Comment by glassfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glassfish | Hacker News Reader

I have been using FreeBSD for the last 2 years on a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro, and I have been a long-time Linux user.

Things I appreciate about FreeBSD:

- init system (with real PIDs).

- FreeBSD documentation.

- installation experience (fast and hassle-free).

- stability, consistency and low memory usage.

- DWM / XFCE works great.

- ease of configuring PF

However, there are some main impediments that prevents me from using it as my daily driver:

- WiFi drivers don't work unless it's a ThinkPad I think (specifically Broadcom 4360 on old Macbooks), I bought a Realtek USB WiFi adapter, which works but with reduced performance.

- There are sketchy sound driver issues with the laptop speakers, resulting in tinny sound.

- Bluetooth doesn't work at all, although my BOSS system shows up on hcinquiry.

> init system (with real PIDs).

I like FreeBSD's init system too, but what do you mean about PIDs?

> WiFi drivers don't work unless it's a ThinkPad I think

That's not it; FreeBSD works fine with the wifi in my Dell. I grant that the driver coverage is probably more spotty than Linux, but it's just on a per-device (card/chipset) basis.

Even OpenBSD has better wifi support. I'm able to use the WLAN adapter in my Pi 3 with OpenBSD, but it doesn't work in FreeBSD.

Didn't it used to be the case that a lot of FreeBSD devs used OSX while OpenBSD devs used OpenBSD and this dogfooding produced better device driver support on OpenBSD?

I heard that somewhere many years ago, but it may be false.

Yes that's absolutely true. And sad. What did FreeBSD do now? They are trying to create an environment to run Linux WiFi drivers. It's so hard to get documentation and support to develop a WiFi driver, less and less people want to do it.

Agree with the documentation, its rock solid and NOOB friendly. 7 years ago I had to rebuild and restore an embedded server for a client and with no BSD experience at all it took me a few hours and has been working flawlessly since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com