Desktop FreeBSD won't improve unless people are using it | Hacker News Reader

Desktop FreeBSD won't improve unless people are using it

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69 pointsnixcraft60 comments

I gave it the old college try a few years ago out of some weird retro desire to use something "cool" like when I first found Linux in the late '90s. It was an obnoxious hassle nearly every step of the way, but I stuck with it as long as I could stomach. I did what felt like some pretty substantial work trying to update a port, and my issue just sat with no responses for months until someone else came along and independently re-did the work for a newer release.

The running joke about Linux is that next year is perennially the "year of the Linux desktop", but by comparison, FreeBSD feels like it's a decade away from achieving that kind of maturity outside of the server/middlebox space.

It is really difficult to suggest or even use a BSD myself. The hardware support is years behind Linux; Linux is often a year or behind Windows for new hardware, but much more for more niche things. Linux drivers, at least Intel and AMD graphics drivers, do tend to mature faster than their Windows counterparts in my limited experience.

Then you go into development work where the GNU version of many command line tools have more features than the BSD counterparts. Systemd offers very nice unification of a lot of previous disarrayed scripts. Wayland is the future, wish it was smoother and more unified, but people should not be using Xorg as it just does not handle things that well, such as different refresh rate monitors or screen tearing.

The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back. This harms the community. The GPL was very important for establishing a somewhat sustainable open source ecosystem.

>The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back.

Isn't this the main reason they chose it over Linux? Like Sony for the PS?

Also check the IoT space, it is no wonder that there are a couple of POSIX FOSS alternatives with non-copyleft licenses.

NetBSD runs on basically anything. They even fully support the Sega Dreamcast in the year 2023, and has great drivers support in the kernel. If you meant the latest and greatest niche GPU drivers, then sure your point stands.

> The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back

The single largest install of NetBSD is by SDF.org who absolutely gives back to the NetBSD community.

Supporting the Dreamcast is cool... if I wanted to do my computing on a Dreamcast, and if I wanted to do something like that for some reason it would make more sense to use a PS2 instead since it's the most popular console ever, but that has PS2Linux available already which has more software... so there's really no incentive to run BSD.

> The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back.

This isn't true. Looking at the last year of git commits I see significant contributions from a large number BSD-using companies and organizations. Looking at the top of the list (roughly sorted by commit count) we have:

  The FreeBSD Foundation
  Netflix
  Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
  Klara, Inc
  Juniper Networks, Inc.
  Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
  NVIDIA Networking
  Chelsio Communications
  DARPA
  AFRL
  NetApp, Inc.
  Arm Ltd
  Axcient
  Microsoft
  Intel Corporation
  Amazon, Inc.
  vStack
  UKRI
  Innovate UK
  Stormshield
  Modirum MDPay
  iXsystems, Inc
  Instituto de Pesquisas Eldorado (eldorado.org.br)
  Citrix Systems R&D
  Dell EMC Isilon

There are a couple of (admittedly high-profile) companies that use FreeBSD in their proprietary products with limited contribution to the community, but they are very much in the minority.

I'm willing to give a BSD a shot. But trying out OSes is so tiring now that I'm nearly 40. I really just want to pay for a working computer.

I recently was given an Apple computer for work, and I really loathe the whole experience. I'm completely spoiled by how flexible Linux is. You can make it do whatever you want. Apple seems hell bent on not letting you do anything, and what it does do is inefficient or clunky or just broken.

I would go back to Windows, but I keep hearing about how new versions are worse recently. And I expect it's a resource pig.

So before I switch away from Alpine (I finally got it working mostly well; but I have to be extremely careful before installing any package, because it likes to brick itself by removing packages like the wifi support), I'll give BSD a shot. But I anticipate hardware problems and maybe software problems too.

Surprisingly I had almost no issue setting up and Open Indiana machine. But while I do see the arguments for BSD on the server, for desktop it doesn't appeal to me. Requirements for desktop just include to many random third party apps and drivers.

Why in the world are you running Alpine linux if that's the experience you want?

Give Fedora or Ubuntu a try.

Alpine is not meant to be a no-tinkering desktop distro.

I'm still trying to make the full time switch to Linux

When I use MacOS and Windows these days I am baffled by the design choices.

It's like the design process involves the CEO, their yogi, and the finance department.

I have no idea what's going on but the big two desktop operating systems have gotten worse in the last decade.

Linux has been my last hope and it's getting to be passable recently, but there's a lot of work yet before I can make the switch full time.

> I'm still trying to make the full time switch to Linux

Just did that this year. After trying and failing every year I tried ubuntu + gnome + firefox, I succeeded by altering my choices: arch + hyperland + edge

I get the familiar pacman (used in MSYS2) and an UI that very closely matches my keyboard centric AHK configuration (no window borders, my most important apps run in fullscreen on their own workspace) in browser I'm used to (with my vertical tabs and groups, bookmarks etc).

I was using W11 Pro or Workstations before (so I didn't feel the pain home users have with disabled options or ads) and I loved windows, but the shady moves toward deprecating Office 2010 made me take a side as Excel is more important than windows to me.

Now Excel runs happily on Wine within wayland thanks to the HiDPI hyprland patches, I have a quaketerm very similar to Windows Terminal, and a sixel enabled terminal (wezterm) that's just as good as mintty for what matters to me (sixels, colors, italics, ligatures)

I still have some pains as moving to a different OS takes a lot of tweaks, but so far I'm loving it!

I would consider BSD for the native zfs support, but the lack of Bluetooth or SystemD and the pains to get modern options like Wayland means I won't.

I still use office 2010. They are deprecating it how?

It was removed from my start menu without me doing anything.

Also Microsoft has started deploying a special KB to figure out who's still using 2010, and there have been rumors it would get blocked in the future through another KB, even if it can run perfectly fine right now in Windows 11 as it did in Windows 10.

I like Office 2010: it's faster to start Word 2010 that even wordpad, so it's not a risk I'm willing to take. My bet on Linux (and wine to run Office 2010) has paid in spades.

Maybe that’s why the wrong version of one note opened the other day and I had to go hunting for onenote 2010

I read something a few days ago how some developer at Microsoft had to explain why something wouldn't work on Windows for their OS designers who where all using Macbooks.

I'd love to read more about this; do you have a link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

I can't think of any reason why would one use BSD on desktop or anywhere really. BSD flavours were popular 10-20 years ago for licensing reasons. Think like Junos 9 (FreeBSD), FTOS (NetBSD). Now the world largely moved to Linux.

I run FreeBSD for networking purposes -- I still find PF much more comprehensible and reviewable than nftables.

Well yes. Also PF offers way less functionality than nftables + tc. So no surprise it's easier to use/understand.

I'll take dummynet over tc any day

OpenBSD is the most hassle free personal computing experience I can think of. My (now outdated, maybe) experiences with Linux involved:

1. Installing a user-friendly distro and scraping layer after layer of cruft off it until it finally performed acceptably.

2. Installing a cool minimalist distro and spending hours pasting commands from a wiki to build a brittle rice rocket OS that would explode if I sneezed at it.

I was shocked by how little configuration OpenBSD required in comparison. I always assumed it was some Gentoo tier wank given its elitist reputation. All the defaults were sensible. I just installed my favorite packages and went about life.

The same isn't true for FreeBSD of course.

I could never figure out high dpi in openbsd and eventually gave up.

For headless installs openbsd works great for me.

Headless desktops?

Desktops without screens and monitors. /s

That brittleness aspect of minimal Linux setups is one of the reasons why when using Linux I just go with a full fat DE. It’s distracting and unproductive when it feels like your desktop setup is built upon glass stilts as a result of being so duct-taped together.

Yeah - generally speaking these days if I'm setting up a "desktop" running Linux it 99% likely going to be Kubuntu (with snapd purged and Firefox installed from the Mozilla Team PPA).

> OpenBSD is the most hassle free personal computing experience I can think of

if this statement were true, wouldn’t less people use Mac OS X and instead use OpenBSD?

Mac OS X is hassle free

you buy the laptop, you open it, it works

Apple Macs only work as soon as you unbox them because Apple controls both the hardware and software.

If you go an buy some random laptop, then installing Linux or Free/Net/Open-BSD yields unpredictable results.

The only reason that Linux works in more cases than the BSDs is due to the far greater number of device drivers.

Here's an idea for the AI experts, give a Linux device driver to your AI and ask it to produce a compatible, bug free BSD driver.

Unfortunely not even pre-installed GNU/Linux is headache free, e.g. my experience with Asus 1215B.

Not even Windows is headache free.

I have an Asus where the NVMe causes a BSOD every third startup or so.

Passes all the hardware diag I’ve done. No crashes for years using various Linux distros.

I lucked out this time. They (my wife and I bought two) were purchased in a panic when we had covid because we realized we did not have enough computers for the kids to do online school.

> Apple Macs only work as soon as you unbox them because Apple controls both the hardware and software

Yeah, there's something to be said for hardware-software co-design.

I think Alan Kay said something like "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Linux is often the best tool for the job, but the BSDs have their place.

FreeBSD is a very good server OS. It supports ZFS and Dtrace right out of the box. Also it supports both binary packages via pkg and source based packages via the ports system. It also feels lighter on resources than typical Linux distros which is nice for older systems.

OpenBSD is an excellent router OS thanks to PF. It is more powerful than Linux for this purpose. Also the security track record for the default install is pretty much unrivaled.

NetBSD runs on a lot of obscure hardware that Linux doesn't support. It is the best tool for the job for reviving old otherwise unusable hardware. pkgsrc is also a very cool package management system that is not only supported on every architecture that NetBSD supports, but several other operating systems like Linux, macOS, and Solaris/OpenSolaris/Illumos/etc.

My all time Theo (OpenBSD maintainer) interaction, in response to why OpenBSD wasn't affected by TLBleed:

>We didn't chase the fad of using every Intel cpu feature.[1]

The dedication to security is unparalleled.

[1]https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152600018515730&w=2

UNIX is a good headless server OS, that is about it.

Pretty sure Mac users would disagree.

Only those that buy macs instead of paying GNU/Linux OEMs, and then complain macOS isn't Linux.

"Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible."

https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...

"They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them."

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

> FreeBSD is a very good server OS. It supports ZFS and Dtrace right out of the box.

zfs is easily achievable with Ubuntu. Dtrace isn't required by typical users.

> Also it supports both binary packages via pkg and source based packages via the ports system. It also feels lighter on resources than typical Linux distros which is nice for older systems.

Doesn't sound like any practical advantage at all.

> OpenBSD is an excellent router OS thanks to PF. It is more powerful than Linux for this purpose. Also the security track record for the default install is pretty much unrivaled.

PF is the only practical advantage of BSD over Linux but then again, unless you're running a router, you only need simple rules which can be done with any tools easily like ufw or even use cloud service control panel based ones.

> NetBSD runs on a lot of obscure hardware that Linux doesn't support. It is the best tool for the job for reviving old otherwise unusable hardware. pkgsrc is also a very cool package management system that is not only supported on every architecture that NetBSD supports, but several other operating systems like Linux, macOS, and Solaris/OpenSolaris/Illumos/etc.

Nothing practical.

On the other hand, not being able to run docker kills BSD's use by not being able to run any service easily hosted on docker hub.

And slight difference in CLI tools and shell behaviors kill all the little scripts you've written which makes it feel lazy to maintain scripts that work on both Linux and BSD. Quite hell of a job to maintain Ansible scripts that can create an identical environment on Linux and BSD.

I tried to like BSD but now it's dead in me.

Linux has become incredibly bloated. The kernel is bloated, the freedesktop (instead of just X) is bloated, etc

I use NetBSD to keep my sanity, but unfortunately, because of the sheer weight of the Linux userland, its resource inefficiency is slowly creeping into even NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Could you give some example? Not attacking, I'm just curious.

Examples of feature creep? Sure. Rust is a good example. Anytime we deprecate a functioning C program with a Rust one, or add a Rust dependency somewhere, we also deprecate older hardware which can't cope with it, and make those machines useless.

Let's not even mention Electron, at least it won't work on NetBSD and OpenBSD, which prevents a lot of bloat.

Most Linux folks won't care about resource usage because they purposefully use powerful machines with gigs of memory, which hides inefficiencies.

NetBSD does the opposite, they purposefully test and develop the system on small, constrained hardware, whether new (ARM SBCs) or old (VAX stations, 486s and alike). But we can't fork the whole userland, so when Linux moves to large, bloated layers, it compromises a lot of efforts to keep the userland tight and fit.

Well, I also only use Desktop Linux via VMs, since Virtual Box and VMWare got good enough to run it, around 2010.

ChromeOS and Android don't really count, as the Linux kernel is the only thing from GNU/Linux being used for their desktop like purposes.

So in that regard, BSD and Linux are on the same boat anyway.

And as Steve Jobs used to point out, UNIX was never designed for the desktop anyway, note how NeXTSTEP and OS X developer stack barely care for UNIX workflows other than getting the UNIX (TM) stamp.

> People who are into BSD don’t use BSD. This seems to be a reason for lacking hardware support.

Ryzen 9 5950x - no issues

AMD 5700 XT - no issues

Nvidia 3070 - no issues

Presonus - no issues

While waiting for replacement morherboard I did a complete swap from AMD to Intel 4770k and no issues. Linux kernel panicked and Windows BSOD.

What issues are people having?

My desktop runs like a charm. sound works, Internet and WiFi, works perfectly and this is all pretty recent hardware.

Ryzen 2920X GeForce RTX 2060

Charmed.

I don't know which BSD you are using but the article was regarding FreeBSD. One of the issues as noted in the article is the poor support for WiFi. FreeBSD doesn't support 802.11ac and support for 802.11n varies from driver to driver. Personally, being limited to 802.11g or 802.11n would be a nonstarter.

FreeBSD13.

Sure, it's an issue to you. But how is this a FreeBSD fault when it's up to the hardware vendor to release the binary blob?

If the vendor provides the blob for Linux why should FreeBSD have to bend over to Linux blob?

Why are the vendors not providing the blob for FreeBSD?

OpenBSD doesn't seem to have an issue with many of these same cards.

Anybody wanting to give a decent FreeBSD implementation a go, try:

https://www.ghostbsd.org/

I have a FreeBSD vm running kde, but I don't remember if it's 12 or 13... it took a while to get the desktop running, but after that, it just felt like I was running Linux...

Is that a bad thing? I don't know. How come BSD doesn't have its own desktop? Or maybe it does and I didn't know about it at the time... but if I'm going to set up wayland I feel like I might as well run Linux.

But maybe there isn't much to 'improve'...? I suspect this is the feeling shared by those who appreciate it.

Too bad, it's a chicken or egg issue. People won't use it unless it fits their needs. Have kept an eye on it for over two decades now, I still have an active FreeBSD installation but unfortunately, it's nowhere near usable as a desktop environment. In the meantime, Linux has improved a lot, and it's more or less ready.

I use FBSD as my primary OS and as an daily driver have had 0 issues.

What issues are you having?

Various issues, drivers, apps, updates etc.. I actually managed to get it working perfectly for me at some stage but a power outage ruined that. I probably still can get it working perfectly if I want to get down the rabbit hole. But unfortunately, I no longer have the energy to do so. I still do clean install every year or so to check how it goes, but you know, I no longer can spend weeks on just trying to get something working.

I’m using it, and I really like it. I’ve been using FreeBSD as my main operating system for more than two decades. Though I’m fairly OS agnostic, I keep a copy of Linux and Windows just in case. I accept its limitations(Bluetooth) and I think it’s great software

The way netbsd does drivers has always interested me. It seems like you could solve the problem with new distros not supporting lots of basic hardware by using netbsd’s drivers with your kernel

Issues i had with (Free)BSD:

- different partitioning scheme, wants a primary partition for it

- old style filesystem, tried to run it in a VM, run out of inodes when installing ports.

- in the good old days, OpenBSD had the best documentation.

I gave FreeBSD a try a couple of years ago and it was a hassle all the way for me. It's not beginner friendly from what I remember but I hope that has changed.

I stopped paying attention to FreeBSD since the day they adopted their moronic code of conduct.

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