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Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

I have tried learning FreeBSD occasionally, mostly for nostalgia because I learned Unix on BSD 4.3 (or 4.4?) on MicroVaxes many years ago. But I get stuck on some very basic things:

- My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but the driver doesn't work.

- The console terminal defaults to 80x25, I don't know how to resize it.

- I can't figure out how to start X Windows.

- If I run it in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), the network bridging doesn't work so my FreeBSD instance has no internet access.

It's probably my fault, I'm sure it's in the docs somewhere. But it probably means that I'm not the target audience for FreeBSD, since I don't have the time and patience to figure out the most basic things.

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> - My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but the driver doesn't work.

It really depends on your Wi-fi card. If you're installing FreeBSD on bare metal with an Intel card, iwx now supports Wifi 6 and 6E cards. Although, since I haven't tested it myself, I can't say it will work as expected if it works at all.

> - The console terminal defaults to 80x25, I don't know how to resize it.

Select console terminal at the boot screen and type the following:

  gop list
  gop set {mode number}

and then reboot the VM

> - I can't figure out how to start X Windows.

Assuming you've installed the appropriate graphics driver from the pkg or ports repo:

  pkg install xorg
  startx

If you don't have the appropriate graphics driver, proceed to step 8 in the webpage below.

> - If I run it in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), the network bridging doesn't work so my FreeBSD instance has no internet access.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd-project/resources/inst...

Step 8 might help.

If you're interested in trying out BSD on the desktop vs in a server or through some other BSD-based appliance distro (projects like OPNsense or TrueNAS Core which build on BSD but are mostly intended to be used from a Web GUI) you could take a look at GhostBSD [0]. It's a vastly more polished and desktop focused project that takes off many of the sharp edges of a plain vanilla FreeBSD install. Of course, "more polished" for BSD is still going to be a ways behind Linux these days. There just isn't the same level of hardware support, eyeballs and companies working on it. But it's not 00s era either, it's a pleasant functional experience. If one wants to test the waters a bit in an easier way it's an option worth considering. Ars did a decent little initial experience run through [1] a few years back (though since it is under active development a lot has changed since then) you could check out if interested. As demoed there it's very viable in a light VM so one doesn't even need to dedicate any hardware for a first try. That review also lists some of the other more GUI focused BSD distributions left out there.

Anyway, there are some options to ease into it more. I find some of the ancient FreeBSD-isms a bit grating on occasion but overall I'm glad it's part of the mix.

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0: https://ghostbsd.org/

1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-d...

FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are for servers, appliance servers and embedded devices mostly. You can use them as a desktop, but that's not where their strengths are. If you want to learn or use FreeBSD in this case I strongly suggest setting up a home server and learn as much as possible.

I've used OpenBSD as my desktop OS for the last 10 years or so. I agree it's probably not the ideal desktop OS for everyone, but I think your dismissal may be a bit too strong.

You do need to be sure your desktop machine is well-suited for OpenBSD. This means supported Intel or AMD graphics (Nvidia won't work well if at all, and not all AMD will either) and network/wifi card.

Do you do a lot of customization, or use a special desktop environment, or do you stick with the base stuff?

I use awesome for a window manager. Other than that and a few color/font tweaks, it's pretty much stock.

https://awesomewm.org/

Most of what I do happens in a browser, terminal, or emacs.

If the user has run of the mill hardware, that only is true in the sense that FreeBSD does not offer to install a desktop environment at time of initial install/setup. Nothing precludes you from installing Gnome, KDE, or any of the many others. IE pkg install gnome.

The only place FreeBSD (or any of the other BSDs) is less robust is driver support, though most common stuff is available. In any event, those needing support for the latest greatest of hardware are probably better of with Windows.

Yet… “On FreeBSD you'll notice right away that you're dealing with a "complete operating system", a system that has been put together very well.” It’s a complete operating system. /s

This is why FreeBSD loses in my view. The arrogance of claiming to be a complete system when basic stuff like wifi doesn’t work.

> basic stuff like wifi

Wi-fi is not basic.

Having written a wifi driver, that’s something I’m comfortable stating unequivocally.

The hardware is almost always proprietary and undocumented, and in many cases (looking at you, Broadcom), a poorly-designed shitshow of complex errata, proprietary magic numbers required for initialization, and in general, an absolute dogshit technology stack.

The only reason Linux has working Wi-Fi at all tends to be because it was used to power a lot of cheap consumer access points, and Wi-Fi chipset manufacturers released binary and open-source Linux drivers — generally of horrific quality, but drivers nonetheless.

No true Scotsman OS needs WiFi so it's not a basic requirement of a complete OS.

It’s a complete operating system on supported hardware, of course. Even Linux doesn’t work on all random laptop hardware.

The arrogance of claiming that "wifi doesn't work", implying for everyone, when it's really just _your_ hardware that it doesn't work on.

For me, FreeBSD wifi works straight of the box on the laptop I have.

No, it "works" in that it's 2.4ghz. That is not what most people would expect from speed at this point.

It will "work" correctly when it supports general consumer expectations e.g 5ghz networks, which has been a common complaint about FreeBSD for years now.

>- My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but the driver doesn't work.

(Even if you get it to work, it's not going to be full speed)

read the handbook... it's the second chapter in this webpage.

...or pick an operating system where you don't need to read the handbook to get working WiFi.

I'm on Linux and have to get a rtw8852 driver from some random-ish gitHub repo to get WiFi in a recent Lenovo.

Does this mean WiFI is only for Win/Mac?

i recently spent 4 hours installing random driver versions to get wifi working on a windows pc, i'm of the opinion wifi is just for phones at this point

RTW8852 based wifi, sure. You can get Linux preinstalled, and with full support from some places. I highly recommend doing that if you're going to run Linux. They'll not have that chip though. They'll have one that works.

That's odd. My 2018 Lenovo Thinkpad had working Wifi out of the box from day 1.

The last time I had wifi driver issues on Linux was 2008.

New chip for Wifi6 hasn’t made it upstream to the kernel yet and relies on patches.

Does it mean rtw8852 is supported on *BSD?

mostly, I can’t make both my usb wifi5 dongles work on ubuntu 22 as well as random Qualcomm wifi4 pcie. These chips must be decade old.

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