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Comment by mmsc | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD works perfectly on intel MacBooks if you've got one laying around: https://joshua.hu/FreeBSD-on-MacbookPro-114-A1398

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From the link: "Note: The inbuilt WiFi chip is not natively supported by FreeBSD, so you will need to (temporarily) use a USB WiFi or Ethernet dongle, or (as I will explain) copy some files from a different system to the Macbook. You could also just transplant a different chip into the system."

You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.

To be fair, Linux also has trouble with the Broadcom chip, the driver needs to be installed as a separate step on most distros.

I think the intersection between BSD users and people who will buy a dongle or use Ethernet is a perfect circle.

> Broadcom

Here's the real problem.

It's sad how a company that spawned the raspberry pi in earlier times got so evil so quickly.

Every Raspberry Pi ships with a closed source OS, ThreadX, that boots Linux, BTW.

It's MIT licensed now, which isn't particularly useful when it comes to Pi (there's some Broadcom crap in that boot loader so it won't be open sourced) but otherwise is kind of interesting.

https://github.com/eclipse-threadx

Broadcom (and to a lesser extent, Realtek) devices had always been anywhere between hit-or-miss and completely unworkable on Linux, LONG before Raspberry Pi came around.

My experience too. Sometimes I did manage to eventually get their cards working under Linux after pulling some proprietary firmware blobs.

I imagine that is because modern Broadcom is a different Broadcom, Avago bought and took the name in 2016.

RaspberryPi Foundation spawned the raspberry pi and used a Broadcom SOC.

I always saw Broadcom as evil, and saw Raspberry Pi as just reusing cheap parts from set top boxes or similar, with all the proprietary stuff that that comes with.

> You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.

Copying some files from a different machine is not that burdensome. The point is, it works.

By that logic, every piece of software ever made can be said to work perfectly in every situation, because there is always some amount of additional work which could be done to make up for its native deficiencies.

That's quite the leap. The work is already done, they just can't/won't ship the driver in base, right? Isn't it comparable to installing Debian and needing to load in non-free drivers separately?

I was mostly objecting to the "perfectly" part. And I couldn't resist making a Princess Bride reference for amusement.

I assume this is what is meant:

                       | Works Perfectly | Mostly Works | Has Lots Of Bugs
    -------------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------------
    Default Install    |                 |              |
    -------------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------------
    With Add-Ons       |       X         |              |
    -------------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------------
    Major Config Work  |                 |              |

i.e. Declare its working quality after the install is done. The install may take multiple steps. (In this case, copying some files over, apparently.)

Probably not T2 MacBooks though.

Those barely work with Linux.

And I have found the WiFi to be incompatible with some networks.

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