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Unix Linux BSD

Project Trident Ditches BSD For Linux (itsfoss.com) 97

Posted by EditorDavid from the Unix-to-Linux dept.
Project Trident is moving from FreeBSD to Void Linux, reports Its FOSS: According to a later post, the move was motivated by long-standing issues with FreeBSD. These issues include "hardware compatibility, communications standards, or package availability continue to limit Project Trident users". According to a conversation on Telegram, FreeBSD has just updated its build of the Telegram client and it was nine releases behind everyone else.

The lead dev of Project Trident, Ken Moore, is also the main developer of the Lumina Desktop. The Lumina Desktop has been on hold for a while because the Project Trident team had to do so much work just to keep their packages updated. (Once they complete the transition to Void Linux, Ken will start working on Lumina again.)

After much searching and testing, the Project Trident team decided to use Void Linux as their new base.
More from the Project Trident site: It's important to reiterate that Project Trident is a distribution of an existing operating system. Project Trident has never been a stand-alone operating system. The goal of Project Trident is enhancing the usability of an operating system as a graphical workstation through all sorts of means: custom installers, automatic setup routines, graphical utilities, and more...

The more we've tested Void Linux, the more impressed we have been. We look forward to working with an operating system that helps Project Trident continue to provide a stable, high-quality graphical desktop experience.
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Project Trident Ditches BSD For Linux More

Project Trident Ditches BSD For Linux

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  • Has Netcraft confirmed it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @06:39PM (#59328930)

    The evidence points to FreeBSD dying. Does anyone know if netcraft has confirmed it yet?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There's always one.

      You're like that guy who thinks it's funny to shout "FREBIRD!" at every live gig.

      It's not funny anymore. Give it a rest.

      • Firebird isn't dying either, you insensitive CRUD!

      • Re:Has Netcraft confirmed it? (Score:4, Informative)

        by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:25PM (#59329014)

        it's not a troll and doesn't need to be humor, it is fact. Less than two-thirds of web facing servers now run FreeBSD. It really is dying.

        Netflix chose FreeBSD for its balance of stability and features (as did Netcraft once upon a time), but it is becoming an increasingly less common frontend operating system on the web as a whole. Only 60,200 (0.67%) web-facing computers are running FreeBSD today. To put this into perspective, more than twice as many servers are still running Windows Server 2003, even though it has not been supported for several years.

        Linux is by far the most commonly used operating system for web-facing computers. It is installed on 6.64 million (74.2%) servers, and at least 1.05 million of these can be positively identified as running the Ubuntu distribution.

        • Re:Has Netcraft confirmed it? (Score:4, Informative)

          by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:29PM (#59329020)

          oops, that's two-thirds of a percent!

          it used to be huge percent

        • BSD isn't "dying" (Score:4, Insightful)

          by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:47PM (#59329060) Journal

          While Linux definitely stole it's thunder on the X86 commodity server side of things, let's not forget that BAD is the base of both OFFense and OpnSense, both of which are wildly popular and growing. That's a lot of web-facing devices. Plus NetBSD remains a.Prime choice for powering things like networked copiers. As for OpenBSD, I think you'd have seen a lot of firewall products use it as their base if the whole OpemBSD project wasn't run like some hostile cult. And let's not forget that FreeBSD makes up a fair chunk of Apple's OS X and iOS.

          In short: firewall/network management servers are where all the BSD growth will come from.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            Shh, the real reason, it has become abundantly clear that the Government of China will be pushing Linux hard in all technology devices, as a counter to foolish Trump sanctions, M$ will now pay that price big time. As Linux is now being really, really pushed hard by the Government of China at the highest levels, so all the apps and games will follow, some proprietary some FOSS, China makes it money from making computers so an investment in free software ensure their hardware wins. So China, 10 million coders

        • Linux is by far the most commonly used operating system for web-facing computers. It is installed on 6.64 million (74.2%) servers, and at least 1.05 million of these can be positively identified as running the Ubuntu distribution.

          Yup. As we all know and often repeat here on /. : "The Year of Linux on everything but the Desktop !" has long come and passed by...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebh ( 116526 )

      Imagine a Beowulf cluster of th--*SMACK*

  • It seems to be a privacy / security / reliability / usability oriented desktop distro.

    • Re:What is Project Trident? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:19PM (#59329002)

      Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend Project Trident for those patients who use a FOSS desktop distro.

    • What is Project Trident? (Score:4, Informative)

      by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:20PM (#59329004)

      I had to look it up as well. The intention seems to have originally been a packaging a lightweight BSD desktop called lumina ...which looks great, on an established BSD based distro called TrueOS, but because the BSD is lacking support expected for a desktop based OS at this time, which seems to include updates of common packages to hardware simply not working, they have moved to a Linux based distro...with an equally interesting BSD based package manager, which should solve the problems.

      Looks a great project. Looks like a great OS for SBC like the raspberry pi 4.

      • Trident and Void should make great bedfellows. I'm looking for an OS after kicking a longterm habit with MacOS, Trident looked good on paper, installer booted to a slick first page, my Huawei Matebook13 keyboard and touchpad were unresponsive: repeated hammering on random keys managed to change the HWC by one year. Power switch forced off... Latest Void installer booted to black screen, Dr G gave me a magic incantation to get to the grub options and eventually to a slick first screen, where keyboard and tou
    • Yes, but not a very good one. Average rating 4.8 from 11 reviews on Distrowatch.
      Project Trident seems to be just a base for the Lumina desktop environment, which seems to be the unpopular part.
      There are any number of great desktop environments for BSD or Linux that one more just becomes redundant.

      • yet-another-linux-distribution, interestingly these are the features you get with their move to Linux:

        Functional AMD video card support with the amdgpu driver.
        Newer NVIDIA 390.x driver support.
        Streaming audio through HDMI connections should now become functional.
        Newer wifi chipsets are supported.
        Wireless connections will actually run at the proper connection speeds for the protocol type (n, ac, etc..).
        For the first time, PT will be able to start supporting and leveraging bluetooth devices due to a fu

  • smart, uses runit not systemd (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:00PM (#59328956)

    kudos for not using a distro with that badly engineered and obscenely complicated systemd garbage

    • and obscenely complicated systemd garbage

      Yes, its horribly obscure (ini-like) files are a doom and gloom !~

      What would you prefer ?
      extremely short and clean (50+ lines) scripts [github.com] written for a tiny interpreter (that includes a functionnal networking stack) [linuxjournal.com] ?~

      • Yes, its horribly obscure (ini-like) files are a doom and gloom !~

        What would you prefer ?
        extremely short and clean (50+ lines) scripts written for a tiny interpreter (that includes a functionnal networking stack) ?~

        This is a strawman argument. The "obscene complication" of systemd doesn't have anything to do with the format of its configuration files.

    • Spoken like a true Luddite. Systemd isn't perfect by any stretch but in a myriad of ways it is far better than SysVinit, etc.
      • I see valid looking critiques of systemd from smart, non Luddite people, are they making all that up?
        • such as?

          • Binary log files is probably the most common, of course that seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. If people really feel strongly about it they can just modify systemd to write the output to a plain text file instead of or in addition to the binary file.

            The small minority of people who are genuinely opposed to systemd use and contribute to Devuan.

            • There are plenty of alternatives to Devuan, a fallacy to say genuine opposers must use or contribute to that.

            • I was opposed to the binary logs when the journal was announced, but having used the journal now for several years and gotten to see the benefits that the binary format brings with it (since now meta-data can be added to each log line) I now see this as a major benefit. And as you say it you want text logs then it's easily configurable to do so, in fact Ubuntu already does that out of the box.

      • absolutely false and I can tell you don't admin hundreds of servers in multiple locations for a living.

        Serious use isn't your laptop, boy

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gmack ( 197796 )

          I do maintain hundreds of servers in multiple locations for a living and I have found that systemd makes my life much easier, especially if the setup involves network storage, SAN or better yet a clustered FS on either of those.

  • What about ZFS? (Score:3)

    by Alwin Barni ( 5107629 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:10PM (#59328976)
    What about ZFS, is ZFS on linux production ready? Last time I checked it was not, and the CDDL license is not compatible with GPL2, isn't it?

    • Re:What about ZFS? (Score:4, Informative)

      by That Ordinary Guy ( 6159720 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:18PM (#59328998)

      Proxmox has been using ZFS on Linux for a while now. I am using it and it seems stable enough. I don't know if they customized it although. They are using a customized kernel based on debian 10, latest is vmlinuz-5.0.21-2-pve as I can see in /boot.

      https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Z... [proxmox.com]

    • For me, ZFS on linux has been production ready for years. I'm using it on all my machines - servers, desktops, laptops... everywhere. Ubuntu just released 19.10 with install on root option, making it easier to have ZFS on the root partition. They are building tools to make it even easier in the future and will have features like boot environments, automatic scheduled snapshots, etc, that FreeBSD has already. If that is what you mean by "production ready", then its a couple of years away.

      In 2019 ZFS on

      • The main contribution of ZFS was to teach people about how much they don't really care about snapshots. Of course, Btrfs helped with that too.

      • Production Ready means: I can run my multi billion dollar per year business on it without fear of job loss, law suit, Big Four auditors, Enterprise customer questions during pre-sales or lack of vendor supplied support contract. What you describe is the kind of thing tiny shops with a solo sysadmin do because no one knows better. When you quit who will maintain all that non-production zfs you installed? The next guy will go on a 2 year zfs replacement jihad.

        • If you are worried about that, buy Oracle ZFS storage appliances for your big eNteRpRisE data. It will protect you from law suits.

          We, tiny shops with single admins, will continue using ZFS as a kernel module in Linux and in the kernel of the BSDs. Which is allowed by the CDDL. If the guy that replaces me in 2 years understands basic storage and FS concepts, they will learn ZFS in a day. Replace ZFS? With what? What will be better than ZFS in 2 years?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kremmy ( 793693 )
        It's seriously disappointing that it's 2019 and all of those features that were supposed to make zfs an attractive option still aren't there.

    • ZFS demands 1GB of RAM per TB of storage.

      Making it unpractical for anything other than servers. And not even for all of those.

      It's a great file system, but they should *really* make a redesigned fork that is suitable for everything from PCs over SBCs to smartphones.

      • Why is that a problem? If you have 3TB of storage that is only 3GB of ram to put in a computer.

      • BTRFS (Score:2)

        by DrYak ( 748999 )

        but they should *really* make a redesigned fork that is suitable for everything from PCs over SBCs to smartphones.

        BTRFS already fits the bill (works on Sailfish OS-powered smartphones, works on Raspberry Pi - though is not pre-compiled, so you'll need to either use a initramdisk or boot from F2FS / EXT /etc.) and is also backed by companies (mostly Suse and Facebook - it's default on openSuse Tumbleweed).

        Bcache is yet another new-gen filesystem that similarly includes CoW, snapshotting, etc. and also adds tiering SSD and HDD storage which will eventually find its way into stable kernel.

        Re-writing (a very difficult task

      • The "1GB per TB" saying is patently false. It will consume what you give it for cache but it can easily run on way less than that ratio and be content.

      • My server has about 4TB of HD per GB of RAM. Runs just peachy with ZFS and a slow processor. It's just storage, but that's what ZFS is for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        --You are arguably out of your mind if you think ZFS should *ever* run on a smartphone. It's totally overkill for that application.

        --You can run 64-bit ZFS in as little as 2-4GB of non-ECC RAM, so it is perfectly OK to run on non-server home PCs and virtual machines. You can even run it on Macs (which I do.) The I/O throughput will be better the more RAM you give it, but it's been stable for years.

        --The only major slowdown I'm aware of right now is with encryption on LTS kernels (since Greg K-H decided to

    • Canonical is considering ZFS and ZoL production-ready and they are proponent for ZFS.
      (Just like Suse is pushing for BTRFS and Redhat is pushing for their rubegoldbergesque "Stratis" contraption, and I forgot-which-corporate-sponsor is paying Kent Overstreet to finish Bcachefs and get it accepted upstream in stable kernel).

  • Protip (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday October 20, 2019 @07:34PM (#59329026)

    If you want people to care about news on your obscure project, you might first of all inform them why they should care about it.

    In other words, wtf is "Project Trident"? For all I know it could be the name of the new Aquaman movie. And as we all know, Aquaman sucks.

    • wtf is "Project Trident"? For all I know it could be the name of the new Aquaman movie. And as we all know, Aquaman sucks.

      Yeah, fuck Aquaman! ;)

    •     It would also help to at least have a graphic of your desktop actually running. Their website has only a few FAQ and disclosures. A walk-through of installing virtualBox with virtualBox graphics only.

    • Its a dummy spit project that forked off TrueOS which is a fork of NetBSD, because they didn't like the way it was going or something.

      Also its another weird ass muscl clib based thing, with a weird ditto with weird package manager.

      Folks, just use NetBSD if BSD unixes are your things, and Debian or CentOS if Linux's are your thing. Keeping it standard means its easier to recover when things go wrong. And we live in a universe dominated by entropy so things *always* go wrong.

      • Since this is about Desktop Linux distributions neither Debian nor CentOS is best in class. You should probably have a better understanding of the problem domain before running around offering ridiculous ill thought out solutions. Ubuntu and Fedora would be the closest analogues to Debian and RHEL/CentOS for the Desktop, but then there is Kali for security folks and a host of other perfectly good distributions. There are many different ones for a reason, and the multiplicity is a strength, not a weakness. H

      • Not a real Linux. (GNU/Linux)

        Might aswell recomment Android (AOSP/Linux) at that point.

        Void looks actually pretty good. Gentoo, Arch, etc, obviously look good too, if not Poetteringized.

    • TrueOS was created to be an easy to install desktop system based on FreeBSD (an easier to install fork of NetBSD). It was not exactly popular so they turned TrueOS into an easy to install server based on FreeBSD and Project Trident took over the TrueOS desktop development

      It now appears Project Trident is way of installing Lumina on Linux, by first installing a whole different Linux distro to get rid of systemd and add LibreSSL.

      386BSD was too slow in getting an open source kernel out and Linux got in first

      • They used a BS distribution as their basis. Now they use a real Linux (GNU/Linux) distribution.

        At no point does systemd/Linux or AOSP/Linux or whatevsr come into play with this. Which isn't even real Linux, let alone a Unix.

        Next you be telling us how Gnome requires you to first uninstall Windows from "Linux" (meaning WSL), to install a whole different kernel and init system, because you have no clue whatsoever what the worlds Linux or UNIX mean. --.-;

        • FreeBSD is not a BS distribution, it the most popular Unix distribution, but no longer has the labour to stay updated. And they could have switched to OpenBSD or NetBSD. Instead they are switching to Void, a Linux distro that also struggles with the problem of enough people to support upgrading drivers, software, and documentation as well as bugfixing and patching. This is the curse of the infinite forking, desktops and rebundling into distro that plagues open source operating systems.

          They come from Unix w

  • that is not lightweight, as claimed

    pretty? maybe, depending on taste.
    lightweight? definitely not.

    to put it another way: if qt5 is "lightweight", then what would be middleweight? what would be "heavyweight"?

    • if qt5 is "lightweight", then {...} what would be "heavyweight"?

      Gnome4, built with GTK4, running on Mir, using several Vala extensions, all this in a .NET bytecode.
      Inside a WSL session on Windows 10.

      You happy ?~~

  • What does it say about the usability of Trident when their website has bought into the difficult-to-read low contrast fad?
  • This is the first I've heard of the Trident project. Given their reasoning for the move, including users being affected by lack of packages and features, I do find it interesting they are rebasing to Void. I gave Void a good spin before moving to Arch. Its status may have changed a lot over the last couple years, but I remember Void as having a rather limited package repo (and documentation) which were among a larger list of reasons I decided against it in favor of Arch. I have to wonder if any existing

  • So what is this thing really? I mean they are saying OS but obviously they are changing OS... hell they are changing the entire underlying OS distribution. I mean I've seen distros using other distros as a base before and switch base but usually it is to another distro of the same OS.

    It is just a collection of graphical tools/interfaces or what? It almost sounds like that from the description but I note the website lacks screenshots?

  • Well, there's a shocker. All they are now is just one of many Linux distros in an already overcrowded and saturdated market.
  • FreeBSD has always been server-focused. Yeah, you can run it on whatever you like, but the server has been their focus for as long as I can remember. If this group wants to make a system into a better workstation environment, they will likely find it less burdensome to start with an OS that is designed for workstations.

  • Darl McBride should have offered the licence. Shame the original UNIX base code is gone to die at SCO and FreeBSD withers away. Hopefully Apple keeps the torch lit, this was our heritage.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Seems like project trident lost the point. The point as I understood it was to be a user friendly environment for BSD (trident!!!) other than just offering lumina I see no point to this.

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