Monthly Archives: November 2020

macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a why I left macOS

I think the title tells a lot about the story I’m going to tell you.

This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.

Not so long ago, I was using macOS as my daily driver. The main reason why I got a macbook was the underlying BSD Unix and the nice graphics it provides. Also, I have an iPhone. But they were also the same reasons for why I left macOS.

I did not want to write this post right after the migration, I wanted to take my time, use FreeBSD daily, see if I will ever miss macOS.

Here’s a tweet of mine from 8 months ago

Let’s look at it this way. macOS is becoming less Unix-y every year, date(1) is outdated, there are 100+ Unix processes running by the time the system is booted, most of them are useless for the general user, it has no native package manager (at least MacPorts/homebrew/pkgsrc is out there) and for a power user, there is no proper documentation. Have you ever checked the FreeBSD handbook? Everything is right there!

Okay, the nice graphics part. Have you seen the latest and greatest Big Sur? It feels like eye-candy, it’s not made for power users at all, everything seems to be a distraction now, even the icons. I’m no UI guru, but bringing iOS to the desktop is not for everyone.

So I decided to move to FreeBSD. This is where many people will tell me “Okay but not everything works outside the box”, true! but which OS works outside the box these days anyway? Windows is still a nightmare, setting up macOS took me 3 days the last time, Linux takes way more if you’re building it from scratch. Setting up FreeBSD took me 3 days, however this meant that I will NOT need to change it again for a very, very, VERY long time.

Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted.

On FreeBSD, I upgraded from 12.1-RELEASE to 12.2-RELEASE and nothing broke, and in case there were any changes, FreeBSD just asked me what to do about them.

Let’s come back for a second. Unix is outdated and Apple does not care about it, fancy graphics are too fancy now. Doing forensics is almost impossible. And the hardware is, well, not the best out there (have you ever disassembled a MacBook Pro? it’s takes 2 hours to change a battery while I can reassemble my Dell Latitudes and ThinkPads in 30 minutes).

So there was no reason to stay here anymore. I had to migrate. The question is: where?

Linux has systemd, not my favorite thing out there, Windows is privacy nightmare. That left me with 2 major options: Linuxes without systemd (Gentoo, in my case) or BSDs.

Since I run FreeBSD servers anyway, I just migrated to FreeBSD.

Here’s a short review about running FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.

  • WiFi: works. not the fastest, but fast enough.
  • Graphics: works.
  • Touchpad: works with multiple fingers AND very configurable via sysctl.
  • BT does discovery and pairs, I still have to try it with non-Apple headphones.
  • COVID-19 era: Zoom, Google Hangouts, Jitsi and all other WebRTC-based video conferencing software works via web as well.
  • Thanks to Linuxulator, I can watch Netflix as well: here’s a screenshot.

Most importantly, it’s Free and Open Source.

It’s been 1 month and 1 day since I last touched my MacBook Pro, so, what do I miss?

  • Better BT support
  • Faster WiFi

That’s it, that’s all missing on a FreeBSD laptop these days. WiFi can do 48Mbps according to ifconfig but I usually get 10-20Mbps. BT pairs with my Apple AirPods but I wish it worked till the end.

Having a nice workstation/laptop is not an easy thing, using macOS means living by Apple rules, Windows is the same for Microsoft. The BSDs gave me the power to be as free as possible πŸ™‚

During the next weeks I’ll try to blog about the actual setup.

P.S. dear Apple employee, in case you’re reading this, please tell your management to update their BSD Unix layer. Some of us still care, some of us are not just Docker people, some of us are not just “modern” web developers. Thanks in advance.

That’s all folks! πŸ™‚

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Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD

So couple of days ago I migrated from macOS on Macbook Pro to FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.

Unfortunately, since we are in war, I do not have the time to blog about the migration, although I’m taking notes every day about every change that I do so I can blog later on πŸ™‚

However, one of the biggest concerns for me was running Signal on FreeBSD, as I understnad, Signal people are not interested in supporting the *BSDs.

As any sane person, I started searching the internet for possible solutions and turns out all I need is two pieces of software

The installation is as easy as running

pkg install signal-cli scli

Now for the simple part.

First, you need to link your phone by running

signal-cli link -n "FreeBSD"

It will give an output that says tsdevice:/?uuid=...&pub_key=....

Copy that output, and then in another terminal run

qrencode 'tsdevice:/?uuid=...&pub_key=...' -t ANSI256

You will be represented by a QR Code in the console (cool, aye?).

Using the phone app, link the device by scanning the QR Code.

To receive list of your contacts run

signal-cli -u +myphonenumber receive

Now try to run the TUI interface by running

scli

Side-note: In case you are not able to send or receive messages, you might need to do some DBUS magic.

First, find if you have DBUS running

antranigv@zvartnots:~ $ ps -x -o comm,pid | grep dbus
dbus-launch         53571
dbus-daemon         54064
dbus-daemon         54963

Then, you will need to find the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable, this is usually set in the DBUS child process, in our case, it’s 54963, so we can use procstat as root

root@zvartnots:~ # procstat -e 54963
  PID COMM             ENVIRONMENT                                          
54963 dbus-daemon      SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash DBUS_STARTER_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c DISPLAY=:0.0 WMAKER_BIN_NAME=wmaker PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/home/antranigv/bin WINDOWPATH=9 MAIL=/var/mail/antranigv GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c USER=antranigv DBUS_STARTER_BUS_TYPE=session MM_CHARSET=UTF-8 WRASTER_COLOR_RESOLUTION0=4 PWD=/usr/home/antranigv BLOCKSIZE=K LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LOGNAME=antranigv HOME=/home/antranigv

Okay! we have our variable!

Now, we need to set the ENV and we are done, if you use (t)csh then execute

setenv DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c

If you are using bash, run the following

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c

Now, you can run scli again and it will work fine πŸ™‚

Happy Chatting!@#$%

That’s all folks! πŸ™‚

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