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Comment by valarauko | Hacker News Reader

I'm an academic (bioinformatics), and my use case is largely browsing, reading pdfs, drafting scientific reports in markdown (trying to move to emacs and org-mode) & docx, and writing code in python & R. I do rely on many bioinformatics packages, though most are available through conda. Probably 80% of my computer time is spent in Firefox or the command line. I've been linux only for over 10 years now, mostly on Ubuntu or Pop! OS. I'll be moving to a new postdoc position in a few months, and is a opportunity to do a clean install on my creaky Intel Core i3 laptop. I've been leaning towards Arch/Manjaro/Arcolinux, but BSDs have recently popped up in my periphery.

Would you suggest FreeBSD for my use case? Or another BSD? Or something else altogether?

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I have very little experience with the other BSD flavors, but FreeBSD will be different than Linux, for sure. I used to use Slackware and I would say FreeBSD is fairly comparable from a “clean slate” perspective (although now it’s gotten much more full featured). On the surface you will get the usual support for Firefox, your choice of windows manager (I use xfce) and so on, but expect to do some tweaking. Using xfce as an example, the basic install is very different and fundamental than what you might find on something like Linux Mint, but if you see something you like, once you know you can do it, it’s typically not too time consuming to figure out how. More of this will be on your shoulders though. Sometimes you’ll find small things like right clicking on an archive to trigger an unpack won’t work out of the box, you’ll need to add that yourself. But once you get things dialed in, they stay.

After some reflection, I think the number one reason I’ve stayed with FreeBSD all this time is it’s so dang stable and it just works. Historically speaking, I can’t think of anything radical ever happening since I’ve been using it. When it comes time to upgrade it’s been fairly painless which boils down to making a backup and running a couple commands (crossing your fingers is optional, but I think it helps).

TrueOS may be tempting but my experience with it was not very good. In fairness maybe it’s better now. I just use the vanilla release and chug along and won’t deviate again. No point.

But for you – not sure. I write code for my bread and butter and am steeped in technology – I most certainly have blinders regarding the complexity involved, but again, if you’ve been using Linux for 10 years this may not be an issue for you.

*Edited for ramble.

>TrueOS may be tempting but my experience with it was not very good. In fairness maybe it’s better now.

TrueOS development has been discontinued as of May (?) 2020.

Xfce is more than sufficient for my needs - I've been experimenting with TWMs, i3 most recently.

As a long term linux user, I'm well accustomed to spending exponentially more time working on the system rather than actually using it. As biologists, our computational skills tend to be middling, so dogfooding linux as my daily driver was a means to learn. If a BSD daily driver takes my learning up a notch, worth it. The top level comments reference to "elegance" and "well designed" is what struck me - these are not things I'd associate with any of the linux distros I've used.

Do you need CUDA? If so, forget it. Because it is not there on any BSD. OTOH creaky i3 suggests you don't.

edit: I think one of the most important and convenient things is to get a NAS or build a small fileserver. That way you can decouple most of your personal stuff from the systems you are using via NFS/SMB/CIFS and give a damn about interoperability of filesystems, thereby gaining the ability to try out what works best for you without much hassle.

I do use CUDA, though not on my laptop. My usual workflow has been to fiddle around with the code on a minimal dataset which takes up most of my time. Once I'm happy with the logic and how things work, the heavy crunching (if required) is offloaded to CUDA workstations/servers.

The thing that gives me the most pause is how fractured the academic bioinformatics software scene is, and how poorly they're maintained once published. I've often run across requirements for GCC beyond what's included in the current Ubuntu LTS, for example. In my old lab I kept a CUDA workstation running the latest Manjaro for these eventualities, among others.

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