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.
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.
For headless installs openbsd works great for me.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
>We didn't chase the fad of using every Intel cpu feature.[1]
The dedication to security is unparalleled.
"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....
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.
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.