4mo ago

BSD Vs. Linux

Whilst BSD isn't linux per se, it still has a lasting legacy in the unix like space and notably has been used in game consoles like the PS4.

For you in your personal use case, have you tried a bsd distro? What was better compared to the average linux distro?

Apparently BSD is more modular with its jailing system and seems to have a lower resource usage.

I look at ones like NETBSD and FreeBSD and think, "what exactly do I get out of them that I wouldn't with Linux say, Ubuntu or Void as an example?

What are your thoughts on BSD, you use FreeBSD before?

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56 comments

I tried FreeBSD on a laptop.
It spammed error message all over the installer's TUI until I disabled my fingerprint reader in BIOS.
Then I had to patch and recompile the kernel to get it to talk to my laptop's battery sensor.
Then there were half a dozen other issues I solved one by one, like getting the touchpad and the camera to work, and auto-detecting my networked printer/scanner.
Then I read up on why WiFi is so unbearably slow, and the solution was to pass-through a WiFi driver from inside a Linux VM.
I didn't actually notice any end-user advantage of having a "fully integrated system" either, so I gave up and went back to Linux.
- I’ve not used BSD, but this is cracking me up because this reads like the “Linux Sucks back to Windows” threads from 10 years ago.
  
  I've used Linux for 20 years now, and yes the experience was similar to back then.
  But back then, there wasn't a better FOSS option. Now there's modern Linux.
  Don't get me wrong, I think BSD is a great system. It's just not the right OS for a new-ish convertible laptop.
  
  While you're not wrong there are still FreeBSD pain points particularly around wifi that remind me of 2007 when I first moved to Linux (and then FreeBSD). They're working on it and have some funding put aside to pay developers to help remedy this. Laptops also are very likely to have odd and end edge cases, for instance my chromebook needs to pass audio over i2c which FreeBSD doesn't support and even linux needs some hacky scripts to run through the commands to enable this (and the script needed an update because THIS particular model was slightly different from others by the same brand...). Linux in this regard moves much faster in getting support going and requires little to no pain especially in comparison. I love FreeBSD and use it everywhere I possilby can but there's certainly things it's just not easy/practical to use it for right now.
  
  How is HDR on the BSDs? On Linux it works nicely with plasma6 and wayland.

56 comments