6 ms·

After a year of trying Ubuntu as my at home dev machine, I'm going back to FreeBSD. FreeBSD is much more of a pain during initial setup, but then it just works.

After a year of trying Ubuntu as my at home dev machine, I'm going back to FreeBSD. FreeBSD is much more of a pain during initial setup, but then it just works. Where as my laptop with Ubuntu has the most finicky Wifi and freezes way too often, and I didnt have these problems with FreeBSD on the same hardware.

na85 6y ago
Do you actually get working wifi, suspend/resume and acceptable battery life under BSD? Last time I tried (open)BSD, none of those things worked acceptably. The recommended way to connect to wifi was to manually edit wpa_supplicant.conf and battery life was a solid hour less than under linux. I feel like BSD is a great "laptop OS" if you're the kind of user that leaves their thinkpad plugged in all the time, essentially using it as a small-form factor desktop. Maybe it's better nowadays.
- 2trill2spill 6y ago
  Suspend and Resume was the hard one, battery life is solid, although I haven't done a direct comparison with Linux. Wifi was easy but not as easy as Linux to setup. On Linux wifi worked out of the box but I would lose wifi a couple times a day. While on FreeBSD I had to edit a few config files to get wifi working but I dont lose wifi every day. To get the Suspend and Resume to work I had to use the drm-next-kmod port.
- laumars 6y ago
  BSD isn’t like Linux where it’s the roughly the same kernel and user land but a different distribution of packages. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are entirely different operating systems albeit with a shared lineage.
- 0ld 6y ago
  > Last time I tried (open)BSD Sorry, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD are very different operating systems, it's not just "different distros" like in the Linux world Whatever you tried in OpenBSD has most likely no relation to FreeBSD Speaking of the things you mentioned, I personally would expect suspend/resume to just work out of the box in the latest OpenBSD, but not necessary in FreeBSD (it was never a priority for the developers). You also don't need wpa_supplicant in OpenBSD (unlike FreeBSD), ifconfig should be enough in most cases. For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD
  - na85 6y ago
    >For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop. I have a small pcengines apu2 running openbsd but I don't enjoy tinkering with it. I find it cumbersome and unwieldy. The documentation seems to be mostly "complete" but it's definitely geared at someone who already has an in-depth understanding of openbsd, and lots of fundamentals are left unsaid, which makes it difficult to learn what the "proper" way to do something is. I end up with a patchwork of hacks and it's very unsatisfying. It took me quite a long time to figure out how to get wireguard working on that box, for instance, whereas on linux and mac it "just works" pretty much out of the box.
    - loeg 6y ago
      > Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop. I think you missed the last clause here: > > comparable to Linux in FreeBSD
      - na85 6y ago
        No, I didn't. Linux battery life is pretty darn close to windows on my hardware, out of the box. Getting freebsd to the level of Linux only after significant tinkering just isn't a good ux. For my personal machine that's unacceptable.
        2trill2spill 6y ago
        You said above you were using OpenBSD not FreeBSD, they are completely different operating systems. Also getting the battery to last long on FreeBSD was a super simple config change, that took less than a minute to do.
    - anthk 6y ago
      >and lots of fundamentals are left unsaid, which makes it difficult to learn what the "proper" way to do something is man afterboot
- andoriyu 6y ago
  This is my life with FreeBSD: > wifi WiFI is working, but not `802.11n/ac`, so you're limited to `802.11g` which sucks, but I use it with ucb-c dongle, so not much of an issue for me. I don't use any GUIs for WiFi because I use the same 3 networks. > suspend/resume Yeah, just like linux it doesn't support fancy states that windows does, but suspend to ram works. Works perfect with laptop lid, but you do need to change a sysctl thingy. > Battery life I can go entire work day on a single charge for my x1 carbon (gen 6). I know that because I forgot to plug it in multiple times. I'm sure OpenBSD has it worse tho.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  I've never edited or even had a wpa_supplicant.conf file under openbsd.
- anthk 6y ago
  OpenBSD handles WPA2 thru ifconfig just fine. ifconfig $IFACE join $ESSID wpakey $PASS
forinti 6y ago
I tried NomadBSD in order to use RDP, but I couldn't get an earlier version of Remmina or xfreerdp. It might be my lack of experience with BSD, but I got the impression that it is very hard to get a previous version of a package with BSD. edit: corrected the name NomadBSD
- 2trill2spill 6y ago
  I've never heard of MonadBSD, but installing a previous version of a package is straight forward on FreeBSD. Just specify the version when you use pkg or use portdowngrade.
- jabirali 6y ago
  Do you mean NomadBSD? Hearing MonadBSD and thinking about Haskell, I suddenly got really curious, but couldn’t find anything on Google...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Hearing MonadBSD and thinking about Haskell, I suddenly got really curious, but couldn’t find anything on Google... That would be a fun name for the BSD answer to nixos...
    - 0mp 6y ago
      Heads-up: Nix is on its way to start working on FreeBSD: https://github.com/0mp/freebsd-ports-nix https://github.com/0mp/freebsd-ports-nix
  - forinti 6y ago
    My bad, it was NomadBSD.
zelly 6y ago
The freezing is not an Ubuntu problem it's a GNOME problem.
- 2trill2spill 6y ago
  Thanks for the heads up, is there a straight forward work around? Or don't use GNOME?
- skibbityboop 6y ago
  Any docs to this effect? I'm curious to check them out because I've had flawless wifi under GNOME across various work laptops since at least 2010. Maybe it's Ubuntu+GNOME specific, haven't run Ubuntu, but it certainly doesn't seem to be GNOME. Ah, on re-read of the OP comment, it's "wifi issues and freezing", two different problems they had. Have never seen either from GNOME though.
  - zelly 6y ago
    Wifi in Linux distros is not handled by the DE. It's usually systemd-networkd and wpa_supplicant. GNOME is very slow. The UI and animations are implemented in JavaScript. KDE Plasma isn't much better though. You should try using a tiling window manager.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      > The UI and animations are implemented in JavaScript This should be a criminal offence
    - iso-8859-1 6y ago
      > The UI and animations are implemented in JavaScript Can you point me to the code implementing an animation in JavaScript?
      - zelly 6y ago
        Here, took me less than 30 seconds to find one: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/0db41a3773eaf7d197d1dede4ec0d04f4b9aaf62/js/gdm/loginDialog.js#L795 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/0db41a3773... It's everywhere
nucleardog 6y ago
I love FreeBSD. Been using it in a server context for going on 20 years now. Trying to use it on a desktop takes me back to, well, trying to use Linux on the desktop 20 years ago. Recently started shopping different distros because I’m not comfortable with the direction Ubuntu is going and rather than upgrade my 18.04 when it’s EOL’d, I’m looking at just hopping to something else for my work laptop. Took hours to get X working with my laptop’s graphics card (though most resources I found online said it wouldn’t work at all, so that was a nice bonus). Not “get accelerated graphics working” just “get X to start”. Spent another couple hours screwing around trying to get the trackpad working. And not just “get it working to my liking” but get it working at all. Turns out it’s entirely not supported as a lot of modern laptops uses a I2C connection rather than USB/PS2/etc, and there’s just no driver support for that. Never did get that resolved. A lot of desktop apps that I use are either unavailable or require a lot of dicking around to use at all. There is no Slack desktop client. You cannot run Docker natively, and instead I ended up setting up a Debian guest OS under bhyve, which harkens back to how Docker is run on Windows/OSX and all the caveats that entails. You’ll pry my FreeBSD servers from my cold dead hands, but it’s certainly not my go-to for a desktop OS.
- andoriyu 6y ago
  I don't know what century you've tried freebsd, but trackpad works nearly otb and otb in new xorg. Accelerated graphics works fine with intel (YMMV depending on the chip), nvidia (if you install driver from nvidia and not opensource one), amd. > There is no Slack desktop client. There is no Slack desktop client for any platform. It's just a web browser. You can make "desktop client" yourself. > You cannot run Docker natively, and instead I ended up setting up a Debian guest OS under bhyve, which harkens back to how Docker is run on Windows/OSX and all the caveats that entails. Actually, this setup works MUCH better than Docker on Mac. Which is good enough for developer. Looking at 3 laptops right now: mac, windows and freebsd. Docker user experience goes linux (non-rhel based) > linux (rhel based ) > windows > freebsd > mac. That being said, FreeBSD isn't "Oh, I will try running freebsd on this machine", FreeBSD is "I'm buying this specific machine because it runs FreeBSD". I use it both on my desktop and laptop.
- toast0 6y ago
loudmax 6y ago
If you decide you need Linux due to drivers or whatever, I'd recommend giving Arch a try. Arch has a reputation of having a learning curve, but it's no worse than the FreeBSD and like the BSDs it has excellent documentation. In my experience, Arch has been very stable with few surprises, especially if you avoid unnecessarily complicated software like GNOME. I can't say the same for Ubuntu or Fedora. If you're able to get your drivers and all working with FreeBSD then good for you! FreeBSD is awesome and I'm always happy to come across it.
zepearl 6y ago
Not related to the post itself nor to FreeBSD: I personally feel sad when people state (indirectly) that Linux is NOK because their Ubuntu didn't work well :( Ubuntu is probably the only Linux distro which I hate => I admit that it's a bit a mixed situation (Ubuntu seems to be a kind of "lighthouse" for the Linux world), but in the end I personally think that it's a pity that it acts as representative of the Linux distros. I'm currently using Gentoo & Mint & Arch (depends on the usage), and in the past I liked as well at least Fedora and CentOS (not using them since a long time), but I never liked Ubuntu.
- iso-8859-1 6y ago
  what do you mean by lighthouse?
  - zepearl 6y ago
    Like a "point of reference"
- 2trill2spill 6y ago
  I hear ya, but as a counterpoint to my above post I've yet to have a issue with Linux in a server context, although I tend to use FreeBSD on servers where ever possible. The only time I've had issues with either FreeBSD or Linux is using it as a desktop/dev machine. They are both awesome operating systems, I just prefer FreeBSD.

na85 6y ago

Do you actually get working wifi, suspend/resume and acceptable battery life under BSD? Last time I tried (open)BSD, none of those things worked acceptably. The recommended way to connect to wifi was to manually edit wpa_supplicant.conf and battery life was a solid hour less than under linux. I feel like BSD is a great "laptop OS" if you're the kind of user that leaves their thinkpad plugged in all the time, essentially using it as a small-form factor desktop. Maybe it's better nowadays.

2trill2spill 6y ago
Suspend and Resume was the hard one, battery life is solid, although I haven't done a direct comparison with Linux. Wifi was easy but not as easy as Linux to setup. On Linux wifi worked out of the box but I would lose wifi a couple times a day. While on FreeBSD I had to edit a few config files to get wifi working but I dont lose wifi every day. To get the Suspend and Resume to work I had to use the drm-next-kmod port.
laumars 6y ago
BSD isn’t like Linux where it’s the roughly the same kernel and user land but a different distribution of packages. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are entirely different operating systems albeit with a shared lineage.
0ld 6y ago
> Last time I tried (open)BSD Sorry, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD are very different operating systems, it's not just "different distros" like in the Linux world Whatever you tried in OpenBSD has most likely no relation to FreeBSD Speaking of the things you mentioned, I personally would expect suspend/resume to just work out of the box in the latest OpenBSD, but not necessary in FreeBSD (it was never a priority for the developers). You also don't need wpa_supplicant in OpenBSD (unlike FreeBSD), ifconfig should be enough in most cases. For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD
- na85 6y ago
  >For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop. I have a small pcengines apu2 running openbsd but I don't enjoy tinkering with it. I find it cumbersome and unwieldy. The documentation seems to be mostly "complete" but it's definitely geared at someone who already has an in-depth understanding of openbsd, and lots of fundamentals are left unsaid, which makes it difficult to learn what the "proper" way to do something is. I end up with a patchwork of hacks and it's very unsatisfying. It took me quite a long time to figure out how to get wireguard working on that box, for instance, whereas on linux and mac it "just works" pretty much out of the box.
  - loeg 6y ago
    > Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop. I think you missed the last clause here: > > comparable to Linux in FreeBSD
    - na85 6y ago
      No, I didn't. Linux battery life is pretty darn close to windows on my hardware, out of the box. Getting freebsd to the level of Linux only after significant tinkering just isn't a good ux. For my personal machine that's unacceptable.
      - 2trill2spill 6y ago
        You said above you were using OpenBSD not FreeBSD, they are completely different operating systems. Also getting the battery to last long on FreeBSD was a super simple config change, that took less than a minute to do.
  - anthk 6y ago
    >and lots of fundamentals are left unsaid, which makes it difficult to learn what the "proper" way to do something is man afterboot
andoriyu 6y ago
This is my life with FreeBSD: > wifi WiFI is working, but not `802.11n/ac`, so you're limited to `802.11g` which sucks, but I use it with ucb-c dongle, so not much of an issue for me. I don't use any GUIs for WiFi because I use the same 3 networks. > suspend/resume Yeah, just like linux it doesn't support fancy states that windows does, but suspend to ram works. Works perfect with laptop lid, but you do need to change a sysctl thingy. > Battery life I can go entire work day on a single charge for my x1 carbon (gen 6). I know that because I forgot to plug it in multiple times. I'm sure OpenBSD has it worse tho.
tedunangst 6y ago
I've never edited or even had a wpa_supplicant.conf file under openbsd.
anthk 6y ago
OpenBSD handles WPA2 thru ifconfig just fine. ifconfig $IFACE join $ESSID wpakey $PASS

forinti 6y ago

I tried NomadBSD in order to use RDP, but I couldn't get an earlier version of Remmina or xfreerdp. It might be my lack of experience with BSD, but I got the impression that it is very hard to get a previous version of a package with BSD. edit: corrected the name NomadBSD

2trill2spill 6y ago
I've never heard of MonadBSD, but installing a previous version of a package is straight forward on FreeBSD. Just specify the version when you use pkg or use portdowngrade.
jabirali 6y ago
Do you mean NomadBSD? Hearing MonadBSD and thinking about Haskell, I suddenly got really curious, but couldn’t find anything on Google...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Hearing MonadBSD and thinking about Haskell, I suddenly got really curious, but couldn’t find anything on Google... That would be a fun name for the BSD answer to nixos...
  - 0mp 6y ago
    Heads-up: Nix is on its way to start working on FreeBSD: https://github.com/0mp/freebsd-ports-nix https://github.com/0mp/freebsd-ports-nix
- forinti 6y ago
  My bad, it was NomadBSD.

zelly 6y ago

The freezing is not an Ubuntu problem it's a GNOME problem.

2trill2spill 6y ago
Thanks for the heads up, is there a straight forward work around? Or don't use GNOME?
skibbityboop 6y ago
Any docs to this effect? I'm curious to check them out because I've had flawless wifi under GNOME across various work laptops since at least 2010. Maybe it's Ubuntu+GNOME specific, haven't run Ubuntu, but it certainly doesn't seem to be GNOME. Ah, on re-read of the OP comment, it's "wifi issues and freezing", two different problems they had. Have never seen either from GNOME though.
- zelly 6y ago
  Wifi in Linux distros is not handled by the DE. It's usually systemd-networkd and wpa_supplicant. GNOME is very slow. The UI and animations are implemented in JavaScript. KDE Plasma isn't much better though. You should try using a tiling window manager.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    > The UI and animations are implemented in JavaScript This should be a criminal offence
  - iso-8859-1 6y ago
    > The UI and animations are implemented in JavaScript Can you point me to the code implementing an animation in JavaScript?
    - zelly 6y ago
      Here, took me less than 30 seconds to find one: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/0db41a3773eaf7d197d1dede4ec0d04f4b9aaf62/js/gdm/loginDialog.js#L795 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/0db41a3773... It's everywhere

nucleardog 6y ago

I love FreeBSD. Been using it in a server context for going on 20 years now. Trying to use it on a desktop takes me back to, well, trying to use Linux on the desktop 20 years ago. Recently started shopping different distros because I’m not comfortable with the direction Ubuntu is going and rather than upgrade my 18.04 when it’s EOL’d, I’m looking at just hopping to something else for my work laptop. Took hours to get X working with my laptop’s graphics card (though most resources I found online said it wouldn’t work at all, so that was a nice bonus). Not “get accelerated graphics working” just “get X to start”. Spent another couple hours screwing around trying to get the trackpad working. And not just “get it working to my liking” but get it working at all. Turns out it’s entirely not supported as a lot of modern laptops uses a I2C connection rather than USB/PS2/etc, and there’s just no driver support for that. Never did get that resolved. A lot of desktop apps that I use are either unavailable or require a lot of dicking around to use at all. There is no Slack desktop client. You cannot run Docker natively, and instead I ended up setting up a Debian guest OS under bhyve, which harkens back to how Docker is run on Windows/OSX and all the caveats that entails. You’ll pry my FreeBSD servers from my cold dead hands, but it’s certainly not my go-to for a desktop OS.

andoriyu 6y ago
I don't know what century you've tried freebsd, but trackpad works nearly otb and otb in new xorg. Accelerated graphics works fine with intel (YMMV depending on the chip), nvidia (if you install driver from nvidia and not opensource one), amd. > There is no Slack desktop client. There is no Slack desktop client for any platform. It's just a web browser. You can make "desktop client" yourself. > You cannot run Docker natively, and instead I ended up setting up a Debian guest OS under bhyve, which harkens back to how Docker is run on Windows/OSX and all the caveats that entails. Actually, this setup works MUCH better than Docker on Mac. Which is good enough for developer. Looking at 3 laptops right now: mac, windows and freebsd. Docker user experience goes linux (non-rhel based) > linux (rhel based ) > windows > freebsd > mac. That being said, FreeBSD isn't "Oh, I will try running freebsd on this machine", FreeBSD is "I'm buying this specific machine because it runs FreeBSD". I use it both on my desktop and laptop.
toast0 6y ago

loudmax 6y ago

If you decide you need Linux due to drivers or whatever, I'd recommend giving Arch a try. Arch has a reputation of having a learning curve, but it's no worse than the FreeBSD and like the BSDs it has excellent documentation. In my experience, Arch has been very stable with few surprises, especially if you avoid unnecessarily complicated software like GNOME. I can't say the same for Ubuntu or Fedora. If you're able to get your drivers and all working with FreeBSD then good for you! FreeBSD is awesome and I'm always happy to come across it.

zepearl 6y ago

Not related to the post itself nor to FreeBSD: I personally feel sad when people state (indirectly) that Linux is NOK because their Ubuntu didn't work well :( Ubuntu is probably the only Linux distro which I hate => I admit that it's a bit a mixed situation (Ubuntu seems to be a kind of "lighthouse" for the Linux world), but in the end I personally think that it's a pity that it acts as representative of the Linux distros. I'm currently using Gentoo & Mint & Arch (depends on the usage), and in the past I liked as well at least Fedora and CentOS (not using them since a long time), but I never liked Ubuntu.

iso-8859-1 6y ago
what do you mean by lighthouse?
- zepearl 6y ago
  Like a "point of reference"
2trill2spill 6y ago
I hear ya, but as a counterpoint to my above post I've yet to have a issue with Linux in a server context, although I tend to use FreeBSD on servers where ever possible. The only time I've had issues with either FreeBSD or Linux is using it as a desktop/dev machine. They are both awesome operating systems, I just prefer FreeBSD.