Ask HN: Does anyone use FreeBSD or OpenBSD as a daily environment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone use FreeBSD or OpenBSD as a daily environment?

30 pointsstakkur23 comments

Over the years, I've used MacOS and Linux, sometimes switching between the two. I'm curious to know if any readers use one of these BSD distros as a daily driver/dev environment, especially on laptops.

NOTE: Not seeking to start an OS flame war or info dump of what BSD is.

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I do since around 2007.

Here a screenshot from 2010 of that FreeBSD laptop/desktop:

- https://www.deviantart.com/vermaden/art/CorporateBSD-FreeBSD...

After years of using it I slightly modified it to better suite my needs:

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

I have used that FreeBSD on these laptops for all those years:

- Dell E6400 - ThinkPad W530 - ThinkPad T420s - ThinkPad X220 - ThinkPad T520 - ThinkPad W520 <= currently used one

This is my current setup:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/freebsd-13-1-on-th...

Hope that helps.

Regards.

I’ve been reading through your Desktop Series of posts; excellent work and thank you for it!

Thanks mate.

I use OpenBSD on my daily driver laptop and a few other appliances. It's great, but depending on the features and software you need, might not fit your usecase. No bluetooth, no Linux compatibility layer, no WINE, smaller selection of ports, no PCI passthru... A lot of the Linux-targeted embedded and FPGA toolchain software is either unavailable or not straightforward to build on OpenBSD too.

Thanks. Do you find these limitations are device-specific, or just general OpenBSD gotchas that apply broadly?

In general. I've run into very few device-specific quirks with OpenBSD, and those only during the initial installation.

I'm currently a very happy OpenBSD user. I've stuck with Thinkpad laptops because I know they are well supported (sleep, hibernate, etc). OpenBSD does everything I want to do - I'm running a couple/few web browsers for different occasions, claws-mail, I've got my music collection (with a small usb bluetooth dongle), podcasts, camera and favorite paint program, voip, programming environment, other things I use less often like audacity, gnumeric, some astrophotography software I got from github, video editing, etc. I run fvwm as my desktop, which is included as part of the base system.

I tend to eschew software that requires proprietary operating systems or drm. I've grown more opinionated on that as time goes by and proprietary and coprorate software gets more and more user hostile. I don't have a problem finding alternatives for myself.

Over the past couple decades I've switched from Windows to Redhat to Debian to FreeBSD before settling on OpenBSD. I appreciate how stable OpenBSD is over time. I appreciate that it's a very consistent and well documented OS. I got really tired of having to fiddle and fix stuff that gets moved around with system/gcc/gettext/python/java/gnome/etc updates, over and over and over again as the years go by, and OpenBSD does a good job of avoiding that. I'm sure it helps that I've become more of a minimalist, too. It's nice to have a pc that runs the way I want it to, and stays that way. I can't get back all the time I spent tweaking systems that no longer exist.

I've setup my current OpenBSD system with a shell script that I can run after a fresh install to put in place all my system, user, and website configurations (I also run OpenBSD on a vps, an extra beater/travel laptop, and an old desktop I use for backups). This works out nice, I can document all my config settings in these shell scripts, why I did certain things, document dependencies, future enhancement ideas, etc.

I do. two laptops, even if I have warnings regarding usage : if you do like (as I do) having software regarding good hw support, well, I sadly had to exclude nvidia-only-GC-based laptop because it's only vesa (means 100% loading on your CPU instead gpu), or the same regarding wifi.

I do really like openbsd. On my machines, laptops, I do have triboot win/nux/bsd. Nux is LMDE5, debian with cool/glamour/user-ended focused debian distro. Then openbsd running isotop project, means dwm adapted for end users or devs, for the one whom have low specs of hardware (2013 laptop, still running today), plus xfce on another asus, whom wifi AND amd radeon chips are well supported. sadly, my main lenovo have only integrated intel graphics (not so sad) but my broadcom is not detected for wifi, I use it only once a week, mainly in places I have no internet. Please be careful regarding filesystems, openbsd is a very specific area, ext4 is just nobody for that os.

excepted filesystems, wifi/graphical hardware support, plus sometime the lack of "trended"-software ports (eg falkon, and others) to the system, in less than four months I adopted it ; on my hp, Im using LO to write (or wordgrinder), plus thundie for my mails, and firefox/iridium/midori.

Veracrypt is supported since latest version. And with time passes, lot of new features, even if it's designed for specific or servers systems, makes system greater. In addition, everything is made to make the system tailored to your needs and wishes. I do really like it, including the /home encyphered part.

to finish, I would say trying openbsd is like learning arabic : only the beginning -the installation- is the most "complicated" thing, with everything in command line, including the slices (aka subpartitions) ; then I added it to grub2, then installed isotop or/and xfce and you have a good environment of work.

why openbsd? because its C coding (best of all) because its highly secured. because its a demanding project for his maintainers and teams because of purety of code because its one among the rare systems you can use on desktops/laptops (not only thinkpads!) as haiku, whom is not a linux system.

I would add : why-openbsd (dot) rocks isopenbsdsecu (dot) re enjoy!

Applicable comments threads from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32369189

Never had problems with FreeBSD on a desktop using nvidia graphics and Ethernet. I used it on a laptop a few times but WiFi was always an issue, I assume Bluetooth would be too but I never use it.

I suggest staying on the "stable" pkg mirrors and stay away from "latest" as you end up updating your desktop packages often and there is a greater chance of problems.

I usually use xfce as the desktop and it works well.

With stable I think you mean quarterly?

I'm on latest myself, the guys maintaining the desktop tools are really good, often it takes only a day or two for a new KDE version to make it to my computer.

Only right now with 5.26 there's a PAM compatibility issue they're waiting on a backport for. But also there it's clear what's holding it back.

Yes, I did actually mean quarterly, thanks for the correction. I don't mean to make 'latest' seem unstable, it just caused me more issues over the long haul as a desktop user. It is really nice to get the latest and greatest software though, as you say.

Piggybacking on this thread because I'm also interested, specifically in using FreeBSD on a 2019 MacBook and using docker on Linux trough bhyve. How well does FreeBSD run on a MacBook? Any compatibility issues?

I daily drive FreeBSD on my desktop, which covers personal, dev, and professional collaboration use cases. Any modern cloudy things work just fine in a browser, e.g., Microsoft Teams and the rest of their office stack, or other conferencing platforms. For everything else, I use FOSS software.

I run OpenBSD on one of my laptops for personal use, as well as on my home router (an x86 mini pc with multiple NICs). I have no trouble with either.

Yes I do. With KDE. I'm very happy about it. I moved from macOS as I disagreed with most of Apple's choices in recent versions. Now I feel in control of my computer again.

I'm not into laptops though and I heard the latest WiFi cards may be a problem. For me it's not an issue at all though. But I suggest to try it out :)

I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop for almost 20 years. Currently running, uhm, CURRENT on an older Thinkpad.

Using FreeBSD as a desktop won't be fun unless one enjoys a raw and rather spartanic UNIX experience, I guess.

I used to (a year ago): the only problem I had is debugging Python with PyCharm, everything else worked flawlessly. It even has working proprietary Nvidia drivers.

I'm heavy FreeBSD user, it is the only OS on my Lenovo Ideapad 3 Gaming laptop and I'm pretty happy with it.

I heard security people sometimes use it as host, can someone in the industry confirm?

macos is most popular with security folks. Programmers into security and *nix exploit devs might be into it from the small sample I observed. Even among very technical infosec people windows is still their daily driver but macs are in close competition. The more software security focused people are the more unixy they get I guess?

Thanks, I'm thinking more about malware reverse engineering, so I guess Windows is the primary playground, but I assume it's mostly running in a VM.

Depends, I do some of that and know others as well. Your primary OS is up to you but a windows guest is mandatory for a malware lab(flare-vm for me) , in most cases a linux vm is also useful as a network proxy for fakedns and pals (remnux is the popular distro). Most reverse engineers live in MS docs though for windows stuff. Plenty of Linux/mac RE too if your job allows you to encounter them. Some like vmware on windows, I do either vbox on windows or fusion on mac.

Actually, it isn't uncommon to have multiple laptops one mac and others windows.

no i dont even know how. anyone can enlighten me on its advantage over ubuntu desktop?

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