FreeBSD builds: beta status?

[Moonchild]

I'd like to ask the community here: do you think the FreeBSD builds have been sufficiently stable and generally compatible to remove beta status from it and make it an official release? Are there things that are still not stable or require special steps that would make it better to leave it a "perpetual beta" like it has been?

[ron_1]

I have never run a BSD as my main OS, but had one on a few times during a couple of my experimenting phases recently (GhostBSD). Pale Moon always ran fine on it during the short times I had GhostBSD on, so I chose make it an official release.

[Basilisk-Dev]

How many people are using these? I don't know about Pale Moon, but looking at the Basilisk FreeBSD stats there are very few people, maybe between 10 and 20, using the FreeBSD releases. I'm not sure how well tested UXP is on FreeBSD. Maybe someone else with better insight can chime in here.

[dbsoft]

Obviously I do some testing, but considering FreeBSD is my server, it isn't a regular use type thing.

Just from my own observation it appears to be about as stable as Linux.

Edit: I leave a browser window open on the server but I only actually do browsing on it when I am working on the server. Brief periods a few times a week.

[athenian200]

I did try building on FreeBSD in a VM at one point while trying to figure out issues dbsoft was having with the Python 3 port (all resolved now), and it seemed like it didn't build correctly on FreeBSD 15 (from what I've heard it requires an older version to build)... so if we're basing it on ease of building it from source, it's still a bit preliminary, but getting there. However, the pre-built binaries being provided work as well as any Unix-like binaries I've seen, if that's what is being measured. Actually, it seems like if anything it runs better on FreeBSD than it does on Linux, though I could be imagining it. YouTube itself seems to load up fine and play videos with no problem.

I would say currently all Unix-like builds use a similar old X11/GTK stack that is not particularly well-maintained, and if anything it is aging better on FreeBSD than it is on Linux, since people are more likely to use X11 directly on FreeBSD rather than going through XWayland. I'm tempted to joke that maybe we should list the Linux builds as beta because of how much everything is in flux on Linux and tends to break things at random depending on distro and version... but yeah, FreeBSD seems to my eyes to be up to the Linux standard. Maybe even a bit more predictable, but mostly because FreeBSD comes from one vendor and diverges from Linux in ways that mostly result in "it builds or it doesn't" (kernel, libc, and malloc compatibility) rather than subtle breakage. Get past that, and the rest of it is just the Unix stack that behaves the same on everything that's not Win/Mac. Supporting BSD or non-Linux Unix is pretty much a challenge one level up from supporting a weird "alt-Linux" that doesn't use glibc as the libc or has a non-GNU userland.

For Windows and Mac, we do expect a bit more polish and handling of edge cases. But based on my Linux experience and building on other Unix-like systems in the past, I think the bar here is more like... if it builds, doesn't crash after an hour of messing around with YouTube or TikTok, plays sound, and the GTK3 version looks okay on MATE using MATE's TraditionalOk theme... it's as good as it's going to get, because that's roughly where the bar is on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems right now.

Essentially, we can't control much on those systems, but it seems like the best-case scenario is to hand it off to MATE on a pure X11 server, and hope the user isn't using a weird theme. There's a lot of crossing your fingers and hoping the user knows what they're doing... on pretty much everything that's not Win/Mac, I think.

[athenian200]

Actually, with further testing, there is one small bug I noticed with FreeBSD, but I don't know if it's FreeBSD itself or my VM setup...

What I noticed is that on the start page, the Pale Moon announcements do not load in properly... they seem stuck with placeholders that try to load forever and never become legible text. This only seems to happen on FreeBSD. I checked on SunOS and Linux and it doesn't seem to happen there, everything loads in correctly.

Have no idea if that small hiccup is enough reason for it not to be release status, but I thought I should follow-up with that in case it affects anyone's assessment here.