because it has the pavucontrol program. But it does cause crackling in some games. Not sure why. But I have no idea what they done to make it work honestly. But it's what I'm using. It works just as well as on Linux and oss works fine too. I tried jack and it works for recording but nothing very in depth.

[j_e_f_f_g]

no idea what they done to make it work honestly.

Well OSS on FreeBSD is functioning just like ALSA on Linux. Not in terms of performance. Rather, in terms of purpose. Just like ALSA is the lowest level right above the audio hardware for Linux, OSS is the lowest level right above the audio hardware for BSD. So Jack is set to go through ALSA on Linux, but Jack on BSD is set to go through OSS.

I have no doubt that PulseAudio on BSD is set to go through OSS. If you have it bridged to go through Jack first, then I'd change that to have PulseAudio go directly to OSS.

In fact, if you're not using any music software that supports jack, you could remove it altogether.

[MattKingUSA]

I've been using FreeBSD for over a year now. I've not really reported anything back regarding audio. But as far as my experience there were no adjustments that I had to make in order to continue doing audio as I had prior on Linux. I thought I would post a song I made in LMMS the other night. This is a vocal sample of my cousin that I used to make the song.

https://ethchat.net/542175888/1795854596.php8

-Matt

[tseaver]

Cool that the FreeBSD audio environment is suitable for your work!

I haven't used it in donkey's, at this point.