What’s the advantage of running BSD on desktop? Even, is it usable?
The only real problem with BSD as a desktop is it tends to be a couple years behind Linux for drivers and the like but is only really an issue if you are the sort who must always have the latest and greatest hardware. It is much like running Linux 20 years ago in that regard, if you want to run BSD you need to buy your hardware accordingly. Most of the Linux software ecosystem has been ported to the BSDs so it is perfectly usable as a desktop system.
In 2011, bsdinstall(8) [1] was merged into HEAD as a replacement for sysinstall(8) [2] and allowed, among others, easy setup of ZFS on Root. It was a CLI-based process with sysinstall.
Granted, both installers look fairly similar and the change may not have been that visible to someone installing FreeBSD once every few years.
[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bsdinstall(8)
[2] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysinstall&apropos...
Which was my point that the rest of that sentence was meant to highlight. What I learned about installing, setting up and using a FreeBSD all those years ago when I first installed it has remained largely applicable over all these years.
People will go online and try and pick and choose their hardware for best performance for Linux and Windows. You do the same for FreeBSD and, in almost all cases, can pick the same hardware using the latest drivers.
Broadcom, for example, does not supply drivers for some of their wifi or networking parts so that's an issue but there are workarounds with other just as good hardware.
There are claims, here, that FreeBSD is "years behind" with software and drivers but that's mostly a false claim. Almost all software and drivers are up-to-date. A few may be a few days/weeks/months behind because FreeBSD maintains its own and doesn't rely on outside parties to do so.
Why does this question or statement have to be an every other day posting somewhere on the internet?
TBH, you have to be extremely careful with new hardware. My P14s barely runs 13.2. Wi-Fi is causing constant kernel panics and Alder Lake GPU is not supported at all, so have to use frame buffer driver. Ethernet NIC works only with jumbo frames. FreeBSD is significantly behind Linux in terms of hardware support. But it's awesome. :-)
I don't do this - I just buy hardware I like and blindly assume Linux will work.
[1] https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
If you like it and prefer it to Linux.
> is it usable?
Yes.
Also, my understanding is BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers (I could be totally wrong, feel free to correct me, especially since the article says the author had... wifi drivers?). Meanwhile the only the pretty much cutting edge Linux Kernel supports realtek wifi devices.
That said, better hardware and software support is definitely an advantage of Linux; but if your hardware supports FreeBSD and you don't want any Linux-specific software that FreeBSD's Linux emulation can't run then most of the time it's just a matter of preference; the platforms have converged quite a lot over the last 20 years – the differences were more substantial in the past.
I'm not sure what you mean with "BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers"; WiFi has been supported for a very long time, and back in the day when WiFi sucked on any non-Windows platform OpenBSD was the trailblazer in this area.
If anything, BSD generally seems more centralized and batteries included than Linux, so it would be the first to have Wi-Fi drivers, going by philosophical stereotype.
These days Linux tends to be a bit conservative though, and it's not the same project it was 20 years ago.
Theodore Ts'o posted something interesting on this a few years ago:
P.S. There is yet another example of "Worse is Better" in how Linux had PCMCIA support several years before FreeBSD/NetBSD. However, if you ejected a PCMCiA card in a Linux system, there was a chance (in practice it worked out to be about in 1 in 5 times for a WiFI card, in my experience) that the system would crash. The BSD's took a good 2-3 years longer to get PCMCIA support, but when they did, it was rock solid. Of course, if you are a laptop user, and are happy to keep your 802.11 PCMCIA card permanently installed, guess which OS you were likely to prefer --- "sloppy but works, mostly", or "it'll get there eventually, and will be rock solid when it does, but zip, nada, right now"?*
I think it's for when living on Linux full time has gotten too easy to satisfy your masochistic autism. (Mine, thankfully, has only taken me as far as Arch.)
> FreeBSD gaming
That's a thing? Wow. :'D
> That's a thing? Wow. :'D
It has been for a long time. Where do you think bsdgames came from? But really I ran the smacx demo from ports [1] on a lark when I was at Yahoo and it worked. I think that was maybe sometime in 2010, but I can't say for sure; the port was marked expired in 2005, but Yahoo's process to run packages from ports was manualish --- you would ask and someone would build it and then it would stick around installable forever more or less... so it probably had been built while the port was alive.
I don't really know what the current status is, but you can run Steam on FreeBSD, so I guess at least some things work: https://www.freshports.org/games/linux-steam-utils/
And what is the stability and usability of docker on FreeBSD?
| That's a thing? Wow. :'D
|
For some oldschool gaming its more then capable :p
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/10/14/oldschool-gaming-o...
There's no philisophical opposition to wifi that I'm aware of in BSDs. Afaik, they all have some wifi drivers. It's just a lot of effort to support wifi, hardware is complex and not generally super well documented, and vendors aren't building drivers for any of the BSDs. That means a lot of work and there's not a lot of people working on it. It's definitely an area where you need to understand the limitations and carefully choose your hardware if you want to run a BSD with wifi. At least for FreeBSD, there's a lot of users that have no intention to run wifi, so it's a real limitation, but those users aren't affected. Laptop users understandably would like wifi support though, clearly.
Moar here: https://is.gd/BECTL
Do You think I should add anything more there?