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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

Can I just install it on my laptop, and expect that I'll have graphics, hardware acceleration, wifi, suspend/hibernate out of the box? (There was the live hurd distribution ArchHURD that offered exactly this, I could just put the CD in, and then I had a familiar system with gnome, firefox and such.)

I know there was ghostBSD and desktopBSD for this in the past, but I am not sure what is recommended today?

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Mostly yes.

ThinkPad T14 for example:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/05/14/freebsd-13-2-on-th...

More laptop models:

- https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

Being on you place I would try GhostBSD or NomadBSD - DistroWatch just made a nice review:

- https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20231127#ghostbsd

Regards.

Maybe you can try NomadBSD[0]:

> NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD®. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD®'s hardware compatibility.

Though I am not sure when/if it will be rebased to this new release of FreeBSD.

[0] https://www.nomadbsd.org/

>> Though I am not sure when/if it will be rebased to this new release of FreeBSD.

>> [0] https://www.nomadbsd.org/

> Current Version

> 140R-20231121

Seems to be on 14?

If your laptop is 8-10+ years old, surprisingly yes (not sure about the suspend/hibernate part, I doubt it). I tried to recycle a friend's 2 older laptops and most everything worked out of the box. I even installed the "Chicago" Theme (looks like win95) [1] for ease of use.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpaSXca-tEs&t=214s

Minus hibernate, of course.

Impossibile to tell, I've tried Free, Open and NetBSD on my older ThinkPad and surprisingly OpenBSD turned out to have the best out-of-the-box compatibility. It seemed however to be the worst performance-wise with fans going crazy whenever a browser is opened up. I ended up with Linux.

You are very lucky to be able to do that even with Linux.

I've been "very lucky" with five computers in a row now, for almost a decade. Linux is actually a good, reliable desktop OS these days.

> I've been "very lucky" with five computers in a row now, for almost a decade. Linux is actually a good, reliable desktop OS these days.

This. I've been using Linux as a primary OS across all my devices for about twenty-five years. This comprises half a dozen Raspberry Pi 4s, two laptops and a monster workstation (AMD|Intel x86_64; ASUS, Dell, and ASUS, respectively.)

I used to have enormous linux compat problems with laptops as a matter of course, and I earned my stripes doing custom kernel compiles with patches, etc. The last time I had to do this was, I think, 2016 or so.

In particular, the past half-decade's worth of installs have all Just Worked -- at least, after I turn off Secure Boot.

My feeling is that after you’ve compiled your kernel a few times, everything just works because you learned to debug it the hard way and it seems easy now.

What I understand as “just works” is having a webcam, bluetooth, audio, graphic acceleration, hibernation, wifi, media keys, etc, all working when you first boot after the install.

By your definition, Linux just worked literally the first time I tried it (Linux Mint in 2015) and each subsequent install as well. The distros I have the most experience using are Linux Mint, LMDE, Qubes, and NixOS. They've all cooperated flawlessly with my hardware. I'd recommend Mint for literally anybody, especially since you can try it on a live USB and verify your hardware before installing.

(There is one exception: my client wanted me to use this out-of-date screen casting device which only had support for Windows and Mac. I tried to get it to work for all of ten minutes, and did not succeed.)

literally, that is now the case. Did you not read my post.

Is that a question? If so, I did and it wasn't explicit.

My point is that people used to compiling their kernel have a different idea of what just working means from the rest.

To be clear, not every question requires a question mark :) Punctuation is not a DTD.

And to be clear about the earlier thing: even if I didn't know how to do anything with Linux, it is now possible to install and have everything just work. Including and especially all the parts listed.

When I say "Just Work", I'm speaking as a model user, not a model hacker (with apologies to Umberto Eco's "model reader/model writer" distinction)

> not sure what is recommended today?

I'd recommend using *BSD with a VM on top of Linux.

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