I tried it recently, but eventually gave up. It had so many little and not-so-little issues on my laptop, which I solved one by one over 2 weeks, reading and learning a lot. Even recompiled the kernel with a custom patch to get energy management to work.
Then I did a speed test on Wi-Fi, and it capped out at 6MBit (I have a Gigabit connection). The solution apparently is to install a Wi-Fi network adapter inside a Linux VM and connect to that on boot.
That’s when I went back to Debian where everything just works out of the box on my PC.That reminds me of the oldschool Realtek WiFi cards which required you to run drivers through WINE just to have WiFi on Linux. It really is excellent to see how far it’s come. I have a cheap Chinese laptop with a celeron chip (jasper lake) that I use as essentially a thin client. Installing windows fresh: trackpad doesn’t work, audio doesn’t work, WiFi 6 card driver is a generic MS one that caps at 5mb a sec until I install the right Realtek drivers, graphics aren’t accelerated until I install intel’s drivers. Installing Linux: everything works out of the box, just need to install the right graphics drivers for accelerated graphics to work. Only sad spot is the fingerprint reader is just flat out not supported in Linux. Lol if I tried hard I guess I could hook up WINE to run it like the old days
Yeah, I’ve had the same issues with BSD distros over the decades, always giving those devs the benefit of the doubt that they would get around to fixing various driver bullshit for older hardware eventually, and they never do.
Meanwhile a bleeding edge distro like my Arch setup runs on a piece of shit Celeron two-threaded dual-core with 3Gb RAM old as fuck Chromebook just fine.
To be fair, 99% of BSD’s probably run in a VM.
Oh, that’s an interesting point. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it’s something I definitely hadn’t considered.
I cant figure out why windows is still popular!
BSD isn’t really a competitor to Windows, try installing Windows 11 on your router and report back.
Windows CE skeletal hand shoots out of the ground in a cemetery somewhere
Instructions unclear, router stuck in pooper.
I see little reason to use any of the BSDs. Neither for desktops nor for servers. The only benefit I see is that you can take the BSD licensed code and use it to create a closed source product like the PlayStation without having to contribute anything back. I dislike that benefit with quite some intensity.
I ran FreeBSD on my home server for a while since the old TrueNAS versions use it. The supposed simplicity of BSD rings hollow to me as it is just another thing I’d have to learn. I also don’t care much about the Unix philosophy or any other clerical reasons that distinguish the various BSDs. Computers and their OSes are a tool to me not a religion. Admittedly TrueNAS worked well for me, but reading up on the differences from Linux got old rather quickly. I migrated to the newer Debian Linux based TrueNAS Scale a couple of months ago because I feel more confident that if anything goes wrong I’d be able to fix it.
openbsd seems interesting to me, it’s entire existence seems to be “secure OS” and i think that’s rather respectable. I’ll get around to messing with it some day.
I think most routers are running on BSD iirc
OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there is one person at least [email protected]
The Mach kernel started as a derivative of a BSD kernel. Years later the XNU kernel was created by combining the Mach kernel with code from newer BSDs, therefore it’s totally fair to describe macOS as a BSD. From my very limited exposure to BSD conferences, using Macs is pretty common there as many developers see their community-developed BSDs more for headless use they SSH onto.
From my little experience with working on BSD Servers, BSD is very reliable and for my use cases fast enough. But the slower updates and lack of most Wi-Fi support and sometimes spotty hardware support combined with the need for porting a lot of Linux software that dose not natively run on BSD is a deal breaker for using BSD on my Main Desktop Computer.
TLDR: For me BSD is a powerful tool that has a very specific job that is not being a Desktop Computer.
Yep, it is for Sony PlayStations.
The end user has no way of knowing or changing that so it doesn’t matter
Caveat: unless it is Mac OSX. There are… issues there, but it is still a fairly great experience, objectively speaking.
I used openbsd on my 2005 aluminum mac book. It was a lot of fun.
Dude we literally have that unix_surrealism comic there’s at least some love for BSDs here
i feel like openbsd doesn’t get the support it should.
One significant vulnerability in 20 years is actually psychotic. I don’t care how desktop ready freebsd is, it’s dead to me now. i’m sorry.
I use OpenBSD on the desktop.
Check out Root BSD on YouTube (or on Odysee or PeerTube!). He has quite a few interesting videos about various BSDs, and he actually uses OpenBSD on the desktop. Zaney’s older videos are also about BSD, nowadays he mostly covers Linux, but I still like his videos. I also like Joshua Stein’s blog jcs.org, he’s an OpenBSD developer and has some pretty interesting posts. He’s also on Mastodon: @[email protected]
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
BSD = Bondage, Submission, Dominance?
/so sorry, could not resist.
Windows?
Windows is non-consensualBSD
I personally have tried FreeBSD and some FreeBSD “distros” on the desktop, and have used *BSD-based stuff as servers/single-purpose machines.
As a desktop system (user-centric use case), you notice how hardware support is sometimes problematic, especially on laptops. I personally had problems with NVIDIA GPUs, already a problem on Linux, being a big problem here as well, and don’t mention WiFi (FreeBSD doesn’t support 802.11ac and up currently) or Bluetooth. Software-wise, if your applications do not have a *BSD version, well, then you are relying on Linux ports, which for desktop use isn’t exactly great.
But, in servers/headless setups, *BSDs are shining, with the most important things running rock-solid, stable and resource-friendly.
