Comment by elagost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elagost | Hacker News Reader

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The way I got started with Linux, even in the early 2000s, was blowing away the Windows install on my laptop and installing Ubuntu. Out of the box everything worked (but the laptop was ancient and didn't have wifi, so that didn't have the opportunity to break) and besides the weird problems with alsa and xorg that were endemic to those days, I had no issues.

A few months ago I tried to install FreeBSD on a spare 5+yr old laptop. FreeBSD doesn't show boot messages (display goes all wonky) and it can't detect half the hardware (network, disks, others). Seems like it's a decade or two behind hardware support on Linux.

Is there a vendor that sells good FreeBSD desktop-enabled systems, i.e. system76 for Linux? I'm now at a point that I'm more than willing to jump into using a BSD desktop, I just want something that works. Alternatively, is there a FreeBSD-based OS that is Ubuntu-like - includes a bunch of drivers and gives me a decent desktop out of the box?

(also, as an aside, the fact that the bus factor of FreeBSD's wifi stack seems like it's 1 reminds me of libinput on Linux.)

Because it is less popular and generally server-focused, hardware support has always been thinner.

Jumping OSes without looking is dangerous. It might go better next time after a review of the hardware compatibility list:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/hardware.html

If you want a preinstalled system, start here:

https://www.freebsd.org/commercial/hardware.html

As a contrast, I was recently setting up an APU2 system as a router. I tried 3 different kinds of Linux (OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Debian), and they were all horribly broken in different ways - Ubuntu wouldn’t even show comprehensible boot messages over the serial port.

I tried FreeBSD, and it booted perfectly the first time and all the hardware worked properly.

I think FreeBSD is just a lot more focused on server/infrastructure hardware.

For some reason Linux distros mostly default to not sending anything over the serial port, even when they can't find a video device.

To get everything you need to have GRUB, the kernel, and inittab configured to use the serial port.

Once you've done that it all works, but yeah annoying.

[1] https://nomadbsd.org which could be called a "distro" or derivative of FreeBSD. But not really, because it IS FreeBSD, just enriched with clever scripts and preselected and configured software. Try it out in live-mode from USB, check if everything works, and install if you like it. If not, wait, or forget it :)

The same applies to [2] http://www.ghostbsd.org

Edit: forgotten [3] http://www.midnightbsd.org Pick your poison.

Why use FreeBSD if you're going to use it as a desktop?

You'd have the same gnome, the same browser etc but a headache to get it working completely than Linux.

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