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I've recently switched my home server to Freebsd after it was on Debian for who even knows how long (Debian still virtualized on bhyve for some tasks). My take

I've recently switched my home server to Freebsd after it was on Debian for who even knows how long (Debian still virtualized on bhyve for some tasks). My take: I love FreeBSD as a server os. It's really, really well designed. Spend a bit of time with the handbook and after a while it's really simple to hack on. I really like the separation of the base OS, I like the init, I like jails, documentation puts every Linux distribution to SHAME. But laptop?... Unless you scour for exactly the parts that will work (esp for wifi), you're going to have a bad time, even on old equipment. At the same time as I rebooted my server, I had an old ThinkPad I decided I wanted to FreeBSD for the hell of it. I gave up on it. It may have been possible but it was just too much work. In this day and age when almost any Linux desktop distro boots without a hitch on hardware that's not completely brand spanking new, it was just not worth it

Melatonic 5y ago
I would probably just a bare metal hypervisor on the laptop and then make FreeBSD a VM but you might still run into a lot of hardware issues.
tombert 5y ago
That was basically my experience. I had tried multiple times on old laptops, thinking that maybe someone had developed a better driver by this point, and it just didn't happen. Usually when this happens in Linux, a few hours of Googling, swearing, and retrying is enough to fix my problems, and I'm sure that with enough time that approach would have worked in FreeBSD as well, but I always grew impatient. > almost any Linux desktop distro boots without a hitch on hardware that's not completely brand spanking new Can't speak for anyone else, but even for brand spanking new hardware, as long as I've stuck with AMD drivers, nowadays Linux "Just Works" when I boot it. Obviously YMMV between systems, but I feel like Linux has finally become competitive with Windows and macOS from a usability standpoint.
int_19h 5y ago
You might also end up carefully researching all the parts, only to find out that a new major FreeBSD release breaks hardware support for something. Had that happen to video on one of my netbooks.

Melatonic 5y ago

I would probably just a bare metal hypervisor on the laptop and then make FreeBSD a VM but you might still run into a lot of hardware issues.

tombert 5y ago

That was basically my experience. I had tried multiple times on old laptops, thinking that maybe someone had developed a better driver by this point, and it just didn't happen. Usually when this happens in Linux, a few hours of Googling, swearing, and retrying is enough to fix my problems, and I'm sure that with enough time that approach would have worked in FreeBSD as well, but I always grew impatient. > almost any Linux desktop distro boots without a hitch on hardware that's not completely brand spanking new Can't speak for anyone else, but even for brand spanking new hardware, as long as I've stuck with AMD drivers, nowadays Linux "Just Works" when I boot it. Obviously YMMV between systems, but I feel like Linux has finally become competitive with Windows and macOS from a usability standpoint.

int_19h 5y ago

You might also end up carefully researching all the parts, only to find out that a new major FreeBSD release breaks hardware support for something. Had that happen to video on one of my netbooks.