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I have tried FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the desktop a couple years back, but for a while now I've felt that they're becoming irrelevant. * No Bluetooth support on
by jgillich 5y ago
I have tried FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the desktop a couple years back, but for a while now I've felt that they're becoming irrelevant.
* No Bluetooth support on OpenBSD at all, and it never worked on FreeBSD for me. Linux used to have issues with some devices, but it has gotten much, much better over the recent years (or devices have gotten better).
* Wifi on Linux mostly works out of the box nowadays (with the exception of some Broadcom chips, but even they are getting better). Completely different story on the BSDs, while they have decent support for some vendors like Intel, they take quite a while to support new hardware.
* Gaming is not really a thing on BSD.
* Container tech like Kubernetes and Flatpak does not work on the BSDs.
While Linux has taken a long time to catch up to Windows (and still isn't there yet in some areas), I feel like the BSDs lack the manpower or interest to even keep pace with the world around them. Not only are things not getting better, they are getting worse.
- niahmiah 5y agoCame to say very similar things. Thanks for saving me this time.
- radikalerludwig 5y ago> * Gaming is not really a thing on BSD Sony has a different story to tell
- steerablesafe 5y agoIt doesn't help you when you want to run BSD on your laptop or desktop.
- gilrain 5y agoThis post is opaquely referring to the fact that the Playstation 4 os is based on FreeBSD. Obviously, this is interesting but irrelevant.
- gh02t 5y agoSony also doesn't contribute much of that code back to FreeBSD.
- radikalerludwig 5y agojust as the os under the ps3 and ps5
- sgjohnson 5y agoRelated (and a fun watch!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI moved from Mac to FreeBSD for my daily driver and I love it. But I use a desktop and don't use neither Bluetooth nor WiFi. Didn't even try to get them going. FreeBSD does have container tech, in fact it had it before Linux did. It's just not the same tech, its jails are its own invention. And gaming isn't really a thing on Mac either. Ps I use all OSes under the sun. Windows for gaming, Mac for work, Linux for servers and FreeBSD for my main desktop. I don't really do laptops but I have a Windows 11 laptop from work too.
- eatonphil 5y agoI'm not a serious gamer but the only computer gaming I do I do on my mac. Cities Skylines for example.
- kergonath 5y agoI spent hours upon hours in Stellaris as well.
- pseudohex 5y agoM1 macs can take some light gaming pretty nicely actually.
- nomel 5y agoI would agree with you, but my Steam library became almost entirely empty after the 64bit-only Catalina update.
- netr0ute 5y ago> I feel like the BSDs lack the manpower or interest to even keep pace with the world around them That's rich considering that one design goal of OpenBSD is to stay the same no matter what happens around it.
- hestefisk 5y agoWhat I really like about *BSD is that things mostly stay the same, although there are examples of the contrary (ZFS adoption, DTrace in FreeBSD, pledge in OpenBSD). Both systems are stable, reliable and just get out of your way.
- jgillich 5y agoI totally respect that, but that's not how you stay relevant for anyone but old-school Unix hackers.
- breakfastduck 5y agoI'd say being actively used to run the largest streaming service on the planet makes you pretty relevant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-HcG8QxPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-HcG8QxPc
- 1_player 5y agoPossibly unpopular opinion but serving a lot of data via Ethernet is much simpler than creating a low latency modern hardware accelerated desktop with VR support and playing audio through my latest Bluetooth headset.
- Spooky23 5y agoI think that’s a feature of the BSD model. Almost every company making network appliances, etc uses BSD as a baseline, but they don’t necessarily contribute back or consistently drive development. I think the Linux model has better incentives. The other thing is that the markets the BSD has been historically dominant are dying and consolidating. The world is cloud and cloud is mostly Linux.
- satao 5y agoWhat do you mean by 'the Linux model'?
- Spooky23 5y agoGPL
- anthk 5y agoLinux's cloud overcomplication will make the OS collapse into itself as Windows servers did long ago. People will switch to more simple systems.
- Spooky23 5y agoI agree, and I think you’re starting to see that with the container spins of Linux. I’d guess that in a 10 years, somebody will ditch ancient POSIX stuff and hardware support and do something new.
- pjmlp 5y agoPOSIX will be still around, because UNIX compatibility, but not necessarily on top of Linux.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt is already happening with the FOSS POSIX competition on IoT platforms anyway.
- smm11 5y ago
- mekster 5y agoAlways wondered why anyone would use desktop on BSD. Use stuff where it fits well for its purpose. I use Windows only for gaming, Mac for development and Linux for servers where they excel at what they do. Also I really don't get why BSD developers care to develop desktop environment with their limited resource but they should just concentrate on server offerings if they want to stay relevant besides having a more free license than Linux.
- Koshkin 5y agoPeople say it’s Windows that excels for development (because of Visual Studio), and gaming on Linux is not a huge problem anymore. And BSDs (FreeBSD and Dragonfly, in particular) do excel on the server side. I’d agree that it’s still the Year of MacOS on the Desktop, although Linux is catching up pretty quickly (while Windows is receding into sheer madness).
- mrits 5y agoGaming on Linux is as bad as it's been in a long time and is only going to get worst because of anti-cheat systems. Visual Studio is on more platforms than Windows and not even the preferred IDE of most devs on Windows unless they are doing .NET. FreeBSD does not excel on the server side. I don't know any companies that even use it and I spent the last decade consulting with hundreds of companies.
- jmnicolas 5y ago> Visual Studio is on more platforms than Windows No, Visual Studio for Macs is a rebranded Mono thing, it has nothing to do with the Windows Visual Studio. There's no VS for Linux. Of course MS had to complicate things by naming their electron editor Visual Studio Code...
- pjmlp 5y agoNope, Visual Studio for Mac started as a rebranded Mono thing after Xamarin acquisition. Since then, the amount of plugins shared with Visual Studio has increased, which is a reason why Microsoft started pushing to write them in C# instead of COM. Currently it is being rewritten, and should be mostly completly unrelated to Mono Develop by .NET 7 release.
- hestefisk 5y agoKubernetes is hardly ‘container tech’, but a cluster management and scheduling tool for large volumes of containers or VMs. FreeBSD has its own “container”-like feature called Jails, which was written by phk long before Docker / lxc / namespaces were a thing. For the ease of Docker’s CLI and config, use iocage; for cluster management like k8s, look at Nomad. It might not be as flashy and enterprisey as the Linux equivalent, but FreeBSD can easily compete with Linux in containers. Btw, combined with ZFS, Jails are just beautiful. iocage integrates directly with ZFS and creates snapshots before upgrades, data sets per container, shared data sets for base system etc. It’s really really nice.
- johntdaly 5y agoThat is interesting. I would like to hear more about jails and how they compare to containers on linux. This is the first time I’ve heard about nomad and I would like to here more. That the whole thing integrates with ZFS is news to me too. It is sort of sad but BSD is bad at publishing news and tutorials. I wish there was something like lwn and the slew of endless tutorials to keep me up to date with what is going on in the BSD world. There is so little information or it is so hard to find for somebody in the Mac and Linux world that it might as well not exist at all. And the thing is, if you “dev” on Mac or Linux and “deploy” on Linux, like a lot of us, you are a *NIX head and are interested in hearing what is new in the BSDs.
- lmohseni 5y agoThe FreeBSD youtube channel is great for long-form intros and talks, if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/c/FreeBSDProject https://www.youtube.com/c/FreeBSDProject
- Koshkin 5y agohttps://www.freebsdnews.com/ https://www.freebsdnews.com/
- riedel 5y agoSeems dead since beginning of last year. Any idea what happened.
- pinephoneguy 5y agoIIRC BSDs had containers first but they worked slightly differently.
- ok123456 5y agoYou have bsdgames. What else could you want?
- Koshkin 5y agoDoom
- lizknope 5y agoI've got a MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from 2011 and 2012. Neither is supported by Mac OS X anymore but Fedora 35 works perfectly on them. Both have Broadcom WiFi chips.
- mrlemke 5y agoYou don't need Flatpak on FreeBSD. Flatpak was created for a problem that doesn't exist on FreeBSD. There are not a thousand different FreeBSDs with varying kernels and software installed.
- jgillich 5y agoWhen I say BSD doesn't support Flatpak, I mean literal Flatpak. I want to go to Flathub and install any piece of software. Yes, not possible because BSD is not Linux, but as a user I don't care. Flatpak has solved packaging and installing software across distros, and I'm not willing to give it up.
- znpy 5y agoBSD people keep insisting on going back to fifteen years ago GNU/Linux on the desktop as if that was a great thing. I miss being young, having lots of energy, being able to function on 4 hours of sleep and having all my life in front of me as much as the next person but you'll have to take systemd, networkmanager, docker/kubernetes and zfs off my cold, dead hands.
- the_only_law 5y ago> but you'll have to take systemd, networkmanager, docker/kubernetes and zfs off my cold, dead hands. I thought zfs came from Solaris/FreeBSD
- t-3 5y agoYou're right, and they also have jails and the FreeBSD service command seems to have been the inspiration for systemd (or is at least so close that it could have been). I think people are just unaware and afraid of trying "new" things.
- znpy 5y agoyou and GP are only partially right: - zfs came from solaris, not from freebsd - solaris and freebsd share very little as codebases and are very different OSes - and regarding the previous point: the fact that some OSes shared the codebase ~30 years ago means very little today. - the zfs people use on FreeBSD today is basically ZfsOnLinux. Som years ago the freebsd people dropped their snowflake implementation and joined the ZfsOnLinux effort, basically because ZfsOnLinux was moving at a way faster pace than they were. The project has been renamed OpenZFS iirc, and FreeBSD periodically rebases on that afaik.
- thesuitonym 5y agoOne thing I like about OpenBSD as a desktop is that it's extremely focused. Yeah, it's not a good system for playing games, but neither is the laptop I want to run it on. Yeah, there aren't a lot of wifi chips that it supports, but when a wifi chipset works, it just works. None of that Linux ``yeah it kind of works, but you have to jump through all these hoops...'' nonsense. It either works, or it doesn't. Yes, there are many things you can't do on an OpenBSD system, but those are things you wouldn't really want to do on an OpenBSD system anyway.
- anthk 5y agoOn wireless: /etc/hostname.foobar lladdr random join ESSID wpakey blahblahb inet autoconf inet6 autoconf That's it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fartcannon 5y agoIt's beautiful because it's not only simple, but you get the understand more of what's going on.
- Koshkin 5y ago> It either works, or it doesn't. Sounds like that 50/50 joke (about the likelihood of bumping into a dinosaur in the street).
- dilippkumar 5y agoOne thing about OpenBSD that impressed me is that whatever is supported is supported correctly. My go to example is my laptop’s keyboard backlight works exactly as expected from tty terminals. I’m willing to limit my hardware options to the small subset that works with OpenBSD in return for having an OS that I can trust. Fortunately, this small subset includes the X1 Carbon thinkpads which are really nice. I’m experimenting living with a combination of iPad + openBSD thinkpad - iPad for things like Netflix and Zoom where the business isn’t interested in supporting openBSD, and my laptop for everything else. PS: Bluetooth is a terrible protocol and should be nuked from orbit out of existence. None of my 5 bluetooth headphones (from different vendors and different price ranges) can figure out which device I was last playing from, my car repeatedly steals my bluetooth audio and starts playing music without my consent every single time, audio stops streaming randomly despite my phone/iPad thinking that they are connected and continuing to play - I can rant for a long time. I genuinely respect openBSD developers for deleting the bluetooth stack to improve the OS quality.
- anthk 5y agoOn OpenBSD and gaming, check PlayOnBSD. Of course is nowhere near Linux or even FreeBSD, but you can set an XFCE desktop with GVFS supported device automounting withou too much hazzle.
- na85 5y agoBSDs pretty consistently perform at the bottom of most performance benchmarks I've seen, when compared to Linux. NetBSD appears to have embraced a niche as a research OS, not sure about the other distros.
- trasz 5y agoLet me guess, the benchmarks you have in mind are Phoronix, right? :->
- na85 5y agoNo I think I saw them on openbenchmarking, why?
- trasz 5y agoLooking at openbenchmarking.org, it seems they are related to Phoronix? As to why - essentially, Phoronix benchmarks are crap, for a number of reasons: 1. They don't provide things like standard deviation 2. They compile software in improper way 3. They don't even know what are they measuring in the first place It's been pointed to them numerous times, and honestly, I think it's a waste of time.
- na85 5y agoI dunno, sounds like sour grapes to me. Those benchmarks are in agreement with my subjective experience of running (open)bsd on an allegedly well-suoported thinkpad: compared to debian, bsd was sluggish and lasted hours less on battery.
- 1500100900 5y agoPerformance is not the top priority for OpenBSD developers.
- trasz 5y agoNo idea about OpenBSD (BSDs are completely separate operating systems), but I remember recent case where certain bad FreeBSD result was tracked down to PTS failing to correctly measure test time. I hate to say this, but I suspect PTS is not actually a benchmark - it’s a publicity generation tool pretending to be a benchmark.
- blippage 5y agoI tried FreeBSD a couple of years back, and X Windows seemed buggy. I mean, come on, this is something that should have been sorted out by now. Maybe if one were into speed and minimalism, and didn't want a GUI, then one of the BSDs is a good idea. At the time I thought it was slower than Slackware, according to my completely unscientific evaluation. Linux may be more complex than the BSDs, but remember, a lot of resources get poured into Linux. I'm glad that the BSDs exist, I'm just not particularly inclined to use them.
- digisign 5y agoInteresting... I've never used bluetooth or flatpak... or any BSD except in a VM for compat testing. Yet they are described as must haves here.