Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.
Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.
Most of the major ethernet chipsets for networking you'd expect to find in a server are well supported and the system is quite solid for many server use cases, but you're probably not going to be running bleeding edge consumer hardware day one on it.
On the desktop side of things Linux has far superior hardware support for current GPUs/Wifi chipsets. AMDGPU support is a few card generations behind (they have to spend effort porting from the Linux drivers) and things are still mostly in X11 land and you don't have Valve supporting gaming on BSD.
I'd still be interested in running FreeBSD on severs, it just takes a bit of different knowledge (the handbook is excellent) and with OpenZFS being a thing on Linux there's not as much exclusive to the BSDs on a surface level that Linux can't at least mostly provide.
Imagine quitting MacOS because it doesn't support Realtek RTL8188CUS.
I define "desktop use" in another way, and for my definition any Apple PC is completely non-competitive, by having a much lower performance and a much higher price than a desktop PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU.
Apple PCs have exceptional single-thread performance, but that is irrelevant for me. I care about multi-threaded performance and especially about floating-point FP64 and big integer computational throughput, for which the Apple CPUs are weak, one could say years behind their competition, except that Apple does not make any attempt to compete in this domain.
An Apple PC may be the optimum PC for your needs and that is fine, but you should not believe that any computer user has the same needs as you.
Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace.
The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue.
Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.