7 ms·

Myths about FreeBSD

126 points by ecliptik 5y ago

kube-system 5y ago
I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop, but I've always wanted to.... > FreeBSD supports a wide range of network cards (including an increasing number of 802.11n chipsets) Is this out of date or should I not even try installing on a laptop with an ac chipset?
- samtheprogram 5y ago
  Status quo ~2 years ago before FreeBSD 13 was that many 802.11ac cards worked but the ac features did not yet (and/or you’d have to install wpa_supplicant through ports to enable certain compilation flags), so you’d get a fraction of possible speeds or have to jump through hoops. Not sure what the more recent developments here are.
  - oso2k 5y ago
    Yeah....sadly WiFi driver development fell behind in *BSD about 8 or 10 years ago. It made firewalls like pfSense and SmallWall less useful if you wanted an all-in-one network solution. You had to start to moving WiFi to APs from various vendors. It's ok when you have a small foot print with few walls (apartment or townhouse or condo). But a larger home, backyard/outdoor space, or garage/network closet spaces might need extra APs or relocation of AP(s). I do otherwise love pfSense and SmallWall despite what my $DAYJOB is. 10GbE NIC is really great too in *BSDs.
    - nix23 5y ago
      Having Freebsd on my laptop since 2 years...the only point of critique is wireless, thank you freebsd-foundation for that...you probably don't care since you all use macOS.
      - kevans91 5y ago
        That's an odd and misinformed attack on the foundation. They're actively sponsoring WiFi work, the first half of which recently landed in tree. You can see what they're involved in on on their website: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/
        nix23 5y ago
        > They're actively sponsoring WiFi work Yes since three years without any outcome....that's why the critique toward the foundation and NOT the project. https://i0.wp.com/itsfoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/freebsd-foundation.jpeg?w=536&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/itsfoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/fre...
        kevans91 5y ago
        As I said in the previous post, the first half of it just landed within the last month. iwlwifi[0] and dozens of linuxkpi commits[1] over the past couple of months by bz@. My frame.work laptop works generally well with -CURRENT (and presumably with stable/13, since iwlwifi's been mfc'd) with some wifi stability issues that have been reported. [0] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/contrib/dev/iwlwifi https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/contrib/dev/iwlwifi [1] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/compat/linuxkpi https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/compat/linuxkpi
        nix23 5y ago
        And as i wrote, wireless is criminally underdeveloped on freebsd, not just a problem for laptops but firewalls/access-points too. 802.11n came out 12! years ago...and no i don't even talk about ac here.
- loeg 5y ago
  Last I knew, the wireless stack lacked 802.11ac support entirely. I think some drivers for 802.11ac hardware could operate in 802.11n mode, but I might be mistaken.
- mburee 5y ago
  Could also always try OpenBSD, they have support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but check the drivers first
  - kelp 5y ago
    I think OpenBSD has support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but they don't operate at 802.11ac speeds. For example see the CAVEATS section here: https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4 https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  It runs great on my Thinkpad X1 Gen 6. Everything works.
- mnd999 5y ago
  I’m a bit out of date on FreeBSD land but tbh probably both. It references FreeBSD 11 not being out yet so the article is several years old. FreeBSD does tend to lag behind a bit when it comes to WiFi support though so it wouldn’t surprise me if 802.11ac support is patchy.
- dddddaviddddd 5y ago
  There's currently no 802.11ac support, but this is in-progress. There's usually an update about WiFi support in the FreeBSD Foundation quarterly reports, and some major changes were merged into CURRENT a few weeks ago.
diogenesjunior 5y ago
discussion (and probably where OP got the link from): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059062
doublerabbit 5y ago
FreeBSD has always been rock solid until I broke my XFCE4 install on a Ryzen 5650X, Radon 5700XT. FreeBSD is my go-to distro for any server,desktop OS. The kernel is strong, network is great and jails are decent and with bHyve happily taking everything I throw at it, I can't fault it. To me, it feels solid unlike Linux which has always had a flakey-cobbled like feeling. If I had to choose for distro it would be Slackware. With FreeBSD 13, you can now assign dedicated network interfaces to jails, grant bHyve to create virtual machines within the jail leading to isolated VM-Jails. Which is an amazing secure & cool concept as if your Virtual Machine becomes vulnable. Your worse case is a breaking out in to the jail rather then the host OS. This world which is becoming more limited, I'll happly stand by FreeBSD to help it continue to exist in the monolithic reality we all currently live in.
- nix23 5y ago
  How can you damage a pkg installation? That's just not possible.
anon9001 5y ago
I wonder how FreeBSD will fare as Linux users slowly switch over to wayland. I found this, but it doesn't tell me much: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland
- fgrsnau 5y ago
  I am using sway (similar to i3 but for wayland) and it is working flawless on an Lenovo X230 running FreeBSD 13. It seems biggest problem will be graphics driver for different hardware.
  - anon9001 5y ago
    Awesome, maybe it's worth a look then. "amdgpu" seems supported, which I assume is very similar to the linux one, since it has the same name and is open source.
- kelp 5y ago
  Other concerns I have are systemd dependencies and browser support. I'm not as familiar with how it works in FreeBSD, but the OpenBSD Chromium maintainer asked Google to upstream their patches and the Chromium team refused. So OpenBSD has 2.6MB of patches to maintain to keep Chromium going. I just checked and it looks like FreeBSD has 4.1MB of patches in their Chromium port. See: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g/m/5tXefZ74AQAJ?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5... Gnome decided a while back that systemd dependencies were ok, so the BSDs (and Gentoo) have large patch sets to maintain to keep basic functionality going. Those are just a couple of examples of large important projects that don't want to dedicate much if any effort to portability to BSDs or other non-Linux OSs. Seems like that puts more and more pressure on a small number of volunteers to keep up porting efforts of some mainstream programs, otherwise *BSD becomes even more niche and limited.
  - NexRebular 5y ago
    Linux development strategy is sure starting to look a bit like our old friend EEE...
rsync 5y ago
"After 4.x FreeBSD Went Downhill" This nostalgia is justified - see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30063417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30063417
- kelp 5y ago
  Also wasn't it during the 5.0 release process when DragonFly BSD split off? And, RE the point about "that's fixed in -current", I'm reminded if a talk from Netflix engineering about how they just run -current in production.
Minor49er 5y ago
The article notes that FreeBSD has over 26,000 pieces of software with a link, but that link just goes to a page that says "The latest Python updated failed. I intend to repair this post-BSDCan 2019 -- mcl"
pshirshov 5y ago
Could someone tell me if 5GHz .ac wifi is working in modern FreeBSD or not? Also I'm wondering if there is anything NixOS alike built on top of FreeBSD.
- na85 5y ago
  The fact that they make a point of mentioning .11n support should be a good hint that there is no .11ac support at all.
  - SecurityLagoon 5y ago
    That's kind of the killer for laptop usage. Even if there was support for just the most popular broadcom chip or something that would be workable; but, as it is it's unusable on a modern laptop. Linux had had this part sorted for about 10 years which is one of the main reasons why FreeBSD will continue to be forgotten as a desktop OS.
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      I love many BSDs, but yeah sadly they’re hardly usable desktop OS’s for me. FreeBSD tends to be the best still, but the lack of 802.11ac support and the occasional odd problem with “supported hardware” makes it hard for me to go with, when I can just use Linux and everything works. NetBSD is amazing, especially as a retrocomputing enthusiast (there’s an active VAX port, not even OpenVMS has a VAX port anymore), but dear god the hardware problems I’ve had with it. Last time I tried to use NetBSD, it was on a lower end laptop I wanted to try to squeeze as much usability out of and for some reason, the installer refused to work with the eMMC attached. In that last I’ve also had all sorts of issues with supported network hardware causing kernel panics. DragonflyBSD seem cool too, and probably has the nicest kernel maintainer I’ve ever seen. Sadly I’m not sure if it’s whole schtick still applies today, and the lack of any video drivers except Intel made it unusable for me. Yes there’s generic framebuffer drivers, but dear good they are barely usable. Don’t have too much experience with OpenBSD, but I wouldn’t use it as a desktop either way. The lack of LKMs is a turn off for myself, who’s always swapping in and out random weird hardware. If I had the time, energy and patience to learn these kernel, and figure out how to inject myself into projects that are probably long ongoing and with people much more experienced than myself, I’d love to help, but sadly I do not have those things.
caycep 5y ago
I feel like FreeBSD lost a lot of momentum once a lot of the Apple contributors moved onto other companies...in contrast to linux which has (or had) several corporate contributors continuing to fund/drive open source commits.
- ksec 5y ago
  > a lot of the Apple contributors moved onto other companies Do we know why ? It seems a lot of them left post Steve Jobs era.
  - EricE 5y ago
    Is the fact that tech people tend to move around a lot really that surprising? Even if they work for a giant like Apple?
nimbius 5y ago
>FreeBSD Does Not Support Virtualisation this is a half-answer at best and not really relevant. the point of virtualization is that the OS doesnt really care or know its being virtualized in the first place. supporting the virtualization of BSD is a moot point as it really doesnt concern the OS. bhyve (for all its worth currently) isnt mentioned, but it would be nice to see peoples experiences with it to date. props for not flogging jails as a solution however, as quite a few BSD purists will cheerlead this as virtualization. >The BSD License Means Companies Don't Contribute Back the real issue here is with license purists and the philosophy of open source. BSD gifts companies with an easier path to turning your work into a cloistered and proprietary part of their code, whereas GPL at least makes an effort to keep them honest about their appropriations. plenty of companies to date still do skirt the GPL though. ultimately whether or not a company gives back to an OS community is a matter of business prerogative and not entirely license.
- jedberg 5y ago
  For a long time FreeBSD did not work on EC2 or in Virtualbox, which is where this comes from and why it's relevant.
  - kelp 5y ago
    And now I have FreeBSD 14 (13 won't boot and the issue is only fixed in -current) running in Parallels on my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro... works well.
    - drewg123 5y ago
      Is the VM running arm64 or amd64?
      - kelp 5y ago
        arm64 Otherwise it would be emulation not virtualization. Parallels on Apple Silicon only works with arm64 VMs. But that's pretty much everything I care about. I have Windows 11, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, several Linux distributions. They all work fine.
throwaway032342 5y ago
Myth: BSD is bad for desktops. Refutation: It has sound!
jbirer 5y ago
No thanks. It doesn't even support my 3 year old wireless chip and there are still problems with WebRTC in Firefox. They need to use the donations they raised (1,25 million from what I checked last time) to focus on getting decent hardware and software support.

126 points by ecliptik 5y ago

I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop, but I've always wanted to.... > FreeBSD supports a wide range of network cards (including an increasing number of 802.11n chipsets) Is this out of date or should I not even try installing on a laptop with an ac chipset?

samtheprogram 5y ago
Status quo ~2 years ago before FreeBSD 13 was that many 802.11ac cards worked but the ac features did not yet (and/or you’d have to install wpa_supplicant through ports to enable certain compilation flags), so you’d get a fraction of possible speeds or have to jump through hoops. Not sure what the more recent developments here are.
- oso2k 5y ago
  Yeah....sadly WiFi driver development fell behind in *BSD about 8 or 10 years ago. It made firewalls like pfSense and SmallWall less useful if you wanted an all-in-one network solution. You had to start to moving WiFi to APs from various vendors. It's ok when you have a small foot print with few walls (apartment or townhouse or condo). But a larger home, backyard/outdoor space, or garage/network closet spaces might need extra APs or relocation of AP(s). I do otherwise love pfSense and SmallWall despite what my $DAYJOB is. 10GbE NIC is really great too in *BSDs.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Having Freebsd on my laptop since 2 years...the only point of critique is wireless, thank you freebsd-foundation for that...you probably don't care since you all use macOS.
    - kevans91 5y ago
      That's an odd and misinformed attack on the foundation. They're actively sponsoring WiFi work, the first half of which recently landed in tree. You can see what they're involved in on on their website: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/
      - nix23 5y ago
        > They're actively sponsoring WiFi work Yes since three years without any outcome....that's why the critique toward the foundation and NOT the project. https://i0.wp.com/itsfoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/freebsd-foundation.jpeg?w=536&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/itsfoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/fre...
        kevans91 5y ago
        As I said in the previous post, the first half of it just landed within the last month. iwlwifi[0] and dozens of linuxkpi commits[1] over the past couple of months by bz@. My frame.work laptop works generally well with -CURRENT (and presumably with stable/13, since iwlwifi's been mfc'd) with some wifi stability issues that have been reported. [0] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/contrib/dev/iwlwifi https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/contrib/dev/iwlwifi [1] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/compat/linuxkpi https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/compat/linuxkpi
        nix23 5y ago
        And as i wrote, wireless is criminally underdeveloped on freebsd, not just a problem for laptops but firewalls/access-points too. 802.11n came out 12! years ago...and no i don't even talk about ac here.
loeg 5y ago
Last I knew, the wireless stack lacked 802.11ac support entirely. I think some drivers for 802.11ac hardware could operate in 802.11n mode, but I might be mistaken.
mburee 5y ago
Could also always try OpenBSD, they have support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but check the drivers first
- kelp 5y ago
  I think OpenBSD has support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but they don't operate at 802.11ac speeds. For example see the CAVEATS section here: https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4 https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4
systemvoltage 5y ago
It runs great on my Thinkpad X1 Gen 6. Everything works.
mnd999 5y ago
I’m a bit out of date on FreeBSD land but tbh probably both. It references FreeBSD 11 not being out yet so the article is several years old. FreeBSD does tend to lag behind a bit when it comes to WiFi support though so it wouldn’t surprise me if 802.11ac support is patchy.
dddddaviddddd 5y ago
There's currently no 802.11ac support, but this is in-progress. There's usually an update about WiFi support in the FreeBSD Foundation quarterly reports, and some major changes were merged into CURRENT a few weeks ago.

diogenesjunior 5y ago

discussion (and probably where OP got the link from): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059062

doublerabbit 5y ago

FreeBSD has always been rock solid until I broke my XFCE4 install on a Ryzen 5650X, Radon 5700XT. FreeBSD is my go-to distro for any server,desktop OS. The kernel is strong, network is great and jails are decent and with bHyve happily taking everything I throw at it, I can't fault it. To me, it feels solid unlike Linux which has always had a flakey-cobbled like feeling. If I had to choose for distro it would be Slackware. With FreeBSD 13, you can now assign dedicated network interfaces to jails, grant bHyve to create virtual machines within the jail leading to isolated VM-Jails. Which is an amazing secure & cool concept as if your Virtual Machine becomes vulnable. Your worse case is a breaking out in to the jail rather then the host OS. This world which is becoming more limited, I'll happly stand by FreeBSD to help it continue to exist in the monolithic reality we all currently live in.

nix23 5y ago
How can you damage a pkg installation? That's just not possible.

anon9001 5y ago

I wonder how FreeBSD will fare as Linux users slowly switch over to wayland. I found this, but it doesn't tell me much: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland

fgrsnau 5y ago
I am using sway (similar to i3 but for wayland) and it is working flawless on an Lenovo X230 running FreeBSD 13. It seems biggest problem will be graphics driver for different hardware.
- anon9001 5y ago
  Awesome, maybe it's worth a look then. "amdgpu" seems supported, which I assume is very similar to the linux one, since it has the same name and is open source.
kelp 5y ago
Other concerns I have are systemd dependencies and browser support. I'm not as familiar with how it works in FreeBSD, but the OpenBSD Chromium maintainer asked Google to upstream their patches and the Chromium team refused. So OpenBSD has 2.6MB of patches to maintain to keep Chromium going. I just checked and it looks like FreeBSD has 4.1MB of patches in their Chromium port. See: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g/m/5tXefZ74AQAJ?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5... Gnome decided a while back that systemd dependencies were ok, so the BSDs (and Gentoo) have large patch sets to maintain to keep basic functionality going. Those are just a couple of examples of large important projects that don't want to dedicate much if any effort to portability to BSDs or other non-Linux OSs. Seems like that puts more and more pressure on a small number of volunteers to keep up porting efforts of some mainstream programs, otherwise *BSD becomes even more niche and limited.
- NexRebular 5y ago
  Linux development strategy is sure starting to look a bit like our old friend EEE...

rsync 5y ago

"After 4.x FreeBSD Went Downhill" This nostalgia is justified - see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30063417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30063417

kelp 5y ago
Also wasn't it during the 5.0 release process when DragonFly BSD split off? And, RE the point about "that's fixed in -current", I'm reminded if a talk from Netflix engineering about how they just run -current in production.

Minor49er 5y ago

The article notes that FreeBSD has over 26,000 pieces of software with a link, but that link just goes to a page that says "The latest Python updated failed. I intend to repair this post-BSDCan 2019 -- mcl"

pshirshov 5y ago

Could someone tell me if 5GHz .ac wifi is working in modern FreeBSD or not? Also I'm wondering if there is anything NixOS alike built on top of FreeBSD.

na85 5y ago
The fact that they make a point of mentioning .11n support should be a good hint that there is no .11ac support at all.
- SecurityLagoon 5y ago
  That's kind of the killer for laptop usage. Even if there was support for just the most popular broadcom chip or something that would be workable; but, as it is it's unusable on a modern laptop. Linux had had this part sorted for about 10 years which is one of the main reasons why FreeBSD will continue to be forgotten as a desktop OS.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I love many BSDs, but yeah sadly they’re hardly usable desktop OS’s for me. FreeBSD tends to be the best still, but the lack of 802.11ac support and the occasional odd problem with “supported hardware” makes it hard for me to go with, when I can just use Linux and everything works. NetBSD is amazing, especially as a retrocomputing enthusiast (there’s an active VAX port, not even OpenVMS has a VAX port anymore), but dear god the hardware problems I’ve had with it. Last time I tried to use NetBSD, it was on a lower end laptop I wanted to try to squeeze as much usability out of and for some reason, the installer refused to work with the eMMC attached. In that last I’ve also had all sorts of issues with supported network hardware causing kernel panics. DragonflyBSD seem cool too, and probably has the nicest kernel maintainer I’ve ever seen. Sadly I’m not sure if it’s whole schtick still applies today, and the lack of any video drivers except Intel made it unusable for me. Yes there’s generic framebuffer drivers, but dear good they are barely usable. Don’t have too much experience with OpenBSD, but I wouldn’t use it as a desktop either way. The lack of LKMs is a turn off for myself, who’s always swapping in and out random weird hardware. If I had the time, energy and patience to learn these kernel, and figure out how to inject myself into projects that are probably long ongoing and with people much more experienced than myself, I’d love to help, but sadly I do not have those things.

caycep 5y ago

I feel like FreeBSD lost a lot of momentum once a lot of the Apple contributors moved onto other companies...in contrast to linux which has (or had) several corporate contributors continuing to fund/drive open source commits.

ksec 5y ago
> a lot of the Apple contributors moved onto other companies Do we know why ? It seems a lot of them left post Steve Jobs era.
- EricE 5y ago
  Is the fact that tech people tend to move around a lot really that surprising? Even if they work for a giant like Apple?

nimbius 5y ago

>FreeBSD Does Not Support Virtualisation this is a half-answer at best and not really relevant. the point of virtualization is that the OS doesnt really care or know its being virtualized in the first place. supporting the virtualization of BSD is a moot point as it really doesnt concern the OS. bhyve (for all its worth currently) isnt mentioned, but it would be nice to see peoples experiences with it to date. props for not flogging jails as a solution however, as quite a few BSD purists will cheerlead this as virtualization. >The BSD License Means Companies Don't Contribute Back the real issue here is with license purists and the philosophy of open source. BSD gifts companies with an easier path to turning your work into a cloistered and proprietary part of their code, whereas GPL at least makes an effort to keep them honest about their appropriations. plenty of companies to date still do skirt the GPL though. ultimately whether or not a company gives back to an OS community is a matter of business prerogative and not entirely license.

jedberg 5y ago
For a long time FreeBSD did not work on EC2 or in Virtualbox, which is where this comes from and why it's relevant.
- kelp 5y ago
  And now I have FreeBSD 14 (13 won't boot and the issue is only fixed in -current) running in Parallels on my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro... works well.
  - drewg123 5y ago
    Is the VM running arm64 or amd64?
    - kelp 5y ago
      arm64 Otherwise it would be emulation not virtualization. Parallels on Apple Silicon only works with arm64 VMs. But that's pretty much everything I care about. I have Windows 11, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, several Linux distributions. They all work fine.

throwaway032342 5y ago

Myth: BSD is bad for desktops. Refutation: It has sound!

jbirer 5y ago

No thanks. It doesn't even support my 3 year old wireless chip and there are still problems with WebRTC in Firefox. They need to use the donations they raised (1,25 million from what I checked last time) to focus on getting decent hardware and software support.