SOLVED Any idea why my idle FreeNAS is swapping?

[danb35]

So is TrueOS dead?

I don't think it's dead, it's just completely changed what it's trying to be compared to a year or so ago--then, it was a desktop BSD, more or less the continuation of PC-BSD. Now, it's an OS core that's based on, but somehow different than, FreeBSD.

Is Ghost OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(operating_system) FreeBSD?

Doesn't sound like it, but GhostBSD is:

A simple, elegant desktop BSD Operating System | GhostBSD

ghostbsd.org

 

[jgreco]

True--and though there have been at least a few "desktop FreeBSD" projects, they don't seem to stick around very long (see, e.g., PC-BSD, TrueOS, Project Trident). Maybe GhostBSD will make it work... You can always install plain FreeBSD and put a GUI on it, but even if that solves the "ease of use" issue, it doesn't do much for "ease of installation."

Software availability has become less of an issue in recent years, but not for the right reason--you still can't run Quicken or TurboTax under Linux or FreeBSD, but you don't have to any more, because they're "in the cloud."

There's lots of problems with desktop BSD, and they're actually related to the desktop Linux issues. The advantage to Linux is simply that there's a lot more people working on device driver support, so there's a lot of crappy Windows/PC-grade devices that Linux supports (sometimes not so well) which means that Linux has been somewhat better at capturing the people who desperately want to avoid Microsoft. FreeBSD has a smaller number of people developing on it, and a lot of us are focused on server use cases.

Trying to get a desktop environment up and running on FreeBSD is somewhat more challenging than some of the Linux versions, because X11 has always been a bit twitchy to set up from scratch, and has some unfortunate tendencies to be sensitive to the hardware specifics. X11 on FreeBSD doesn't even work consistently or reliably from ports with VMware and its virtual VGA hardware; I frequently see quarters where my FreeBSD browser VM script breaks for no obvious reason other than port drift.