I've bounced around distros for quite a while and I've become very familiar with Linux. I thought I'd try a BSD. I've tried out OpenBSD before but it was so foreign and scary to me so I went back to Linux.
Later I saw Dragonfly and noticed it used cryptsetup from Linux and thought, hey I'm familiar with that, why not give it a go?
I learnt a lot about BSDs through just installing Dragonfly. The way they handle device names and BSD disklabels are two things that had scared me when I tried OpenBSD but installing Dfly helped me understand.
The only problem I'm facing is that when I first set it up I used dports (Dfly's version of 'ports' from Free/OpenBSD - I'm familiar with it thanks to CRUX). The problem is that I installed half my packages through compiling from source, until I gave up and just used the pre-compiled binaries they provide so now there are some major version conflict sort of things with LibreSSL and it says I need to remove 90% of the programs I have to upgrade it. I'll probably end up making a backup of important files and starting from scratch - which may not be the easiest solution but I find that sort of thing fun.
Edit: another major problem I forgot to mention is that Dragonfly has very shitty NTFS drivers. It only allows read access and you can't copy files over 2GB. This was a major pain because the files I backed up from my Linux install were in an archive that was 160GB - on an NTFS drive.
So what I ended up doing was using 7zip's (on windows) handy feature of splitting an archive into equal sized pieces under 2GB and copied each file across, then put them together again. And it worked flawlessly.
What are the advantages over linux for use on desktop and server? How are the drivers?
David Bennett
>it says I need to remove 90% of the programs I have to upgrade it. Can't you just delete your /usr/local files and start from scratch with binaries? I think that would work on freebsd since BSDs keep user installed software separate from system software like on linux where they're the same thing.
Nathan Long
>Edit
Isaac Perez
The advantage is that it is one well put together OS instead of a kernel plus utils, drivers, etc.. So the *BSD's have the advantage of better optimization, documentation, and stability. While Linux does have some better applications for certain tasks, BSD overall has better structure compared to Linux.
Thomas Parker
>based on freebsd
Isaiah Nguyen
(OP) You haven't mentioned the hammer filesystem, a ZFS alternative, that I would have thought is the major attraction of DragonflyBSD.
I use ext2 for transferring between Linux and OpenBSD. Just doing a couple of google searches has already gotten me interested again in trying out Dragonfly, with the new Hammer2.
Jackson Hernandez
i only very recently heard about HAMMER (last bsdnow), is it really cool? like a network filesystem raid?
