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In a perfect world I'd probably use FreeBSD in all the places I currently use Linux. I however don't live in a perfect world so I haven't used FreeBSD for anyth

In a perfect world I'd probably use FreeBSD in all the places I currently use Linux. I however don't live in a perfect world so I haven't used FreeBSD for anything significant in over a decade. My number one problem with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) has been hardware support. I got an HPE Microserver to use as a compact centralized storage. No matter what I could not get FreeBSD even booting on the machine. It's got an AMD APU and apparently FreeBSD has zero support for it. With Ubuntu I had zero installation issues and still got to use ZFS for storage. Similarly I have a SFF AMD box to use as a router. While FreeBSD would boot on it, every few weeks it would kernel panic and need to be power cycled because FreeBSD shit the bed with the Ethernet cards in it. Ubuntu with the same exact usage patterns has given me absolutely no trouble. I've never been able to get FreeBSD fully working on a laptop. Something is always broken (usually WiFi) and power management sucks. It's also entirely inconvenient to have to power down the laptop because it won't wake up when opening the lid. My second major problem has been a lot of seemingly advanced features in FreeBSD are very experimental or simply difficult to use properly. While FreeBSD's Jails are very sophisticated they are a pain in the ass to manage and there's multiple management tools available with wildly different levels of functionality. I want FreeBSD to exist and keep pushing forward but I've given up on using it. None of its technical features can make up for the fact it won't run or run well on hardware I actually own. Advanced features don't mean much to me if I can't use them effectively. I'm not developing FreeBSD (or Linux), my interest in them extends about as far as launching other pieces of software I want to use or that I'm writing. I'm not typically pushing the limits of the systems so interesting optimizations around edge cases don't mean much to me. I don't get paid to support myself or my personal projects so I'm just going to go with the system offering the least hassle. That hasn't been FreeBSD since the 4.x days (compared to contemporary Linux distros).

non-entity 7y ago
>It's got an AMD APU and apparently FreeBSD has zero support for it. When's the last time you tried. I don't remember if I've run FreeBSD on it, but I have a cheap board with an AMD APU that's run NetBSD within the last year. > I've never been able to get FreeBSD fully working on a laptop. Something is always broken (usually WiFi) Yeah WiFi support is super shaky seemingly across all BSDs. I had to make a small patch to an existing kernel driver to get it to work with one of my Realtek cards in FreeBSD. To my knowledge the same card will cause panics in NetBSD when the driver is attached and I have an Intel WiFi card broken in DragobflyBSD.
- giantrobot 7y ago
  > When's the last time you tried. I don't remember if I've run FreeBSD on it, but I have a cheap board with an AMD APU that's run NetBSD within the last year. It's been two or three years since I last bothered. While FreeBSD's support for the board might be better there's no real upside for me to even try installing it. The router box has been happily running in a closet for years. Best case scenario is it does exactly what it does now with minimal effort on my part. It's not worth the effort. This is my common refrain whenever I think about using FreeBSD for a project. I'll most likely end up with some set of things I need to fix or debug. Each problem then saps my time, motivation, and patience. It's an order of magnitude easier to just use Linux and save my energy for interesting parts of a project.

non-entity 7y ago

>It's got an AMD APU and apparently FreeBSD has zero support for it. When's the last time you tried. I don't remember if I've run FreeBSD on it, but I have a cheap board with an AMD APU that's run NetBSD within the last year. > I've never been able to get FreeBSD fully working on a laptop. Something is always broken (usually WiFi) Yeah WiFi support is super shaky seemingly across all BSDs. I had to make a small patch to an existing kernel driver to get it to work with one of my Realtek cards in FreeBSD. To my knowledge the same card will cause panics in NetBSD when the driver is attached and I have an Intel WiFi card broken in DragobflyBSD.

giantrobot 7y ago
> When's the last time you tried. I don't remember if I've run FreeBSD on it, but I have a cheap board with an AMD APU that's run NetBSD within the last year. It's been two or three years since I last bothered. While FreeBSD's support for the board might be better there's no real upside for me to even try installing it. The router box has been happily running in a closet for years. Best case scenario is it does exactly what it does now with minimal effort on my part. It's not worth the effort. This is my common refrain whenever I think about using FreeBSD for a project. I'll most likely end up with some set of things I need to fix or debug. Each problem then saps my time, motivation, and patience. It's an order of magnitude easier to just use Linux and save my energy for interesting parts of a project.