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>Ethernet and WiFi work, although WiFi is a bit slow (only up to 802.11a?) compared to 802.11n/802.11ac capable OSes. And stuff like this is why I've never stu

• PrimeDirective 7y ago
  Because you like the tinkering and believe there should be (fringe) alternatives to mainstream OSes?
  • bayindirh 7y ago
    > ...mainstream OSes? Look how far we've come. Linux was the alternative OS just ~15 years ago. Now it's one of the mainstream OSes. TBH, I'd like to see one of the BSDs to become one of the mainstream OSes too. :) edit: Except macOS ofc. :)
    • criddell 7y ago
      Is Android still built on Linux?
      • bayindirh 7y ago
        Yes.
      • pjmlp 7y ago
        It is, but userspace isn't aware of it. For userspace what matters is ART, ISO C, ISO C++ and Android NDK APIs.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        It uses a (slightly modified) Linux kernel, yes, although its user land is decidedly not GNU or particularly Unix-like.
        • loeg 7y ago
          Doesn't each phone basically ship its own modified Android-Linux with hacked up drivers specific to the model?
          • Fnoord 7y ago
            Ever since Project Treble it got standardized.
            • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
              I thought Treble just made the hacked up drivers use a standard ABI so you could combine them with a different userspace?
    • thaeli 7y ago
      Well, a BSD-branded BSD isn't. (MacOS is technically a BSD.)
      • TallGuyShort 7y ago
        Some BSD userspace only, and with few of the things most BSD people like about BSD.
        • azinman2 7y ago
          What’s it missing?
          • berbec 7y ago
            Zfs
          • TallGuyShort 7y ago
            Open-source, for one, but that's more than just a philosophy in BSD. One of the key design considerations touted by BSD communities is that the kernel and userspace are distributed and built as one cohesive system for which you can get all the source / rebuild on your system. And that's done far more often than in Linux and other more mainstream OSs. But it's not a BSD kernel and what's distributed / used is very far removed from open-source Darwin and anything you could rebuild yourself. On the more subjective side of things, BSDs tend to value simplicity and correctness over new features. OpenBSD takes this to an extreme, but FreeBSD still takes it a lot further than Apple does. But other than having more claim to the UNIX title than Linux and having some BSD userland, it's really not technically a BSD at all. I'll grant you it's arguably a distant descendant of BSD under the surface or in your shell.
          • loeg 7y ago
            Updates since 2004? It's like they took an old snapshot of BSD userspace and some of the syscall interface, except somewhat broken (see the long saga of broken select/kqueue in OSX). Fundamentally Darwin is a completely different beast based on Mach. It's radically different from the core BSD kernel. Most of their userspace is built on Objective-C, which has 0 overlap with BSDs. It's cool that the Mac community used some BSD code way back when — that's why we use a permissive license — but they've forked whatever they took; they never work to integrate their changes back upstream. To the extent that they're a BSD, they're a very very divergent fork of a historical BSD. And that's fine, for them. I don't know if that makes them a BSD or not in some ontological sense.
    • nh2 7y ago
      "Stardate 2020. There is a mainstream OS with great driver support and the best gaming performance, that everybody uses (Linux). There are two other OSs battling for survival: One run by open source fanatics that release open source editors, browsers and programming languages and which frantically tries to emulate the mainstream OS (WSL), and one where stuff constantly breaks on upgrades, fundamental hardware like keyboards doesn't work, and keeping enter pressed logs you in as root (OSX)."
      • drewbug 7y ago
        open source browsers?
        • nine_k 7y ago
          They joined the Chromium project.
      • Thorrez 7y ago
        Linux has the best gaming performance?
        • tpxl 7y ago
          Some games see a significant performance boost running through Wine.
          • Thorrez 7y ago
            Sure some get a performance boost, but I believe more get a performance hit than a boost (and that's not counting the ones that don't even run at all).
        • nh2 7y ago
          Check out some of the recent Phoronix benchmarks.
      • pjmlp 7y ago
        Stardate 2030: Everyone is now doing Chrome apps, with three major companies sharing the cloud OS resources. Some old people keep talking about the crazy idea of owning computers and installing OSes.
    • swalsh 7y ago
      I think Linux went mainstream when the default installation of one of the distributions came with an icon that opened up "Amazon.com"
      • FillardMillmore 7y ago
        Color me ignorant, but which distribution is that?
        • bayindirh 7y ago
          coughubuntucough IIRC, they recently discontinued the link and related data sharing though.
          • Fnoord 7y ago
            It was always possible to uninstall it. Just a nuisance that you have to, while clearly no users ever desired it. It was also terrible that all search requests went plaintext to Amazon.
        • carterehsmith 7y ago
          Ubuntu did some years ago; it did cause some uproar. Just search for "Ubuntu Amazon"
    • GordonS 7y ago
      > Now it's one of the mainstream OSes ...on servers. It's still far, far from "mainstream" for desktops. Still, that's a really big deal. I work for what is firmly a Microsoft shop, and nobody bat's an eyelid now if we use Linux VMs (as long as they're cloud-based). I think 3 things in particular have driven the rise of Linux as a mainstream server OS: 1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild? 2. The shift to the cloud, in conjunction with (3) 3. The rise of DevOps, in tandem with (2)
      • pjmlp 7y ago
        > 1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild? I have. What is done on .NET stays on Windows, for UNIX like OSes we get to use Java. Yes there is .NET Core, it is the future, not all MS shops are buying into it due to the current limitations, waiting to see how .NET 5 will actually look like.
        • GordonS 7y ago
          I'm truly surprised you've seen Windows containers in the wild - across dozens of engagements with very firm Microsoft shops, I've never seen them, nor seen the need. Gods, even MSSQL runs on Linux these days! I'm also very surprised you'd claim that not all Microsoft shops are buying into dotnet core - I've seen the very opposite; every client I've worked with has known dotnet framework has been superceded by core, and has been eager to move. A decent portion of this is driven by certain containerisation, which (realistically) means dotnet on Linux. The only real limitation with dotnet core has been the lack of managed C++ support - a niche use case, and only relevant on Windows, but even this has been resolved in dotnet core 3.1. Considering the not insubstantial performance improvements in dotnet core, and of course the benefit of cross-platform code, I'm really interested to hear about the limitations of dotnet core you've found (the switch for me and all the enterprise clients I've worked with has been great)?
          • pjmlp 7y ago
            Plenty of Microsoft shops are deeply invested in technologies like WCF, EF6, ODP.NET, WPF/Forms component libraries, commercial CMS stacks (e.g. Sitecore), and aren't willing to allocate budgets to rewrite what is working perfectly fine. The kind of enterprises where deployments on IIS, with AD infrastructure on premises, Windows on all company layers are still the name of the game, with some Linux servers for running SAP and a couple of other Java based services. What is missing from .NET Core 3.1? Besides what I have listed above, EF 6 on Core doesn't support the Visual Studio graphical tooling nor the EF 6 .NET Framework EF providers, WPF/Forms designers are still WIP and have issues with commercial component libraries, WCF well, no one is looking forward to rewrite their working code with gRPC. And many are still a little burned with Silverlight and how the whole WinRT, UAP, UWP story went. Back in the .NET Code 2.0 days, I had a project to rewrite a .NET Application into Java, because the customer in question saw a better business value in doing so than investing in .NET Core. Mainly because .NET Core didn't had support for some critical libraries being used in the .NET Application, while the libraries vendor did support a Java counterpart for them. Yes, they will eventually move to .NET Core, when it makes business sense to allocate budget to do so. That is just my experience, others will vary.
    • umanwizard 7y ago
      BSD was mainstream before Linux existed... (and macOS can't really be called a BSD derivative; it is a mostly different OS that has taken some of its code from FreeBSD)
  • jordache 7y ago
    who cares if its not a mainstream os? how many people in the world actually cares?
    • dpbriggs 7y ago
      Apparently OP does -- What are you asking? Some people are motivated by the allure of fringe projects. There's usually a lot of exploration and learning involved with those projects, which can be very rewarding. Not to mention you gain a deeper appreciation for the unbelievable amount of work that goes into the projects.
• namirez 7y ago
  FreeBSD developers and people who use FreeBSD on a daily basis need laptops too. There are not many options out there unless they opt for ancient hardware.
  • zelly 7y ago
    Most of them use Macs and work on FreeBSD in a VM (I'm not kidding)
    • emaste 7y ago
      There are certainly some, but "most" is unsupported by evidence.
    • sien 7y ago
      It'd be really interesting to know the proportion of Linux users who are now running under a VM for their desktop Linux use. I have Linux on the three machines I use. But on each it's via a VM. I run Windows and MacOS on the machines. Where I work this is common as well. It's surely pretty prevalent. The other way a lot of people work on Linux where I work is on a VM on AWS.
      • umanwizard 7y ago
        Raises hand. I'm typing this from an Arch instance running in VMWare Fusion on a macOS host. It's a bit annoying though -- the trackpad is emulated as a scroll wheel, making everything janky, and I can't use my host's full 32gb of RAM... I almost never do anything but run VMWare on the host -- the only reason I haven't given back my MBP and asked work to buy me a Linux machine is because I'm waiting for the 32gb Dell XPS 13 to come out, supposedly sometime this month.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I keep hearing this, and I don't understand it. Windows is just so... messy. At my last job I kept a Windows VM for Skype (S4B) and the odd non-portable app, but I wouldn't want that on bare metal. I don't have experience with Darwin; maybe the experience is better there.
• tedunangst 7y ago
  Because it's fast enough you don't notice it's "slow" outside of benchmarks?
  • dijit 7y ago
    802.11a is not just slow in benchmarks. That’s easily perceptibly slow, even when doing ordinary web browsing (given that web pages are orders of magnitude larger than when 802.11a was mainstream) Theoretically 802.11a is the same speed as 802.11g, but in practice it drops off super quickly and means a “simple” page (like gmail/outlook) is loading in 30s-1m.
    • reidrac 7y ago
      It operates on the 5GHz frequency, instead of 2.4GHz of 802.11b/g (802.11b was more popular when 802.11g was still a draft). Not sure if that was a factor or just that being less popular there was less investment to make it "better". I don't think I ever saw a card supporting 802.11a exclusively, it was part of a chip supporting multiple standards. And then you would always use 802.11g.
      • martey 7y ago
        > I don't think I ever saw a card supporting 802.11a exclusively, it was part of a chip supporting multiple standards. And then you would always use 802.11g. This ignores the historical fact that 802.11a cards predate 802.11g by multiple years - A-only cards were available in 2001 when the initial draft of the G standard was announced.
        • reidrac 7y ago
          I'm talking about the year 2003 in Spain. Perhaps I should have mentioned it. 802.11g was still a draft. There were serious issues to use cards from different vendors to talk to each other, and 802.11b cards were common. Anyway, 802.11a frequency didn't play well with walls (or other solids), added to the shorter range compared with 802.11b (and g), in 2003 b was king and g was introduced early because of the higher speed.
• slacka 7y ago
  I have a T430 at home that runs FreeBSD that acts as a spare PC/browser/home media server. I never have to screw around with anything. FreeBSD has come a long, long way. If I gave you a new Mac or PC, you could spend hours "screwing around" with it tweaking and customizing it, Linux even more so. If you absolutely need 802.11ac, then FreeBSD is not the right OS for T480s. But how many people actually require that speed?
  • utxaa 7y ago
    i am really glad to read this. it is great that freeBSD continues to improve this way. we all win.
• na85 7y ago
  >Suspend/resume works almost fine as the same level as Windows (they sometimes get weird anyway). Don't forget this, which translated means suspend/resume doesn't work.
  • asveikau 7y ago
    Can't speak for TFA's hardware but suspend/resume works fine on my lenovo x1 6th gen running freebsd, with the only caveat being that I had to load some drivers that were not loaded by default. (I think it was called acpi_ibm. Manpage says that's for the Fn key combos, maybe it was something else.) FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop.
    • na85 7y ago
      >FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop. Sadly I agree. My requirements for a laptop are: 1. Working suspend resume 2. Good touch pad with working palm rejection 3. Good battery life Sadly the only laptop that meets these requirements to my satisfaction is my macbook.
      • allset_ 7y ago
        XPS 13 Developer edition meets these requirements. The touch pad isn't as good as a MacBook (none are) but it's plenty sufficient for working when not at a desk and if you do Docker based development having a Linux OS is actually much more performant.
        • selectodude 7y ago
          Going from a MacBook trackpad to literally any other laptop is an exercise in extreme frustration. Even going from Mac OS X to Windows in Boot Camp makes one want to pull their hair out.
          • asveikau 7y ago
• loeg 7y ago
  They almost certainly mean 802.11g or n, not the archaic a. FreeBSD has generally good 802.11n support. It lacks 802.11ac. Yes, if you absolutely need 802.11ac wifi in particular, FreeBSD isn't a great choice. But many modern 802.11n NICs (and 802.11ac NICs, in 802.11n mode) "just work" out of the box, including the 'iwm' devices mentioned in the article, on more recent versions of FreeBSD. FreeBSD 12.0 dates to 2018 — this is like installing Fedora 29 in 2020.
  • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    > It lacks 802.11ac. Why in the world would it lack support for one of the most ubiquitous, not to mention fastest, wireless standards? I mean, it’s been out since 2013.
    • markjdb 7y ago
      Because there are not many people with the ability to add 802.11ac support to drivers, the resources to do so (datasheets, test hardware), and the time required. The 802.11 stack does support at least some 11ac features.
    • loeg 7y ago
      Time, resources, interest; lack of open datasheets and corporate sponsorship from the hardware vendors making the parts. These things don't just happen magically; people make them happen. Linux finally has enough market power that vendors willingly write drivers for it, but I remember a very similar situation with Linux in the 2000s when Microsoft was the only player around with that kind of market clout.
      • bjornjajajaja 7y ago
        Also, who really NEEDS 802.11 ac?? If you’re that picky wtf not plug into Ethernet??
        • outside1234 7y ago
          Planes
• JudasGoat 7y ago
  You should be able to swap the wifi card for something with better drivers. Not being a BSD user, I couldn't give a recommendation.
• mvkel 7y ago
  Totally. This is the virtue signaling of the workstation world. The mere fact that you’re running a computer with *nix, and you get to tell everyone about it, outweighs the fact that 50% of your day is spent figuring out how to get common tasks working on it. Would love to read a piece akin to “I’ve been running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad for two years without issue” which is a standard the other main OSes have established