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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t actually verified it for myself, but I’ve read several times that for BSD on laptops, OpenBSD is generally a better experience, supposedly because the OpenBSD devs heavily dogfood (using OpenBSD to develop OpenBSD) whereas FreeBSD devs tend to use other operating systems (predominantly macOS, apparently) on their laptops/desktops.

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I use OpenBSD on my laptop. Honestly it was a better experience than even Arch Linux or the like. More things worked out of box (ran on thinkpad) and there is love put into some simple commands - zzz and ZZZ alias built-ins are actually super useful and you can really tell the people building the OS use em themselves.

I have heard that too, and at some point I might try it out.

Honestly I just wish there was a way to run ZFS as a core partition on macOS. APFS is pretty good, but a full on ZFS thing is really cool, and makes FreeBSD so much more appealing as a result.

Have you seen https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/ZFS_on_Boot ?

I have not...if I weren't afraid of losing all my stuff I'd do it tonight...

Maybe I'll just back up to S3 or something. You have peeked my interest.

I don't think relying on kernel extensions on Mac is a good idea. It takes a lot to get it working and I suspect it will be brittle.

I've had a hard enough time in the past with out of tree drivers on Linux. I can't imagine what it's like with an OS vendor as hostile to the concept as Apple is.

I agree.

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