People who use BSD as their desktop os, why do you choose BSD over Linux? | Hacker News Reader

People who use BSD as their desktop os, why do you choose BSD over Linux?

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12 pointsrodrigo9759 comments

Security, simplicity (at least in principle...), plus an excuse to understand other OS's. FreeBSD had a cool history, and its, like 80% of the way to OSX, right?

In practice getting help or fixing things usually required more deeper thinking than it should.

Laptop drivers, esp. wifi were problematic.

I liked FreeBSD as a server OS, but Fedora runs Steam and AMD graphics out of the box, and finding Red-Hat-related solutions is easy.

If I could use OpenBSD as my primary OS, I would. Unfortunately, the performance isn't there and sometimes you run into compatibility issues. The OS itself is absolutely beautiful though. Great documentation and you get the feeling that someone actually designed it, unlike Linux that has man pages from like 1992.

Because Linux is now fat, bloated and in bed with a few enterprises loosely named as Microsoft and Google.

I reject Linux for the same reason as people rejected Windows back in the 80’s.

Once it went main stream and people went “I use Linux, it’s Ubuntu” which is only commercialised version of Debian. I decided to switch.

I’m not a big gamer so that was never a requirement for me. I just want an operating system that turns on when I press the power button. Linux fails at that. The drama, noise..

Well OS X is a BSD, so I use BSD for my desktop OS because that's what comes on my Mac...

But seriously, the only successful desktop Unix or "Unix like" OS has been OS X, and it's really a joy to use. I don't have to fight it like I do Linux.

If one of the BSDs would offer a better windowing system than X, I'd consider switching. For now, OS X is pretty much where it's at if you want Unix on the desktop.

Unfortunately I stopped using freebsd some 10-12 years ago, due to lack of compatibility and modern applications. I wouldn't have minded contributing with tooling but it lags so much behind linux that it would have been a waste of time. It’s a shame tho because I really liked its structure, performance and generally speaking the philosophy around freebsd and bsd os’ in general.

For me Void Linux hits the sweet spot, between BSD philosophy and Linux compatibility. Really enjoyable desktop distro.

You know what bugs me, Void Linux claims to be BSD inspired but uses a sysv-style init system (runit). I don't like systemd, but sysvinit is even worse. If Void Linux used an rc init system, I would probably switch from Arch Linux. I like OpenBSD's init system: super simple and best of all, no bs runlevels!

1. Void Linux doesn't claim its BSD inspired, BSD inspired could mean 100 different things.

2. runit is not a "sysv-style" init, its the complete opposite. runit is a supervisor and inspired by daemontools. A "rc init" is more closely related to "sysv-style" than runit is.

3. > I like OpenBSD's init system: super simple and best of all, no bs runlevels!

Runit has no runlevels, can actually automatically restart services when they die, can signal services without relying on pid files (which are prone to race conditions) and can create a pipe between a service and a log service that will never lose any logs.

because root on ZFS (for Linux) is a painful endeavour that is best avoided

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