Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
152: The Laporte has landed!
This week on BSDNow, we have some big breaking news about another major switcher to FreeBSD, plus early information about the pending
This episode was brought to you by
/>
Headlines
Leo Laporte tries FreeBSD
- Leo Laporte, formerly of TechTV, and now of TWiT.tv, is switching to FreeBSD
- “The latest debacle over the "forced" upgrade to Windows 10 and Apple's increasingly locked-in ecosystem has got me thinking. Do I really need to use a proprietary operating system to get work done? And while I'm at it, do I need to use commercial cloud services to store my data?”
- A sometimes Linux user since the mid 90s, Leo talks about his motivations:
- “But as time went by, even Ubuntu began to seem too commercial to me”
- “So now for the grand experiment. Is it possible, I wonder, to do everything I need to do on an even more venerable, more robust system: a true UNIX OS, FreeBSD? Here are my requirements”
- Browsing
- Email with PGP signing and encryption
- Coding - I'm a hobbyist programmer requiring support for lisp/scheme/racket, rust, and python (and maybe forth and clojure and meteor and whatever else is cool and new)
- Writing
- A password vault. I currently use Lastpass because it syncs with mobile but eventually I'll need to find a FOSS replacement for that, too
- Photo editing - this is the toughest to replace. I love Photoshop and Lightroom. Can I get by with, say, GIMP and Darktable?
- I do all of those things on my PCBSD machine all the time
- “I love Linux and will continue to use it on my laptops, but for my main workhorse desktop I think FreeBSD will be a better choice. I also look forward to learning and administering a true UNIX system.”
- He got a nice SuperMicro based workstation, with an Intel Xeon E3-1275v5 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 GPU
- I have a server with one of those Skylake E3s, it is very nice
- “450Mbps Wireless N Dual Band PCI-e Adapter w/ 3x 2dBi Antennas (Yes, sad to say, unless I rewire my house I'll have to use Wi-Fi with this beast. I'll probably rewire my house.)”
- He plans to have a 4x 1TB ZFS pool, plus a second pool backed by a 512 GB NVMe m.2 for the OS
- “And I'll continue to chronicle my journey into the land of FOSS here when The Beast arrives. But in the meantime, please excuse me, I've got some reading to do.”
- Leo went so far as to slap a “Power By FreeBSD” sticker on the back of his new Tesla ***
OpenBSD 6.0 to be released on Sept 1st, 2016
- OpenBSD 6.0 Tenative Released Notes
- OpenBSD 6.0 is just around the corner, currently slated for Sept 1st and brings with it a whole slew of exciting new features
- First up, and let’s get this right out of the way.. VAX support has been dropped!! Oh no!
- However to make up for this devastating loss, armv7 has been added to this release.
- The tentative release notes are very complete and marks 6.0 as quite an exciting release
- OpenBSD 6.0 Pre-orders up