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Comment by jgillich | Hacker News Reader

I have tried FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the desktop a couple years back, but for a while now I've felt that they're becoming irrelevant.

* No Bluetooth support on OpenBSD at all, and it never worked on FreeBSD for me. Linux used to have issues with some devices, but it has gotten much, much better over the recent years (or devices have gotten better).

* Wifi on Linux mostly works out of the box nowadays (with the exception of some Broadcom chips, but even they are getting better). Completely different story on the BSDs, while they have decent support for some vendors like Intel, they take quite a while to support new hardware.

* Gaming is not really a thing on BSD.

* Container tech like Kubernetes and Flatpak does not work on the BSDs.

While Linux has taken a long time to catch up to Windows (and still isn't there yet in some areas), I feel like the BSDs lack the manpower or interest to even keep pace with the world around them. Not only are things not getting better, they are getting worse.

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Kubernetes is hardly ‘container tech’, but a cluster management and scheduling tool for large volumes of containers or VMs. FreeBSD has its own “container”-like feature called Jails, which was written by phk long before Docker / lxc / namespaces were a thing. For the ease of Docker’s CLI and config, use iocage; for cluster management like k8s, look at Nomad. It might not be as flashy and enterprisey as the Linux equivalent, but FreeBSD can easily compete with Linux in containers. Btw, combined with ZFS, Jails are just beautiful. iocage integrates directly with ZFS and creates snapshots before upgrades, data sets per container, shared data sets for base system etc. It’s really really nice.

That is interesting. I would like to hear more about jails and how they compare to containers on linux. This is the first time I’ve heard about nomad and I would like to here more. That the whole thing integrates with ZFS is news to me too.

It is sort of sad but BSD is bad at publishing news and tutorials. I wish there was something like lwn and the slew of endless tutorials to keep me up to date with what is going on in the BSD world. There is so little information or it is so hard to find for somebody in the Mac and Linux world that it might as well not exist at all.

And the thing is, if you “dev” on Mac or Linux and “deploy” on Linux, like a lot of us, you are a *NIX head and are interested in hearing what is new in the BSDs.

The FreeBSD youtube channel is great for long-form intros and talks, if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/c/FreeBSDProject

https://www.freebsdnews.com/

Seems dead since beginning of last year. Any idea what happened.

> It is sort of sad but BSD is bad at publishing news and tutorials.

Say what?

https://www.freebsdnews.com/

http://undeadly.org/

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os

https://nostarch.com/catalog/linux-bsd-unix

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/

Yea, I know of undeadly and read it off and on, freebsdnews too. I stoped reading undeadly a while ago when they had a rather long lull in publishing. From a post further down I take it freebsdnews has the same problem. I fallow DragonflyBSD off and on, since it is the BSD that interests me the most and they to suck at publishing info. I get more info out of a release note about whats changed than by fallowing DragonflyBSD Digest or reading the mailing list archives.

And publishing some books about the BSDs doesn’t really count as “tutorials”.

I don’t think you are getting my point. The comment I respondet to wasn’t just interesting, it gave me a reason to care about FreeBSD and maybe a reason to read freebsdnews and give FreeBSD a try. You need a place where people from outside of your communities can go to get informed enough to actually care enough to install a specific BSD and start reading their news digest.

The number one feature of Kubernetes is that you can extend it, there are almost no limits to what you can do in Kubernetes, it's a platform for platforms. Nomad doesn't compare. Your enthusiasm about ZFS is roughly how I feel about Kubernetes, and why "traditional" approaches seem pretty backwards to me now. ;)

I think you are downplaying kubernetes.

Nomad is very cool, as are most hashicorp creations, but it’s not in the same class. It’s a single vendor solution, has a lot less mileage on it, doesn’t have the same flexibility. It may very well solve your problem but I don’t know that it will work for as many as k8s does.

Really, someone should start to enable k8s with BSD technologies

Realistically, how many people / companies, in reality, need k8s? It’s a very complex solution geared at managing huge clusters. Sure, if you are Google or Netflix it makes sense. But for smaller deployments, I can’t see why less complex solutions cannot work. K8s is a great tool, but it’s very complex and has reinvented a lot of things, which traditional tools can do just as well.

DevOps people with K8s knowledge are much easier to find, and many companies don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Honestly, K8s is as complex as you need it to be. For smaller deployments it's working just fine too.

I used to say the same thing, but now that there is so much K8s knowledge out there, I think it's the wrong question to ask.

You probably don't need kubernetes, but if you already have a k8s cluster and someone who has done it,, with 10 to 20 minutes of work you can deploy your app/service in a highly available. Even if you don't have a k8s cluster yet, these days you can provision one easily without advanced levels of knowledge. Even just zero-down time deploys make k8s a good choice for a small shop. You basically get it for free with K8s.

I moved from Mac to FreeBSD for my daily driver and I love it. But I use a desktop and don't use neither Bluetooth nor WiFi. Didn't even try to get them going.

FreeBSD does have container tech, in fact it had it before Linux did. It's just not the same tech, its jails are its own invention.

And gaming isn't really a thing on Mac either.

Ps I use all OSes under the sun. Windows for gaming, Mac for work, Linux for servers and FreeBSD for my main desktop. I don't really do laptops but I have a Windows 11 laptop from work too.

I'm not a serious gamer but the only computer gaming I do I do on my mac. Cities Skylines for example.

I spent hours upon hours in Stellaris as well.

M1 macs can take some light gaming pretty nicely actually.

I would agree with you, but my Steam library became almost entirely empty after the 64bit-only Catalina update.

One thing I like about OpenBSD as a desktop is that it's extremely focused. Yeah, it's not a good system for playing games, but neither is the laptop I want to run it on. Yeah, there aren't a lot of wifi chips that it supports, but when a wifi chipset works, it just works. None of that Linux ``yeah it kind of works, but you have to jump through all these hoops...'' nonsense. It either works, or it doesn't.

Yes, there are many things you can't do on an OpenBSD system, but those are things you wouldn't really want to do on an OpenBSD system anyway.

On wireless:

/etc/hostname.foobar

lladdr random

join ESSID wpakey blahblahb

inet autoconf

inet6 autoconf

That's it.

It's beautiful because it's not only simple, but you get the understand more of what's going on.

> It either works, or it doesn't.

Sounds like that 50/50 joke (about the likelihood of bumping into a dinosaur in the street).

One thing about OpenBSD that impressed me is that whatever is supported is supported correctly.

My go to example is my laptop’s keyboard backlight works exactly as expected from tty terminals.

I’m willing to limit my hardware options to the small subset that works with OpenBSD in return for having an OS that I can trust. Fortunately, this small subset includes the X1 Carbon thinkpads which are really nice.

I’m experimenting living with a combination of iPad + openBSD thinkpad - iPad for things like Netflix and Zoom where the business isn’t interested in supporting openBSD, and my laptop for everything else.

PS: Bluetooth is a terrible protocol and should be nuked from orbit out of existence. None of my 5 bluetooth headphones (from different vendors and different price ranges) can figure out which device I was last playing from, my car repeatedly steals my bluetooth audio and starts playing music without my consent every single time, audio stops streaming randomly despite my phone/iPad thinking that they are connected and continuing to play - I can rant for a long time. I genuinely respect openBSD developers for deleting the bluetooth stack to improve the OS quality.

Never considered a BSD general desktop use OS but you are really making me consider installing it on my old Thinkpad T420 which is still going strong and upgraded quite a bit.

You don't need Flatpak on FreeBSD. Flatpak was created for a problem that doesn't exist on FreeBSD. There are not a thousand different FreeBSDs with varying kernels and software installed.

When I say BSD doesn't support Flatpak, I mean literal Flatpak. I want to go to Flathub and install any piece of software. Yes, not possible because BSD is not Linux, but as a user I don't care. Flatpak has solved packaging and installing software across distros, and I'm not willing to give it up.

BSD people keep insisting on going back to fifteen years ago GNU/Linux on the desktop as if that was a great thing.

I miss being young, having lots of energy, being able to function on 4 hours of sleep and having all my life in front of me as much as the next person but you'll have to take systemd, networkmanager, docker/kubernetes and zfs off my cold, dead hands.

> but you'll have to take systemd, networkmanager, docker/kubernetes and zfs off my cold, dead hands.

I thought zfs came from Solaris/FreeBSD

You're right, and they also have jails and the FreeBSD service command seems to have been the inspiration for systemd (or is at least so close that it could have been). I think people are just unaware and afraid of trying "new" things.

you and GP are only partially right:

- zfs came from solaris, not from freebsd

- solaris and freebsd share very little as codebases and are very different OSes

- and regarding the previous point: the fact that some OSes shared the codebase ~30 years ago means very little today.

- the zfs people use on FreeBSD today is basically ZfsOnLinux. Som years ago the freebsd people dropped their snowflake implementation and joined the ZfsOnLinux effort, basically because ZfsOnLinux was moving at a way faster pace than they were. The project has been renamed OpenZFS iirc, and FreeBSD periodically rebases on that afaik.

You are assuming FreeBSD has the same problems Linux had fifteen years ago, and thus requires the same changes/fixes/workarounds. It doesn’t. Good example would be PulseAudio, which is mostly a workaround for ALSA deficiencies that FreeBSD doesn’t have.

> I feel like the BSDs lack the manpower or interest to even keep pace with the world around them

That's rich considering that one design goal of OpenBSD is to stay the same no matter what happens around it.

What I really like about *BSD is that things mostly stay the same, although there are examples of the contrary (ZFS adoption, DTrace in FreeBSD, pledge in OpenBSD). Both systems are stable, reliable and just get out of your way.

I totally respect that, but that's not how you stay relevant for anyone but old-school Unix hackers.

I'd say being actively used to run the largest streaming service on the planet makes you pretty relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-HcG8QxPc

Possibly unpopular opinion but serving a lot of data via Ethernet is much simpler than creating a low latency modern hardware accelerated desktop with VR support and playing audio through my latest Bluetooth headset.

That’s another use case which works way better under somewhat modified FreeBSD (PlayStation) than under Linux.

simpler on paper sure. definitely not easy of course

I thought that was the point of things like OpenBSD.

I think that’s a feature of the BSD model. Almost every company making network appliances, etc uses BSD as a baseline, but they don’t necessarily contribute back or consistently drive development. I think the Linux model has better incentives.

The other thing is that the markets the BSD has been historically dominant are dying and consolidating. The world is cloud and cloud is mostly Linux.

What do you mean by 'the Linux model'?

GPL

Linux's cloud overcomplication will make the OS collapse into itself as Windows servers did long ago. People will switch to more simple systems.

I agree, and I think you’re starting to see that with the container spins of Linux.

I’d guess that in a 10 years, somebody will ditch ancient POSIX stuff and hardware support and do something new.

POSIX will be still around, because UNIX compatibility, but not necessarily on top of Linux.

It is already happening with the FOSS POSIX competition on IoT platforms anyway.

Yeah, they'll switch to another cloud that obscures the layers. We don't need to re-invent the wheel, we just have to make the wheel better.

Always wondered why anyone would use desktop on BSD.

Use stuff where it fits well for its purpose.

I use Windows only for gaming, Mac for development and Linux for servers where they excel at what they do.

Also I really don't get why BSD developers care to develop desktop environment with their limited resource but they should just concentrate on server offerings if they want to stay relevant besides having a more free license than Linux.

People say it’s Windows that excels for development (because of Visual Studio), and gaming on Linux is not a huge problem anymore. And BSDs (FreeBSD and Dragonfly, in particular) do excel on the server side. I’d agree that it’s still the Year of MacOS on the Desktop, although Linux is catching up pretty quickly (while Windows is receding into sheer madness).

Gaming on Linux is as bad as it's been in a long time and is only going to get worst because of anti-cheat systems.

Visual Studio is on more platforms than Windows and not even the preferred IDE of most devs on Windows unless they are doing .NET.

FreeBSD does not excel on the server side. I don't know any companies that even use it and I spent the last decade consulting with hundreds of companies.

> Visual Studio is on more platforms than Windows

No, Visual Studio for Macs is a rebranded Mono thing, it has nothing to do with the Windows Visual Studio. There's no VS for Linux.

Of course MS had to complicate things by naming their electron editor Visual Studio Code...

Nope, Visual Studio for Mac started as a rebranded Mono thing after Xamarin acquisition.

Since then, the amount of plugins shared with Visual Studio has increased, which is a reason why Microsoft started pushing to write them in C# instead of COM.

Currently it is being rewritten, and should be mostly completly unrelated to Mono Develop by .NET 7 release.

I'm sure it depends on the games you want to play - competitive games where anti-cheat is a thing, sure, but if you're ideologically against having kernel level anti-cheat then that's not that Linux gaming is bad, it's just that gaming as a whole is bad.

Most single-player stuff I've tried has worked fine on Linux with either Lutris + Wine or Steam + Proton. The only games that haven't are super small indie stuff where I just assume they're coded a little poorly in some way.

You're kidding right? Linux gaming compatibility has been near ideal for me for the past year and we already know the anti-cheat situation is at least being worked thanks to vendors like Valve. I haven't boot into Windows for a long time for gaming. The only real exceptions being Microsoft exclusives or multiplayer EGS titles.

This comment is wrong on so many levels.

But to tackle the main one, gaming on Linux is in the best position it's ever been in. It's not getting 'worse' due to anti cheat, in fact the steamdeck and valve are actively bringing compatibility to linux for those things.

What can you possibly be basing your claim on there? Are you aware of proton?

I'm guessing you haven't heard of Netflix then

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-epyc-cpus-netflix-band...

The widely known use cases for FreeBSD doesn't have much to do with it "excelling" as a server OS.

Where does FreeBSD excel then, because last time I checked all the widely known use cases were split about 50/50 serving and routing, with a side of Playstation.

Re: Linux gaming: Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of the MCC playing on my Linux box. And Ori. And Stardew, RoR2, Everspace, XCOM2, SWTOR, Hades, DST, Hollow Knight, FTL, Terraria, Human Fall Flat, Portal 1/2, and a variety of other games.

As far as anticheat is concerned, that's actively being worked on by Valve and the largest stake holders.

Now list the games that you can't play

Literally none that I've tried have given me problems.

But to the working games, let me add: Overwatch, League of Legends, Anything from GBA/GB/NES/SNES/DS/OtherRetroSystems, Starcraft. Oh, and Minecraft of course.

I'm sure I can come up with more.

Edit: One steam library checking later - and I'll note, this is stuff that I've actually played on Linux (and is also filtered by names I think people would recognize): Arma 3, Blitzkrieg 2, Pit People, Castle Crashers, BattleBlock Theater, Unturned, Invisible Inc., Baldurs Gate, Undertale, Speedrunners, Dota 2, Gary's Mod, Everspace, Raft, AoE 3.

This makes up the VAST majority of my steam library, none of which was purchased checking for Linux compatibility.

It's one thing to say that a specific game you want doesn't work, and quite another to say it in general doesn't work.

Edit again: Rocket League. That's it. That's the only one that I know of issues with, and I don't know if it even still has issues - I stopped playing when it required an Epic account.

Oh hey, lookie there: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 . Sounds like that works too.

You could (to some extent) say the same thing about FreeBSD: https://github.com/shkhln/linuxulator-steam-utils/wiki/Compa...

There's also Proton port but have no idea on how it works nowadays.

https://www.freshports.org/emulators/wine-proton/

>FreeBSD does not excel on the server side. I don't know any companies that even use it and I spent the last decade consulting with hundreds of companies.

Examples come to mind: Whatsapp and Hotmail used to use it before being acquired by companies with their own tech stacks. Netflix's streaming service is based on it. Pfsense was based on it at one time, not sure if it still is. Juniper uses it. If you go check out the FreeBSD Foundation donations pages you'll see Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and others.

Reality is that on the server and in the data center all I need from an OS is a near posix userland and wired network and storage drivers.

I always wondered how FreeBSD foundation is run.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/about-the-foundation/...

They have so little income with those sponsors and multiple times that expense and who is covering the cost?

The total income is like one guy's salary and is that all those big names are paying as sponsors?

I am an avid fan and user of FreeBSD, l have wondered the same thing myself over the years.

Windows excels at development if you're using Microsoft tech. Virtually all other tech stacks are at a disadvantage on Windows. WSL and WSL2 were created largely to address this gap.

WSL and WSL2 were created to target the market of people that buy Mac laptops when they should be supporting Linux OEMs.

People that don't care what OS they are running, as long as they get their POSIX toys.

In fact, given the size of that market, most likely Linux would never happened if Microsoft had been half as serious with Windows NT POSIX subsystem.

Yeah, GNU/NT would have changed everything.

Instead we got cygwin :-/

Windows NT POSIX subsystem was more like BSD/NT, basic effort.

And SUA was also not much GNU related.

> Instead we got cygwin :-/

I've only used what I think is a subset (of a clone or subset?) of Cygwin: "git bash". At two jobs, on two different Win 10 laptops now.

Is the rest of Cygwin also as excruciatingly slow?

My understanding is that the general problem description for "this Unix program is really really slow when recompiled for Windows" is generally either "lots of small files is good style on Unix, but expensive on Windows," or "fork() is nearly free on every Unix, but potentially expensive in NT."

This UNIX program is slow when compiling to any non POSIX OS (Windows is not the only one), because well stuff like fork() has to be emulated.

Sorry, I still don't get it -- I don't understand what either "lots of small files" or "stuff like fork()" have to do with this. Are those really the reason that "git bash", a single command line interpreting shell, runs single commands like 'ls -l *.txt" or "cd ../../uncle_dir/cousin_dir" as if it was stuck in a mixture of tar and molasses? (Do any processes have to be forked to switch my pwd? And it wasn't really all that many .txt files! :-)

Oh well, my entire data set is N=2, so anecdata rather than any wide-reaching survey; could well be pure coincidence. It just struck me as I started a new job last Monday, got a new Windows work laptop and started the arduous process of installing required (and allowed) software on it, how uncanny the similarities between corporate computing environments are... Right down to this apparent slowness on the MING-64 command line.

> People say it’s Windows that excels for development (because of Visual Studio)

Depends on the development you're doing. .NET or C# -- Windows, hands down. That's about it.

Besides, I prefer JetBrains IDEs anyway, which are platform agnostic.

And I'm in the same boat, macOS for work/development, loonix on VMs/servers, and Windows is strictly for gaming.

> …and Dragonfly, in particular…

Can you please elaborate? My exposure to DragonflyBSD is limited to knowing that they have an interesting new filesystem (Hammer2).

What is it like to actually use it? Is Hammer2 a significant improvement over ZFS on FreeBSD? Does Dragonfly have other selling points?

I’d love to hear the strongest case for deploying Dragonfly.

I use it (FreeBSD) because I want my workstation to match my servers when it comes to basics like the environment variables, kernel versions, and packages.

I manage 100+ servers, and 1000+ domains. If I want to make sure that a security patch for a critical CVE doesn't fuck with our systems, or I want to test a new script to make sure it works I do the following:

ZFS snapshot of my "dev jail". Apply the patch/write the script. Test everything and make sure it still works. Ansible: ZFS snapshot the fleet, apply the patch/deploy the script

So gaming and other 'fun' things are not my goal on my workstation, I do use it. There's at least One of us!

Because it's what my servers use, it's what I want to use on my desktop. I'd like to add here that I LOVE using i3. I'm from an age where the OS is supposed to get out of the way. I want to use my programs, not my operating system.

> Mac for development

Is Mac really any better than Windows or Linux for dev? Or is it just that a Macbook is more convenient to carry around?

Compared to Linux it’s a toss up. Though the Mac UI is miles ahead of standard Linux; you have to spend quite a long time tuning your DE to get something good and even then there is UI consistency across toolkits. The Mac has things like Office, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, more games as well. Linux has better package managers and is more customisable.

Both are vastly better than Windows for development.

The Mac OSX UI is at least as bad as Windows. FFS Finder, guys!

Never liked Finder but you can have alternatives like ForkLift and Transmit. I even enabled "Quit Finder" to get it out of my alt-tabbing.

Cocoa is much, much better than anything I have seen on Windows.

Finder is just an application, but the toolkit is pervasive.

For me personally, moving back to Linux has been a huge improvement. Absolutely the only thing I miss from my mbp was having out-of-the-box keymapping of Control to Control and Command to Super, giving me readline throughout the system. I'm sure there's a straightforward way to produce this in KDE, but it'd be nice not to have to monkey with it. Readline is amazing.

Frankly, the tools themselves are quite similar for the web dev that I do, so I can have the same set of tools running on either OS but it's the little utilities that counts.

There may be alternatives in Windows with same quality but haven't looked at Windows other than gaming for a while.

- QR code generator on copy (No you don't paste nor hit the generate button but it produces the code on copy while the app is running)

- Clipboard manager that can search and preview images even. Who can live without a good clipboard manager these days? Losing password you just generated because you copied your user name should be a thing of the past. I heard Win11 finally getting one. Didn't find any good third party ones the last time I looked.

- Trackpad. This is such a good stuff, I just swipe down with my 3 fingers to close any tab/window with customizable gestures. No more hitting the tiny close button and plenty others tailored for each app as if my right hand is a magic wand.

- A good terminal with even better third party one. Windows finally getting Windows Terminal or WSL shell but was a decade late to the entry.

- iOS simulator. It's handy to check how a web site behaves in iOS within your OS.

- Develop for iOS/macOS. For those who do.

And generally the better look throughout than the convoluted structure of Windows app with 10 drop downs in the menu bar, 20 icons below that, with settings hidden under, settings -> advanced -> more.

And it's even worse when it comes to OS setting that is cross buried in the new settings and the control panel that still exists.

I don't get distracted by the OS except for the occasional OS update that would hold me up for 10 minutes.

And the hardware is good too and I guess no one complains Mac is expensive when an Air is like $1k.

> Also I really don't get why BSD developers care to develop desktop environment with their limited resource

Because they want to: they are the limited resource, and have agency. They may allocate their time as they please, and to their own benefit and preferences. Why should they pander to yours, when you don't even use it, let alone contribute? I struggle to comprehend how such an over-entitled expectation arises.

> if they want to stay relevant

I don't think you realise the sheer scale of the unobtrusively installed BSD base, from fundamental infrastructure (SANs, routers) to home entertainment systems (PS5) and more besides.

And of course, rather notoriously, BSD origins still account for a fair chunk of the userland on that Mac of yours.

I used to use BSD on my hobby server just to keep up with the BSD world but nowadays on Linux, I use various packages from Docker hub and little tools from Homebrew but they don't work on BSD and I've lost the reason to use BSD especially when Ubuntu offers zfs in easy to use packages.

I don't use BSD nor Linux for desktop because I like the third party tools offered on macOS for work and now I don't know what BSD is for me. I'm also amazed how FreeBSD doesn't care to make it work on Raspberry Pi.

Perhaps I'm not the only one in the same boat and people may stop packaging tools for BSD and less people may use it.

Not my business but just an advice.

I see the license is a big part that keeps BSD rolling where the manufacturers want to keep their changes to their own and I get it that people should thank how OpenSSH is developed upstream at OpenBSD.

> I don't use BSD nor Linux for desktop because I like the third party tools offered on macOS for work and now I don't know what BSD is for me. I'm also amazed how FreeBSD doesn't care to make it work on Raspberry Pi.

Where did you get that from? Maybe they care, but it's not that easy for some technical reason?

I got that too far. I had the impression it was borked but it just didn't have wi-fi support. Other parts work. But it does limit its usage like making a wireless router out of it. (Can attach an external antenna via USB maybe.)

https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi#What_works

You have bsdgames. What else could you want?

Doom

I tried FreeBSD a couple of years back, and X Windows seemed buggy. I mean, come on, this is something that should have been sorted out by now.

Maybe if one were into speed and minimalism, and didn't want a GUI, then one of the BSDs is a good idea. At the time I thought it was slower than Slackware, according to my completely unscientific evaluation. Linux may be more complex than the BSDs, but remember, a lot of resources get poured into Linux.

I'm glad that the BSDs exist, I'm just not particularly inclined to use them.

> * Gaming is not really a thing on BSD

Sony has a different story to tell

It doesn't help you when you want to run BSD on your laptop or desktop.

This post is opaquely referring to the fact that the Playstation 4 os is based on FreeBSD. Obviously, this is interesting but irrelevant.

Sony also doesn't contribute much of that code back to FreeBSD.

did they contribute anything back?

I vaguely remember seeing something about them contributing some minor security patches or something token. The BSD license doesn't require them to of course, which was probably the whole reason Sony chose it.

just as the os under the ps3 and ps5

Related (and a fun watch!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA

BSDs pretty consistently perform at the bottom of most performance benchmarks I've seen, when compared to Linux.

NetBSD appears to have embraced a niche as a research OS, not sure about the other distros.

Let me guess, the benchmarks you have in mind are Phoronix, right? :->

No I think I saw them on openbenchmarking, why?

Looking at openbenchmarking.org, it seems they are related to Phoronix?

As to why - essentially, Phoronix benchmarks are crap, for a number of reasons:

1. They don't provide things like standard deviation

2. They compile software in improper way

3. They don't even know what are they measuring in the first place

It's been pointed to them numerous times, and honestly, I think it's a waste of time.

I dunno, sounds like sour grapes to me.

Those benchmarks are in agreement with my subjective experience of running (open)bsd on an allegedly well-suoported thinkpad: compared to debian, bsd was sluggish and lasted hours less on battery.

Performance is not the top priority for OpenBSD developers.

No idea about OpenBSD (BSDs are completely separate operating systems), but I remember recent case where certain bad FreeBSD result was tracked down to PTS failing to correctly measure test time.

I hate to say this, but I suspect PTS is not actually a benchmark - it’s a publicity generation tool pretending to be a benchmark.

On OpenBSD and gaming, check PlayOnBSD. Of course is nowhere near Linux or even FreeBSD, but you can set an XFCE desktop with GVFS supported device automounting withou too much hazzle.

I've got a MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from 2011 and 2012. Neither is supported by Mac OS X anymore but Fedora 35 works perfectly on them. Both have Broadcom WiFi chips.

Came to say very similar things. Thanks for saving me this time.

Interesting... I've never used bluetooth or flatpak... or any BSD except in a VM for compat testing. Yet they are described as must haves here.

IIRC BSDs had containers first but they worked slightly differently.

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