AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop Reloaded | Hacker News Reader

AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop Reloaded

vermaden.wordpress.com

129 pointsvermaden29 comments

vermaden's contributions in making FreeBSD accessible to others is invaluable, as a Google search regarding some aspect of FreeBSD often includes results referencing his blog.

Wayland on FreeBSD does work; combining it with KDE Plasma is quite usable.

FreeBSD is great.

I read this and I feel mostly wonder. About a lot of things.

But hey - I appreciate someone promoting FreeBSD for desktop and doing stuff just because he can. Good for him!

Long time FreeBSD user on and off, currently running 16-CURRENT on my desktop for GPU support. But fwget is a new one on me. I’m gonna try it later and see what it does for me.

FreeBSD is really hard to keep up with the changes - i don’t know of a good source to keep up with what is considered the right way to do things anymore. Anyone know a good source? Linux is much better for blogs.

FreeBSD, as an OS, does not change that much. It's not hard to keep up. That's why it's such a solid OS. The main web site lists any changes or additions with each release.

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/

But you are running 16-CURRENT, which is the development branch not suitable for production or daily use. Is that why you are struggling?

No not all. I’m only on 16 for RDNA4 support, might go back to 15 once it’s back ported, if I can be bothered.

The command I referenced is not, I guess 16 only. Other examples are the service command just appearing, etcupdate being preferred to mergemaster, whatever the current preferred flavour of port upgrade tool is (poudrire, portmaster, portupgrade, something else(?)).

I also have no idea what is a sane way to do things that Linux does as systemd user services like pipewire, xdg-sessions if I want to share my screen.

I think for etcupdate etc, you should be able to get that info from /usr/src/UPDATING

For port upgrades, I dunno if it applies to CURRENT, but pkg seems to work?

I usually read the release notes for each release, which keeps me up to date enough.

I dunno about your session question. In X11, you could drop those in .xsession, but Wayland is a just a protocol, so who knows.

Yeah pkg is fine if you’re using prebuilt packages. I don’t think it builds ports with custom configs for you from /usr/ports. Or maybe it does now and I missed that too.

I much prefer sway as my desktop, but each to their own.

AFAIK the netflix CDN boxes all run -current (they used to at least), so is the main pfsense release.

-current is definitely ok for production

-current is ok with the caveat that you have to be pretty engaged with the development process, ideally having developers employed (or be one yourself)

I was a committer long ago, these days sticking to latest releases on my boxes

Desktop is a moving target and modern hardware usually requires -current, but I wouldn’t call it “production”

IMNSHO that ASRock mainboard is terrible. Worst mainboard I ever bought. It worked fine at first but got issues fast. Only one USB peripheral allowed or all the USB ports loose power, can do unaccelerated 2D but boots to a blank screen as soon as amdgpu loads... I think they've crammed too much features in a small form factor.

I have the one a level up, the phantom gaming one. Those have been solid, maybe better components? Although they do have the inherited issues from using the Intel I225v NIC...

> After I learned how much some Red Hat people wanted to cripple and kill the X11

What is he talking about?

Ages ago Redhat people wanted to stop supporting X11 since it was old and harder to maintain with all the weird extensions and it being older C code. They wanted to move to Wayland and people claim that maybe in maintaining X11 Redhat also made some changes that made X11 worse. You can find all kinds of discussion of why Wayland is bad or why X11 is bad and Wayland is the one and only future. Now things are settled and Wayland won.

The details are in other article I linked to - here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/01/18/200-mb-ram-freebsd...

What did they actually do to kill it?

The 2 quotes just say "they killed it", but the way I read it having followed most linux stuff is just they are finally happy that they were able to "kill X.Org" in RHEL by being able to provide an alternative that they are able to actually improve upon.

And metux was banned from my knowledge after multiple times pushing uncompilable and breaking changes to the actual X.Org repo, which later needed to be reverted and just being stubborn as all hell to work with. Recently even Artix had to drop XLibre support for causing too many issues[0] to put it lightly.

[0]: https://artixlinux.org/news.php#XLibre_support_discontinued

> What did they actually do to kill it?

They did Wayland instead, that killed X11 since X11 windows and such can be spawned under Wayland. but wayland isn't x11 so people miss shit and wish it was there.

Well it is open source, so if enough people miss it, they are free to keep it going, isn't how it always gets talked about?

Except the reality never plays that way, unless we are talking about tiny projects.

Lets see for how long xlibre keeps going.

Great writeout, but also shows the challenges of having regular consumers adopt such systems.

the best thing about freebsd in 2026, is no goddamn systemd virus

> the best thing about freebsd in 2026, is no goddamn systemd virus

Yup. And with FreeBSD's bhyve you can run VMs. My plan to be, at long last, entirely systemd free again is FreeBSD/bhyve/Linux VM (a distro without systemd)/(podman) containers.

The amazing thing with containers is that, by definition, PID1 ain't systemd and they're minimal: no room for systemd and its tentacles meddling everywhere in a container.

Now I could go all Linux (a systemd-less distro) but sadly IMO the Linux ecosystem is way too cosy with systemd, so I prefer a safer bet with FreeBSD.

I wonder how many of us are beginning to use FreeBSD because of our sheer hate of the poetteringization of the Linux ecosystem?

(to op) you must flip your psu around as your cpu is going to cook it. The psu needs fresh intake air.

he's got a 35W TDP cpu... its fine

Modern AMD processors will make use of any thermal headroom they have to go faster (up until they hit power limits), it's very much worth the effort.

While TDP isn't the whole truth, a pretty solid rule of thumb is that a CPU will at most use about 2x TDP. That is still not that much here.

That said, GPUs look like they mostly vent to outside the case, but that is largely untrue. They mostly vent to the inside and that really heats up the case.

As someone who has a few top 10/100 overclocking records across various Zen configurations, you'd be very surprised what a couple C does for peak/sustained boost clocks.

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