Posted by todsacerdoti 15 hours ago
The killer features for me:
- The pf firewall. Rules you actually understand!
- Jails! When you cannot have Zones this will do.
- Native ZFS. Stable, mature, safe and with all the features you can dream of.
- Linuxulator. Binary compatibility with Linux if need be. Can be put in jail as well.
- pkg/ports. I really like it but I might have been indoctrinated.
- Networking stack. Good. Stable. Makes sense to me.
For a nice graphical UI Linux is more smooth but if you are willing to tinker it can work. As Linux gets all the attention you will see stuff such as Chromium lag behind.
I can understand that can scare people off. But FreeBSD feels like a comfortable old glove for me. I will suffer the minor holes. My beard has grayed and my hair line is non-existant.
If waiting for a laptop I would perhaps wait for FreeBSD 15 for much needed improvements in WIFI. If you want fast WIFI today you need weird hacks routing through a Linux VM[1]. It works rather well but it is honestly a bit clunky.
Fast still means beyond 802.11g? (11n support is incomplete, last time I checked)
Because there is no corporate sponsor that needs good Wi-Fi drivers on FreeBSD, I doubt it will ever be better. I guess Sony, but it's all custom for them. I doubt there is anything to contribute back, even if Sony was open to that idea.
My wife and I have identical HP laptops. Her's runs Arch (as you do), with KDE and mine runs Kubuntu 25.10 at the mo. Both use NetworkManager.
I look after both.
Randomly after wake up from suspend, wifi may or may not still be working. When I say random, I mean after a kernel update or the wind changes direction. I think wifies lappy is OK now because I seem to get a lot less "support" calls for the last few weeks.
To be fair, there are a lot of moving parts from a lot of bits of Linux involved in a modern distro these days.
When I say hard to decide what solved looks like: if Samba or SSSD crap out, is that wifi's fault or the kernel/driver? This is exactly what Windows has had to solve over the years and I do note things like credential managers and mounts that manage to survive disconnects being bolted on to Linux.
All that scrappy stuff needs to be passed on to the BSDs too. Getting a laptop with file systems that come and go, with a dickey clock tick and networking that comes and goes and VPNs and all the rest.
Getting all of that to work is quite a job.
Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools. Any other tool is either an alternate version, or a UI paint job.
The reason all this is hard is likely a remnant of what Microsoft did in the 1990s to the point where Non Windows OSes are given the shaft
Nvidia, Broadcom, Wifi generally, whatever
I think they assume people know what they're doing but a little x session never hurt anyone?
I stick with a single 43" 4K@60 but it was a bit of a challenge to get on the happy path:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-fli...
All systems can have issues. But the more widely used systems are at an advantage.
I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.
Maybe on some distros, but on Ubuntu is just an `apt-get install` away, or can be even be added from installation time. I've been using it for many years without any issues and the experience is great.
I actually combine some non-ZFS filesystems with ZFS with encryption and compression for all my setups, including my laptop. I plan to blog shortly about it and how I'm automating it all. Target is also a Framework laptop, too.
This is one of my favorite things about FreeBSD, I love being able to take a snapshot of my system before doing an update.
Even under Linux DisplayLink support was a bit iffy, with kernel updates breaking support with frustrating regularity, but that hasn't happened in the last couple of years.
Apparently FreeBSD has had DisplayLink support built into the kernel since 2015[0], and I'm sure I've tried it since then and couldn't get it to work. However it's been at least five years since I tried it last, so maybe I need to try again (although I'm very comfortable with my Linux desktop flow now).
[0]:https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-DisplayLink-Support
I've tinkered with it in the past and I once had a job where we ran in on our servers. It seems pretty nice, but it never gets the attention Linux gets and the hardware support situation is sorta sad. I always chalked it up to the license and assumed people using it just don't contribute anything back. I love Linux and the support it receives from seemingly everyone these days, but it would be nice to have other options too.
Would love to see it surge in popularity. Underrated OS.
If they do I might try it. However I've had issues getting the video drivers to behave on BSDs even ones that "should" work. Hopefully podman and/or docker is something I can use easily.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd_desktop/comments/1opmb9k/op...
Then somehow freebsd becomes a new darling and they just got done spending a couple years going out of their way to make sure they miss out on that wave. Or worse try dust off their last version of Core and act like "our proud tradition ..." Ugh I'm so not happy with that company...I paid way too much for one of their official own-brand servers instead of just running it on whatever random way better hardware I want.
But I'll say that even I only use freebsd for zvault and opnsense. I try every now and then to make it my laptop daily driver but there are just too many annoyances and things that don't work or aren't supported well enough or that break with updates or that aren't automated or preconfigured well enough etc. I cannot give examples without writing way too much. This is the short version. And I've been a linux daily driver forever without really minding those same sorts of extra efforts needed for linux vs windows or mac, so this does not come from someone who just can't tolerate rough edges or can't figure things out.
But I have also avoided "cheating" by using one of the purpose built desktop distros like ghostbsd or dragonfly etc, so I might be shooting myself in the foot. I do have an old laptop with freebsd 14.something on it currently which is more or less working but not all the hardware works and it kills the battery in 20 minutes. But it runs, even the weird proprietary Sony 2-in-1 ssd and the wifi. Probably not the bluetooth and I never even dared to hope or try the webcam or the fingreprint. I don't remember about backlight or keyboard backlight control.
The onboarding rails just aren’t there these days. Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.
One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience.
If you try it again, the FreeBSD Handbook is the onboarding guide. [1] It's been a long while since I've set something up going from the Handbook, so I can't personally attest to its quality, but it's supposed to be good.
> One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience
I can't imagine they work well on Linux either, because different distributions have a different selection of tools, especially when you consider older documentation that's still out there and no longer works on mainstream distributions as tools have been replaced. The same is almost certainly true for MacOS and probably Windows as well. All of the OSes I can think of where most of the online documentation should be consistent probably don't have much online documentation. I'm not a LLM user (which is probably obvious), but I can't imagine how you'd get good information from it... at best, maybe you could get pointers to documentation you should read and understand yourself, or you could find the documentation and paste it to be summarized? People that use LLMs that I've tried to help with problems will tell me that the LLM told them X when it doesn't make sense and it actively contributes to their problem, so that doesn't give me confidence; of course, people who use LLMs and it solves their problem don't need my help, do they? :)
They do, and they work better on Ubuntu/Debian than on e.g. Alpine, which in turn works better than some wonky Yocto build (ask me how I know). The mere existence of different distributions and tool selections is not the important factor here, but the amount of discourse there is in the training data. Debian and Debian-likes run the table here.
I'm not sure about that. This isn't FreeBSD specific so it's a bit tangential, but I've certainly debugged systems where someone thought it appropriate to run their intensive job on a live box (mind boggling, yes). Seeing it smack dab under their name is kind of important.
Am I missing something?
If you have them unset, you can login to the server as you, see what your service user is up to, and only have to do interventions as the service user or root depending.
If you don't want your service to see what else is going on on the server, you can put it in a jail and not allow jailed processes to see out; not a bad idea to do that anyway, although it does mean starting the service needs root when it likely wouldn't otherwise (you can drop the high priviledged port to 79 and then your service can listen on port 80 without root)
I grew up in times when people were using stuff like Solaris, Novel and my older friends would occasionally gift me a whooping set of 7CDs with something like SUSE or RedHat so I could join the cool kids club.
While former - in my headspace - were like Oracle - specialized, enterprise solutions, the latter were just different breeds of Linux trying to compete with Windows. Nowadays, for an ordinary dude like myself, we pretty much settled on Ubuntu with plethora of different distributions for hackers and tinkers, but, at least for me, there's not much difference between Mint or Arch. It's like sports team, everyone has their own favorite team, but at the end of the day the all play football. Or fashion.
It's like if you'd ask me about a bike I could go for an hour long tangent about different breeds and brands, but at the end of the day if you just want to cycle around the neighborhood just pick any bike you can that more or less fits your size and you're set.
But for whatever reason BSD seems to occupy different space, why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
I mean, if I want to deploy a service on the internet and I need a server, or I want a computer that would work as a weather station around my house, or simply a NAS - I need to pick an OS. At this point I may come to realization that there might be better solutions that my usual desktop system (ie Windows/Mac) and opt for more streamlined solution. But then I have all flavors of Linux. Why is BSD relevant?
Sorry if this sounds stupid, but this questions pops in my head every few years and every time I fail to find the right answer.
Wonderfully under-rated. Robust as anything and SO FAST. It was my sole desktop OS for years, and while I’m dabbling with Debian right now, I miss Void the most. So lean and snappy.
Coming from OpenBSD and FreeBSD, Void Linux feels almost the same. Same rc init scripts and such.