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Comment by romaniv | Hacker News Reader

The first Unix server I've set up was FreeBSD. I was able to go from zero to multiple services working in a sensible manner with next to no Unix experience, using only the Handbook and Running Linux as my guides. Mind you, that was done via command line, not by clicking buttons, so I gained a lot of understanding of how things work in those 3 days.

The core system installs in couple of minutes and runs well on even the crappiest hardware.

There is not WTF stuff associated with runlevels (there are no runlevels).

You can find and install software by navigating a certain directory in the system and typing in one standard command. Great for feature discovery.

FreeBSD has the best documentation among all the software I have ever used: the Handbook, the help screens in the installer, the security emails, the upgrade notes.

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The keyword for me is "desktop". I know FreeBSD might be a good server OS. My question is what features does FreeBSD bring forward for the desktop user in order to be a serious concurrent for Ubuntu, Fedora and the other desktop OS distros.(Does it have a better sound devices support ? better window/desktop manager ? Printer support ? Is it better suited for beginers/average experienced users ?)

It does not have drivers support as good as Linux. Though I found that most peripherals work as intended. The desktop/windows managers are the same as in Linux world - Gnome, KDE, Xfce and Lxde. Most softwares which work on linux will work on FreeBSD too like Python, Ruby, Java. On top of that, FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility. So, technically, you can run anything that runs on Linux. But, I found that google tools or gigantic packages like eclipse do not work on FreeBSD (or I don't know how to make them work). The best thing about FreeBSD is what is best about distros like Arch Linux. They have rolling release. So, you don't have to distupgrade every year and face some weird upgrade problems. Another thing is FreeBSD is much stable (like Debian), which has the same advantages and disadvantages. The cutting-edge stuff does not appear in FreeBSD ports/packages till it is thoroughly tested. Third advantage is FreeBSD is a whole Unix OS in contrast to Linux being a kernel. So, you don't have a lot of variety like in Linux world, which is again a good thing and a bad thing. Most sys admins have experience only in a debian or red-hat distro. So, it will be difficult to find somebody if you are using a distro like Gentoo or Arch or Slackware. In BSD world, there are only two server-based OSes - FreeBSD and OpenBSD, which are similar (at least not as different as debian and red-hat). Finally, FreeBSD is closer to its Unix-roots than Linux. I find that FreeBSD people believe that if you have good documentation, people will be comfortable with command line. Linux world is more about making it more newbie friendly with nice GUIs. (Hence the dominance of Ubuntu).

For a desktop OS, I'd only recommend it for experienced users and those who are willing to hit lots of walls and keep going. You will have a harder time getting almost everything running. For sound, you may have a lot of headaches if you don't like parsing logs for errors, scouring man pages and tweaking config files many times before finding a mix of settings that works. At least that was my experience the second time I tried to use it as a desktop OS (the first time, I gave up before I got to sound). Maybe try PC-BSD, which is aimed at providing a user-friendly FreeBSD desktop experience. FreeBSD does not implement lots of features or aim to be the first to support new hardware.

I have used it as a desktop OS for a few years, and it was definitely a learning experience for me. It was a great one though, because the experience helped me land my first job right out of college in a shop that extensively uses FreeBSD.

But TBH, you should probably just use it for servers ;)

It's not a good desktop system. Furthermore, I don't think that's a priority of most FreeBSD users or developers. If you aren't comfortable in minimal environments, you should be using a more user-friendly system like Ubuntu/Mac/Windows.

My typical question is what does "desktop" even mean? Yes, BSD can run a window manager. It can run cups (though perhaps not the binary driver that counts as support for your $20 inkjet. I recommend, for many reasons, dropping the $100 it takes to get a laser printer with an ethernet port). It's POSIX and X11.

You may have trouble with flash, but didn't you get the memo? Flash is dying. :)

I completely agree.

The handbook is brilliant, FreeBSD is the first non-windows OS I've ever installed. Back then I didn't have an internet connection and did everything with the Handbook alone.

Compared to ubuntu (or really most linux distros, or even PCBSD) it's of course much more complicated, but I really understood what I was doing and how stuff worked.

If you really want to understand how a un*x system works, I really recommand that you give it a try (I've heard similar testimonies from people installing Slackware as well, but FreeBSD's handbook is really stellar).

Beyond that, of course it's not Linux so the hardware support is sometimes sub-par, so I use Linux on the desktop these days. It's still my OS of choice for my servers tho and I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

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