Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

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Originally it was planned to be a distributed OS. The main reason for the fork from FreeBSD was disagreement about what the threading primitives and their semantics should be, IIRC. One major early goal was cache coherency between different machines, though that seems to be abandoned or indefinitely on hold. Other projects have been HammerFS(a filesystem similar to ZFS, and I believe it started before ZFS was ported to FreeBSD), moving more towards a microkernel approach, and dropping support for all platforms other than x86_64. This makes the implementation of things like threading much simpler.

In short, DragonflyBSD is Dillon's experimental OS with ideas he would never be able to get into FreeBSD. It's never really found a niche for production use as far as I can tell, but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.

Source: FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS or both. And I've dabbled with Dragonfly and love reading about obscure unices and their quirks.

> FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS

Oh, could you give a bit of an overview of the State of FreeBSD on the Desktop (or laptop)? I'm playing with the idea. Tried OpenBSD for a while but it just wasn't very consumer-ready. No bluetooth support at all, videos would have audio and video lag, and other issues. Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

It's been a couple years since I daily drove FreeBSD on, my desktop/workstation and I never ran it on a laptop. Still chugging along on my home built NAS(read: shitty old tower with a bunch of disks in it) though.

I switched over from Arch on the desktop for a couple years at one point, and overall I was very happy. The FreeBSD project is still going strong, and they've been greatly improving their Linux syscall compat layer the last few years. ZFS support is great. It's perfectly viable as a desktop OS if you're experienced with Arch and you don't use a lot of weird hardware or software.

What I did when switching was just to install it and start slowly rebuilding my Arch setup as much as possible. It's a fun weekend project with some patience, and you'll quickly find what the pain points might be that way.

There are some tricks with OpenBSD. First, with blueooth, if I recall, OpenBSD devs are not a huge fan of bluetooth. OpenBSD takes a security above all else approach I believe this plays a bit of a role since bluetooth is often poorly implemented by bluetooth devices, so there isn't a huge drive for it to work well on OpenBSD. Bluetooth is also a nightmare to implement and the interest in picking up the torch probably isnt there. Second, small dev team with limited access to hardware. If you want to get the best support for OpenBSD, I've always heard that running Lenovo Thinkpads are the way to go. Quiet a bit of the dev team mains Thinkpads for laptops and they dog food their own code. So the Thinkpads often get the fastest and best support.

> if I recall, OpenBSD devs are not a huge fan of bluetooth

iirc, when they went to implement it in OpenBSD, it was decided the bluetooth stack was basically just too poorly implemented and not really secure. I think if we ever see bluetooth in OpenBSD it will be a rewrite by some of their devs; basically when one of them decides to scratch an itch.

WiFi - doesn't work, you're going to run a VM with linux and pass Wi-Fi device there or deal with 802.11g speed if card even works at all.

GPU - if you're okay with Nvidia blob, then it's all good. If not, then I hope you're okay with RX580 era AMD.

Bluetooth...I don't think people in community know what it is because stack was broken for probably a decade.

Consumer NICs sometimes don't work out of the box.

It's very unfriendly for consumer, which is what I liked, but at one point I had enough and switched to Linux. Still running FreeBSD on home server, tho because i'm too lazy to switch it...

Have you tried iwlwifi?

Yes, it works exactly like I've described:

While iwlwifi supports all 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11 a/b/g modes. Support for 802.11 n/ac is to come. 802.11ax and 6Ghz support are planned.

We will get wider IPv6 adoption before 802.11n works on FreeBSD in stable way.

Ah, my bad -- I misread the 'or' as 'and'. Agreed, lack of n/ac/ax has been an issue! Especially when cloning large repos I didn't realize how much I take >500mbps on wifi for granted.

You can use WifiBox[1], being a user of FreeBSD myself (Laptop, Workstation and many servers) it would be nice to have "native" ac/ax.

[1] https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox

Yes, I've mentioned that solution. It isn't really "FreeBSD support wireless" if I have to run a VM for it, is it?

Just check that your hardware is supported before installing.

https://bsd-hardware.info/

>Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

It can be, it depends on what you use your laptop for. For example, if you game, maybe sticking with Arch is for the best. Bluetooth is supported on Free and NetBSD, but I haven't used it on those os's. EDIT: FreeBSD supports bluetooth, but support might be spotty/depend on how old/new the hardware is. On Free/Net, bluetooth also seems less straightforward ("user friendly) than on linux or commerical OS's like MacOS.

Since you're used to arch, installing, configuring, and maintaining FreeBSD shouldn't be too difficult. Try it in a VM for a while until you get used to using vs linux.

I ran FreeBSD on my desktop for a while; it's fine as a daily driver. I can't speak to bluetooth, and I'm not sure I'd trust it on a laptop (given how hard it is to get suspend working properly even on Linux), but wifi and video work great (you can run the proper nvidia drivers same as Linux).

I have been using FreeBSD as my primary OS since version 1.1.5, and I am currently running 12.4 on a Lenovo T480.

This is what works flawlessly on my configuration (SSD, 8G bytes of RAM): gigabit ethernet, second monitor via HDMI, USB mouse and keyboard, sound via audio jack, video playback on both the internal and external monitor. What I have not tried is Wifi, Bluetooth, the fingerprint reader, and the touchpad (disabled via BIOS). The trackpoint and buttons do work.

IMHO, FreeBSD is a nice system for everyday use. Note, though, that I do mostly terminal-based stuff (and some Ghostview, PDF reading, web browsing, occasional video watching, etc), so YMMV.

I used it to help recover a messed-up Linux instance, copying files over with either Samba or NFS; think NFS kept messing up. But yeah, it'll work as a Windows-friendly file server!

Is it still aiming for being a distributed OS?

Not explicitly it seems, although it certainly has a lot of the necessary features, like a message passing layer and network mirroring support in HammerFS.

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