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School-Cotton

> What’s the advantage of running BSD on desktop?

If you like it and prefer it to Linux.

> is it usable?

Yes.

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I'm ultra curious about this because I'm pretty much fully transitioned to Linux, and youtube serves me FreeBSD gaming videos now :). What are we linux users missing out on not using BSD?

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.

It's basically a "Why would you choose Arch over Ubuntu?"-type of question. Is there a long list of objective reasons why someone might prefer one or the other? Not really. They just do things in a different way.

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.

> BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers

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.

Not necessarily; certainly traditionally Linux tended to merge things when it's "good enough" whereas BSD tended to merge things when it was "rock solid". There's something to be said for both approaches and both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

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"?*

https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/011552.html

Any idea how the Linux implementation fared 2-3 years after that initial release? Did those rough edges get cleaned up?

I don't know; I never used it myself. I always assumed it did, but PCMCIA Wi-Fi was around for a relatively short period and saw relatively little usage so maybe not.

BSD is to Linux what Linux is to Windows.

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

>> FreeBSD gaming

> 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.

[1] https://www.freshports.org/games/smacx/

I haven't run FreeBSD on my desktop since about 2016, but I spent a lot of time playing games on FreeBSD. Many of the Linux-native games (mostly from Loki) worked quite well on FreeBSD with FreeBSD's Linux emulation, and Wine worked just as well (or just as bad, depending on the game) on FreeBSD as it does on Linux.

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/

Oh really?

And what is the stability and usability of docker on FreeBSD?

PS3,PS4 and PS5 system software is based on FreeBSD. So it's actually one of the most popular OSes that are used for gaming.

| > FreeBSD gaming

| 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...

> Also, my understanding is BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers.

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.

Painless ZFS on root.

... and magic ZFS Boot Environments :)

Moar here: https://is.gd/BECTL

Mine reasons here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

this is my go to reply to people on different forums when they ask "why Freebsd"

Thank You.

Do You think I should add anything more there?

No, not besides keeping it up to date if/when things change. I think you do a good job of explaining the technical and philosophical differences between FBSD and linux

It’s 2023, who still uses Wi-Fi?

I like FreeBSD because I enjoy tinkering, and the entire operating is small and self-contained. You can go to /usr/src and look at the inner workings of anything you want, very easily. Whereas with e.g. Ubuntu you have to figure out what package the thing you’re interested in is part of, how to get its source and build it, etc.

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