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Comment by hericium | Hacker News Reader

Few things missing for me after a similar switch are FreeBSD's lack of support for 80211ac and 80211ax, trackpad (I ditched Apple's faulty "Pro" hardware but their trackpads are awesome) and fingerprint scanner support for my ThinkPad (T14s AMD Gen1).

What I absolutely do not miss are Apple's constant crappy UI/UX changes and progressing configurability deprivation delivered under the umbrella of secretive security updates.

With Apple I had to choose between security and stable UX. No iPhone or Mac felt "mine" in recent years. I still use iPhone (lesser evil thing) but replaced MBP with ThinkPad (FreeBSD always had good support for ThinkPads) and am not looking back. I don't miss eye-candy software, designer hardware and I cherish configurability and that my computer is "mine" again and feels like a tool not a toy. Due to macOS' BSD roots, large part of my userland remained almost unchanged.

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> configurability deprivation

Macs are rare machine where I live, so I have 0 experience with them.

A few weeks ago someone came at work with a Mac for a presentation and nothing was showing on the projector.

I had to search on the web to learn that in the screen config menu if you press a certain shortcut a hidden menu will appear and let you manage dual screen options. I'm still baffled...

I still never managed to make the thing work, I had to lend a Windows laptop to the guy (which just plugged and played like you would expect from the Mac!).

I use a Mac all the time, and have never had to press a "certain shortcut" for a "hidden menu" for this to work. You literally just check (or uncheck, as your heart desires) "Mirror Displays" under the arrangement tab.

My bad it's a secret button, not a menu: https://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/show-det...

Worst UX ever IMHO.

Like the only way to eject the CD-ROM was by putting the icon in the trash can back then. How do you discover that?

What DE / WM are you running? And why FreeBSD instead of Linux?

POLA, invested time stays valuable. The system is one, not many seperate and daily changing parts. Not having to learn dozens of network management and DNS resolvers gives you back your valuable time to focus on things you really want to do. On the various Linux distributions you must discover how it's glued together at this point in time.

Linux is fragmented, to be sure, but if you go with stock Fedora or Ubuntu, everything just works (mostly). I never had to put any thought into network management or DNS, except to change my DNS from my ISP to Cloudflare.

Ubuntu has been my daily driver for well over a decade now. As a developer I always wanted to give Fedora a try. Every two years or so I give it a chance and... Not even once did I succed in installing it.

Just Google "fedora won't install" and you'll see what I mean. From my perspective fedora is a meme distro.

Yes, I'm a power user. I just don't want to spend a whole day on something that's expected to work out of the box.

Interesting. I'm surprised to hear that. I've never once had a problem, but its installer is weird. Figuring out how to select the target disk is always strange. Other than that, though, it's the same as any other installer.

The thing I really like about Fedora is how recent the software is. I also prefer dnf to apt.

For reference:

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/unbootable-fedora-35-livecd-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qmgxo4/fedora_wont_...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1976653

I really wanted it to work. I too enjoy trying out new versions of software but I never got to experience what Fedora has to offer.

I have went back and forth from Ubuntu to fedora and literally never had an issue. Same for dist upgrades. Right now I only use fedora, and like you, I too am a power user that can't be bothered to deal with os shenanigans.

In my experience Fedora or Ubuntu just work, until they don't, usually after system update. Then you're in poorly documented territory, often deep in the bowels of GNOME. If video or networking broke hopefully you have a backup system to refer back to. Maybe they've gotten better recently, but I've had much better experience with minimalist setups where breakages are far less frequent and easier to fix on the rare occasions they happen.

i3wm on top of compton.

Most of the time, I don't need bleeding edge and I have always found FreeBSD somewhat more coherent and approaching the future carefully, not hastily, albeit this may be related to much lower number of contributors.

For a long time I did not cared for the fact that FreeBSD kernel and userland are delivered by people closely working together but eventually there was an epiphany after comparing with some more chaotic OS options. There's little things like system scripts delivered with correct version of interpreter so you don't have code deprecation warnings during boot time. There's documentation in place - `sysctl -d [-a]` and you don't need tarot, system sources or 3rd party knowledge to configure parts of OS.

Linux is OK. If not for FreeBSD, I'd probably be using Linux full-time. Currently I use it virtualized for Docker builds. Linux is better for a lot of things that may be important to some but FreeBSD suits my use-cases almost perfectly. FreeBSD gives me this "right at home" feeling which I don't get with Linux and which I definitely no longer can get from a commercial OS.

I always used BSD for servers when it is an option. Linux distros are frustratingly different from classic BSD/SysV for seemingly no good reason while FreeBSD is "just right" for me. Same for OS X historically on workstations/laptops. I've tried many times to get FreeBSD working well on laptops but since all of my laptops are macs that has been unworkable.

My biggest problem with OS X in recent years is the process bloat. Mountain Lion was the last "clean" version to have a reasonable number of OS processes running, now it's in the mid hundreds (!) It's not just resource usage, it's the attack surface/telemetry leakage. I only want the absolute minimum processes running and FreeBSD still gives me that.

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