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I've read about the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer, but don't know that much about it. What exactly does it provide besides emulation of Linux system calls? How

• davidgerard 11y ago
  This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.
  • floatboth 11y ago
    It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11. But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-) You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.
    • david-given 11y ago
      > But you don't need it really. ...games. Is the syscall emulation layer good enough to run the Steam client and, to pick one at random, Kerbal Space Program?
    • tobik 11y ago
      > But you don't need it really. You need it to run Linux Docker containers on FreeBSD. More on https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker
      • floatboth 11y ago
        I don't think that's a good idea. I don't want to run Linux anything ;-)