Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

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> Even if you think Linux isn't better, it can't be worse!

It could be! The truth is complicated. I’ve been using a ryzen desktop running mint for the last year and I just got a M1 pro. I love both of these machines and I still don’t know which I want to be using as a daily driver. (Well, now mint is set up how I like).

These macos bugs are real - and they feel like amateur hour junk. As well as the memory leak I’m also running into a bug on my M1 where WindowServer idles at 100% cpu after I’ve been using my computer for awhile. I have no idea what it’s doing or what causes it, but the only way to fix it is a reboot. (Or kill -9 the process, which logs me out and closes all my programs anyway).

But Linux’s bugs are different. I haven’t rebooted my Linux machine in ages. But on linux I’m annoyed by other things. Lots of programs have broken smooth scrolling. Keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor around are inconsistent. I can’t use the Meta key in intellij as a modifier for some reason - so I can’t use my muscle memory shortcuts (and the ctrl+shift+C is awful as a copy shortcut in xterm!). I use a trackpad on my desktop and the sensitivity is way off - so i get misclicks all the time. App distribution is a mess - flatpak, snap, apt, custom dpkgs and manual make / make install? All of the above? I accidentally ended up with 2 copies of discord installed and didn’t know which one was “right”.

Linux does the core engineering work right but often falls down in frontend UX. (Its definitely getting better these days though). Apple makes nice UX but their core engineering is remarkably buggy. Apple please - I know you think the market wants a new OS every year with new features. You don’t need a new font every year to compete with cheap plastic x86 laptops. Please slow down and fix your shit.

> It could be! The truth is complicated. I’ve been using a ryzen desktop running mint for the last year and I just got a M1 pro. I love both of these machines and I still don’t know which I want to be using as a daily driver. (Well, now mint is set up how I like).

You had better love the way Apple set up their system because that's the only way you're going to get.

For me that's the reason to use FOSS OSes (FreeBSD right now). I got annoyed with Apple changing stuff around on me. Sometimes I like it, sometimes not, but I have very strong opinions on how I like things and on Apple it's their way or the highway (or the steep mountain trail of add-ons/work-arounds that Apple will constantly break :) ).

I used to put up with it because of the "just works" thing but things kinda stopped "just working". I used to see the benefit of opinionated software but it's not for me anymore. This is also why I said things like Ubuntu and Gnome because they're heading in the same direction.

Of course mileages vary and I'm far from a standard user. But I feel like Apple used to care more about non-standard users when they only did Macs and their marketshare was tiny.

How do you find FreeBSD as a desktop operating system? I’m using FreeBSD on my home server and I love it, but I expect that whatever problems Linux on the desktop has will be 10x worse under a more obscure operating system. Though I’d also expect (rightly or wrongly) that FreeBSD would be easier to customise.

So it’s something I’d like to tool around with at some point. Do you recommend it? Do you use any of the Linux emulation stuff to run Linux apps?

FreeBSD is very nice for a well controlled and stable desktop. I use it on desktop since 2005 and did not yet saw a Linux distribution that would provide the same 'zen' experience. Especially with ZFS Boot Environments that make you bulletproof for changes and upgrades.

Maybe my guide will help you to start with FreeBSD desktop:

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/

Regards.

Yes your site was one of my references when I started with this. Many thanks for writing it!

I had used FreeBSD as a server in 2006 or so but moved off it as I moved from colo to VPS at the time and it wasn't supported. So it was off my radar for a long time.

But it's really a great OS for the desktop for me.

Good to hear that someone finds it useful :)

Feel free to ask me directly if you will face any problems with FreeBSD - just use the 'contact' on the blog.

Regards.

I find it really good. It's super stable, I have it running 24/7 for a month at a time and FreeBSD has some really nice things that Linux is only now catching up on. Like ZFS on root (snapshotting your desktop is so cool). It's never crashed on me. Unlike my Mac.

Hardware issues are present yes. Your hardware may vary of course. In my case I had to turn off bluetooth on my NUC (NUC5i5RYK). Because it hangs on boot with some cryptic messages. I probably could have troubleshooted it more but because all my peripherals are wired I didn't really care :)

Also, I don't think sleep works (I don't care, I want it to be ready for me all the time) and I didn't even try WiFi (I have wired ethernet)

In fact the sleep thing is one thing I hated about my Mac Mini. Apple always forces some kind of sleep.. Every morning when I logged in my apps would have this state of "oh wait, just catching up" despite me having switched off all the sleep states with "pmset" and in the GUI, and using an app ("Jiggler") to fake mouse inputs every few minutes. Yet the apps still go to some kind of sleep somehow. Which meant it would take a couple of minutes to be responsive again. I looked it up and this is some "app nap" thing or something. Cool but let me turn it off. My desktop takes 5-10W idle so this is really not something I care about. And during the night I schedule stuff like backups.

Another thing where FreeBSD shines are the jails. I've used them for 15 years and you can even jail GUI apps now. Linux has snaps etc but they're really slow to start up and clutter your mounttab. I prefer this.

But anyway yeah it's really stable. Wayland is not working at the moment but it's being worked on. The developers are extremely quick and responsive at #freebsd-desktop on libera. When a new KDE version comes out they usually have it ready in a day or so. Which is pretty amazing compared to most Linux distros.

I don't use any linux emulation right now. I don't need it. Any apps that were not packaged for FreeBSD I was able to compile natively or use an alternative.

What I also like about FreeBSD is that it's just one OS instead of one kernel and hundreds of distros (basically OSes) doing things around it in different ways. There's usually one good and well documented way to do things, but not by hiding powerful configurability from you like most 'modern' OSes do. If you're looking for something the handbook usually has the answer (though it should be kept up to date more...)

The ports collection is also super. If you want a package but with different compile options than it comes standard you can just do so.

Thanks! That's the second reasonable answer I've got until now.

It guess the distinction in "core engineering" and UX is valid and helpful.

Adapting my point to it: Even the UX may be inconsistent or even outright broken the resulting system is at least somehow usable. If the core of a system is a tire-fire nothing can work, and it makes no difference any more whether you have the nicest UX or not.

One hint regarding the awful shortcuts: You could try to switch CTRL and ALT or META. That's even a common "one click" setting supported usually OOTB by the desktops. Swapping those keys was the one truly right decision regarding usability by Apple, which I welcome even not liking the rest of the macOS UX.

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