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Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting read!

As mentioned, the wireless and graphics areas are sorely lagging behind GNU/Linux os'. They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch. The priority of both BSDs is clearly not the regular desktop user where wireless and graphics support can be deal breakers. The FreeBSD based PC-BSD (now known as TrueOS) exists, but AFAIK it does not fix the wireless and graphics support situation.

Given that GPU based computing is becoming more prevalent with the advent of ML/DL, I wonder if there are efforts to improve support for graphics.

(It would have been interesting if a Linux guy also joined the conversation, along with a Windows guy and a MacOS guy.)

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The statement that wireless sucks on both is pretty accurate. I recently got an old ThinkPad specifically to run OpenBSD. I have run OpenBSD on a desktop since 4.8 and a home server since 5.1, but never on a laptop. I got the ThinkPad because I have often heard it is the best supported on OpenBSD.

It worked fine on first install, including the Radeon graphics and old Intel WiFi (no -11n, just a/b/g). Used it for about a month. Traveled, tried to log onto a different WiFi, and it couldn't see the router. Got home, and now it couldn't see the home router that it used to work on, though it could see the neighbors' WiFi. Tried everything I could think of, with no luck.

I decided to try FreeBSD on it. WiFi worked, graphics worked, but then I broke my su login when I used chsh to change from the stock csh shell to mksh. Since I was already annoyed with some other FreeBSD things, I decided to completely give up and load OpenSUSE (ha!!) on it.

Linux makes me want to vomit, but I'll be damned if all the hardware doesn't work like a charm out of the box. It's made me seriously consider learning how to write drivers for the BSDs.

I think the primary reason for this (graphics/wireless support, or lack thereof) with regard to FreeBSD is that a large number of the developers -- possibly even a majority, if what I've seen at conferences is any indicator -- don't run FreeBSD as their desktop OS. Instead, they seem to overwhelmingly run macOS. A larger percentage of OpenBSD developers do seem to run OpenBSD on their laptops, however.

FWIW, I do recall hearing about some fairly extensive progress being made recently WRT both graphics and wireless support on both of the BSDs recently, so expect the situation to improve quite a bit in the near future if it hasn't already.

> They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch.

OpenBSD supports up to Broadwell graphics, but neither support Skylake or newer.. except in experimental branches, or patches.

https://www.openbsd.org/59.html

I think the lack of support for some graphic cards is not because of developers but because of hardware vendors. AMD, for example, does not support FreeBSD and OpenBSD officially but supports Linux.

Support for Intel's Broadwell / Skylake range is actively being developed in the `drm-next` branch found at https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/

Current effort is to reduce the difference between "upstream" FreeBSD (being 12.0-CURRENT) and the project branch, and make the code ready for merging into head.

TrueOS merges that `drm-next` work on an ongoing basis. Likewise, if you're on HardenedBSD, there are binary updates via hbsd-update, or if you'd rather compile things, clone the `hardened/current/drm-next` branch from https://github.com/hardenedbsd/hardenedbsd-playground.

FreeBSD is fixing the graphics issue, their DRM-next branch is in or nearly in sync with Linux. It's not on 11 to my knowledge, still needs some testing, but TrueOS ships with it.

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