I would suggest to just install OpenBSD and try it (maybe in a VM?), one of the selling points is the simplicity of the setup process. It can be a one evening project.
But that's the thing. The real benefits from OpenBSD come when it's the only system you need. Who cares how simple and elegant the guest system is, if you need to maintain a linux installation to host it?
A project on the scale of OpenBSD can't possibly support all the hardware that's out there. And the system is under active development, so there are constant regressions in hardware support. That's fine for John Carmack: he can fire up ed and fix a kernel panic, that's how he winds down after work. But the vision that attracts me to OpenBSD is a box in a closet that Google doesn't have the key to, which sits there for 6 months receiving my email and serving my homepage, takes 10 minutes to update, then sits there for the next 6 months; maybe once every 5 years I'd need to read a manpage and port my smtpd.conf to a new syntax. Hardware regressions are what stop that from happening.
The OpenBSD developers are getting what they want, and good luck to them. The shame is that a little bit of coordination, where they chose one model of ThinkPad every other year and committed to supporting it for a decade, would make the system so much more useful for so many other people.
I don't think he's suggesting that as the long term way to use it but as an introduction to the system.
https://github.com/elad/openbsd-apu2
Mine is 4(?) years old, and has never crashed. I use it every day. If you want something newer, or have 10x the power budget:
There's very little that I can't do with it versus my Linux workstation, at least for my needs.
But the problem remains: eventually, the next upgrade will crash every time you boot it, and what will you do then?
If only that were true. And they do releases every six months. And you are not supposed to skip one, or you’re on your own.
Once you find the manual, you’ll realize it’s well-documented and simple, and that simply using it has great educational value.
If those things don’t appeal to you, it’s probably not the OS for you. It takes about an evening to figure this out, in my experience.
OpenBSD's manual pages and online FAQ combined have never failed to answer a question I've had about the base system. It's really that good.
The ArchWiki is close behind in usefulness, but that's maintained by its community and article quality varies.
Installing in a VM is not the best differentiation, since in many OSs these experience was streamlined and everything usually works out of the box, but the customization part is still a good example.
Of course in the end, you might get to a setup similar to other OSs - running a browser in a windows manager and a buch of other common tools (IDEs, editors, productivity apps), but the way you get there, and the amount of problems you encounter along the way is a major part of using an OS.
I think you can get a good impression in a few hours, and see how it's different. (For example, I had a similar experience with NixOS: In a few hours you see how radically different it is and learn how it fits you)
Or is that old information which i should forget?
(All Nvidia would have to do is build another binary; it's still chatting with the same driver blob internally so it's not really clear to me why they don't bother compiling it for FreeBSD.)
Binary compatibility is for userspace programs, not kernel modules.
Edit: I'm not having any FreeBSD systems in use right now, so i don't know if they changed the defaults. What i remember is at least the last two versions were compiled into GENERIC, so you didn't even had to compile your own kernel when that range backwards was enough.
Similar thing in NetBSD, a loooong time ago, even their own driver for 3Com905 relied on the equivalent of that functionality. That caught me by surprise, because i used NetBSD like Gentoo, found some Compat foobarjurassicBSD, wondered why i should use that at all, and had no working net. Fun! :-)
I believe something similar is done in Linux. The difference in experience may come from FreeBSD maintaining a stable KBI over a release version (e.g., stable/12), while Linux aggressively does not maintain any KBI stability; hence the need for DKMS/akmods.
This is unrelated to COMPAT_FREEBSD.
[0] https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 (time coded)
Which changes? Where? I'm looking at said EULA right now and I don't see anything related.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
AMD binary blob? You mean that amdgpu-pro thing? That doesn't exist on FreeBSD.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix
edit: maybe should have added https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 too