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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

These rose tinted glasses are pretty strong. I found nothing but pain trying to run the BSDs on recent computers/setups.

There is 'different' as in 'alternative/edgy', and then there is 'different' as in 'won't implement/yagni' which becomes highly subjective.

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> yagni

TIL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

I’ve been using it in VMs just fine. Used it on my desktop just fine for a year. Used it on laptops just fine.

You might have just hit a bad hardware setup that’s outside the scope of support. It happens.

>Used it on laptops just fine.

Which laptop?

Did you use the battery, touchpad, and the wifi?

I find most BSD users who say they use it on a laptop are just using a laptop-form-factor machine like a thinkpad that is plugged in, with a mouse not the touchpad, and connected via ethernet 99.9% of the time. There's nothing wrong with this, but it bears little resemblance to what I consider "using a laptop".

My experience with distros including Open- and FreeBSD on laptops has been universally negative. OpenBSD in particular is very slow compared to Linux on the same hardware, to say nothing of awful touchpad drivers and battery management.

I'm using openbsd on a several laptops at the moment, a dell x55, a thinkpad x230, and a thinkpad x270. Everything works on all of them - sleep, hibernate, wifi, touchpad, colume and brightness buttons, cpu throttling, etc.

On one of them I use a creative bt-w2 bluetooth dongle for audio output, openbsd removed software bluetooth support due to security concerns. The latest wifi standards are not supported on these models, which doesn't bother me. It's not the size of your network, it's what you do with it! I don't mind not having the latest flashy hardware - been there, done that.

I have to pay attention when I purchase hardware, and am happy to do so, because openbsd aligns much better with my priorities. For me that includes simplicity, security, documentation and especially stability through time - I don't want to have to rearrange my working configs every two years cuz of haphazard changes to things like audio, systemd, wayland, binary blobs, etc.

On OpenBSD right now with a Dell Latitude 7490. Works fine.

The reason I like the BSD is that they are easily understood. Have you tried to troubleshoot ALSA? Or use libvirt? Linux has a lot of features, but most of them are not really useful to to general computer user. It felt like a B2B SaaS, lot of little stuff that you wonder why they are included in the design or why they're even here in the first place.

For some reason I had a much easier time getting OpenBSD working on one specific laptop (a Thinkpad E585 where I had replaced the stock Wifi with an Intel card). A lot of Linux distributions got into weird states where they forgot where the SSD was, and there was chicken-and-egg about Wifi firmware.

OpenBSD at least booted far enough that I could shim the Wifi firmware in as needed. I probably picked the wrong Linux distribution to work with, since I've had okay luck with Debian and then Devuan on that machine's replacement (a L13)

probably because OpenBSD developers use laptops, so they port the OS to laptops all the time.

FreeBSD has a few laptop developers, but most are doing server work. There is a project currently underway to help get more laptops back into support again: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop

Lenovo T480s works great with FreeBSD.

From another commentator: "Lenovo T480s works great with FreeBSD."

It was a Lenovo T480s :)

Never had any issues but I've only ever tried to run it on supermicro boards

I've been running it on most of my personal laptops since around version 10. It's a lot like how Linux felt in the late 90s. Depends on your hardware and what you want to do. But it's solid.

If you could handle Linux in the late 90s you can handle it.

So you're saying KDE and Gnome and xfce and enlightenment and openBox, etc, are all desktops that run like the 90s? These current versions, and many more, run on FreeBSD.

No, I was talking mostly about perception of hardware support, package management, and a pre-systemd init system.

But which DE you run is entirely up to you. I'm writing this with FreeBSD running fvwm. On my laptops I run dwm.

Also:

> enlightenment

I haven't kept up with recent developments, but this is the most 1990s WM that ever 1990s'd.

It was early and I couldn't think of all the desktop names so I Googled for "popular Linux desktops" and that's one of them it gave me. Apparently Linux runs a "most 1990s WM that ever 1990s'd".

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