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Always 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 Linu

Always 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 ago
People 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 ago
  Gaming 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 ago
      Nope, 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.
  - noirbot 5y ago
    I'm sure it depends on the games you want to play - competitive games where anti-cheat is a thing, sure, but if you're ideologically against having kernel level anti-cheat then that's not that Linux gaming is bad, it's just that gaming as a whole is bad. Most single-player stuff I've tried has worked fine on Linux with either Lutris + Wine or Steam + Proton. The only games that haven't are super small indie stuff where I just assume they're coded a little poorly in some way.
  - gundamdoubleO 5y ago
    You're kidding right? Linux gaming compatibility has been near ideal for me for the past year and we already know the anti-cheat situation is at least being worked thanks to vendors like Valve. I haven't boot into Windows for a long time for gaming. The only real exceptions being Microsoft exclusives or multiplayer EGS titles.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    This comment is wrong on so many levels. But to tackle the main one, gaming on Linux is in the best position it's ever been in. It's not getting 'worse' due to anti cheat, in fact the steamdeck and valve are actively bringing compatibility to linux for those things. What can you possibly be basing your claim on there? Are you aware of proton?
  - headhuntermdk 5y ago
    I'm guessing you haven't heard of Netflix then https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-epyc-cpus-netflix-bandwidth-400-gbps-per-server https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-epyc-cpus-netflix-band...
    - mrits 5y ago
      The widely known use cases for FreeBSD doesn't have much to do with it "excelling" as a server OS.
      - Shared404 5y ago
        Where does FreeBSD excel then, because last time I checked all the widely known use cases were split about 50/50 serving and routing, with a side of Playstation. Re: Linux gaming: Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of the MCC playing on my Linux box. And Ori. And Stardew, RoR2, Everspace, XCOM2, SWTOR, Hades, DST, Hollow Knight, FTL, Terraria, Human Fall Flat, Portal 1/2, and a variety of other games. As far as anticheat is concerned, that's actively being worked on by Valve and the largest stake holders.
        mrits 5y ago
        Now list the games that you can't play
        Shared404 5y ago
        Literally none that I've tried have given me problems. But to the working games, let me add: Overwatch, League of Legends, Anything from GBA/GB/NES/SNES/DS/OtherRetroSystems, Starcraft. Oh, and Minecraft of course. I'm sure I can come up with more. Edit: One steam library checking later - and I'll note, this is stuff that I've actually played on Linux (and is also filtered by names I think people would recognize): Arma 3, Blitzkrieg 2, Pit People, Castle Crashers, BattleBlock Theater, Unturned, Invisible Inc., Baldurs Gate, Undertale, Speedrunners, Dota 2, Gary's Mod, Everspace, Raft, AoE 3. This makes up the VAST majority of my steam library, none of which was purchased checking for Linux compatibility. It's one thing to say that a specific game you want doesn't work, and quite another to say it in general doesn't work. Edit again: Rocket League. That's it. That's the only one that I know of issues with, and I don't know if it even still has issues - I stopped playing when it required an Epic account. Oh hey, lookie there: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 . Sounds like that works too.
  - wang_li 5y ago
    >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. Examples come to mind: Whatsapp and Hotmail used to use it before being acquired by companies with their own tech stacks. Netflix's streaming service is based on it. Pfsense was based on it at one time, not sure if it still is. Juniper uses it. If you go check out the FreeBSD Foundation donations pages you'll see Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and others. Reality is that on the server and in the data center all I need from an OS is a near posix userland and wired network and storage drivers.
    - mekster 5y ago
      I always wondered how FreeBSD foundation is run. https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/about-the-foundation/financials/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/about-the-foundation/... They have so little income with those sponsors and multiple times that expense and who is covering the cost? The total income is like one guy's salary and is that all those big names are paying as sponsors?
      - soupbowl 5y ago
        I am an avid fan and user of FreeBSD, l have wondered the same thing myself over the years.
- city41 5y ago
  Windows excels at development if you're using Microsoft tech. Virtually all other tech stacks are at a disadvantage on Windows. WSL and WSL2 were created largely to address this gap.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    WSL and WSL2 were created to target the market of people that buy Mac laptops when they should be supporting Linux OEMs. People that don't care what OS they are running, as long as they get their POSIX toys. In fact, given the size of that market, most likely Linux would never happened if Microsoft had been half as serious with Windows NT POSIX subsystem.
    - hnfong 5y ago
      Yeah, GNU/NT would have changed everything. Instead we got cygwin :-/
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Windows NT POSIX subsystem was more like BSD/NT, basic effort. And SUA was also not much GNU related.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        > Instead we got cygwin :-/ I've only used what I think is a subset (of a clone or subset?) of Cygwin: "git bash". At two jobs, on two different Win 10 laptops now. Is the rest of Cygwin also as excruciatingly slow?
        remexre 5y ago
        My understanding is that the general problem description for "this Unix program is really really slow when recompiled for Windows" is generally either "lots of small files is good style on Unix, but expensive on Windows," or "fork() is nearly free on every Unix, but potentially expensive in NT."
- sgjohnson 5y ago
  > People say it’s Windows that excels for development (because of Visual Studio) Depends on the development you're doing. .NET or C# -- Windows, hands down. That's about it. Besides, I prefer JetBrains IDEs anyway, which are platform agnostic. And I'm in the same boat, macOS for work/development, loonix on VMs/servers, and Windows is strictly for gaming.
- dilippkumar 5y ago
  > …and Dragonfly, in particular… Can you please elaborate? My exposure to DragonflyBSD is limited to knowing that they have an interesting new filesystem (Hammer2). What is it like to actually use it? Is Hammer2 a significant improvement over ZFS on FreeBSD? Does Dragonfly have other selling points? I’d love to hear the strongest case for deploying Dragonfly.
UI_at_80x24 5y ago
I use it (FreeBSD) because I want my workstation to match my servers when it comes to basics like the environment variables, kernel versions, and packages. I manage 100+ servers, and 1000+ domains. If I want to make sure that a security patch for a critical CVE doesn't fuck with our systems, or I want to test a new script to make sure it works I do the following: ZFS snapshot of my "dev jail". Apply the patch/write the script. Test everything and make sure it still works. Ansible: ZFS snapshot the fleet, apply the patch/deploy the script So gaming and other 'fun' things are not my goal on my workstation, I do use it. There's at least One of us! Because it's what my servers use, it's what I want to use on my desktop. I'd like to add here that I LOVE using i3. I'm from an age where the OS is supposed to get out of the way. I want to use my programs, not my operating system.
moffkalast 5y ago
> Mac for development Is Mac really any better than Windows or Linux for dev? Or is it just that a Macbook is more convenient to carry around?
- kergonath 5y ago
  Compared to Linux it’s a toss up. Though the Mac UI is miles ahead of standard Linux; you have to spend quite a long time tuning your DE to get something good and even then there is UI consistency across toolkits. The Mac has things like Office, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, more games as well. Linux has better package managers and is more customisable. Both are vastly better than Windows for development.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    The Mac OSX UI is at least as bad as Windows. FFS Finder, guys!
    - mekster 5y ago
      Never liked Finder but you can have alternatives like ForkLift and Transmit. I even enabled "Quit Finder" to get it out of my alt-tabbing.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      Cocoa is much, much better than anything I have seen on Windows. Finder is just an application, but the toolkit is pervasive.
- gglitch 5y ago
  For me personally, moving back to Linux has been a huge improvement. Absolutely the only thing I miss from my mbp was having out-of-the-box keymapping of Control to Control and Command to Super, giving me readline throughout the system. I'm sure there's a straightforward way to produce this in KDE, but it'd be nice not to have to monkey with it. Readline is amazing.
- mekster 5y ago
inopinatus 5y ago
> Also I really don't get why BSD developers care to develop desktop environment with their limited resource Because they want to: they are the limited resource, and have agency. They may allocate their time as they please, and to their own benefit and preferences. Why should they pander to yours, when you don't even use it, let alone contribute? I struggle to comprehend how such an over-entitled expectation arises. > if they want to stay relevant I don't think you realise the sheer scale of the unobtrusively installed BSD base, from fundamental infrastructure (SANs, routers) to home entertainment systems (PS5) and more besides. And of course, rather notoriously, BSD origins still account for a fair chunk of the userland on that Mac of yours.
- mekster 5y ago
  I used to use BSD on my hobby server just to keep up with the BSD world but nowadays on Linux, I use various packages from Docker hub and little tools from Homebrew but they don't work on BSD and I've lost the reason to use BSD especially when Ubuntu offers zfs in easy to use packages. I don't use BSD nor Linux for desktop because I like the third party tools offered on macOS for work and now I don't know what BSD is for me. I'm also amazed how FreeBSD doesn't care to make it work on Raspberry Pi. Perhaps I'm not the only one in the same boat and people may stop packaging tools for BSD and less people may use it. Not my business but just an advice. I see the license is a big part that keeps BSD rolling where the manufacturers want to keep their changes to their own and I get it that people should thank how OpenSSH is developed upstream at OpenBSD.
  - 1500100900 5y ago
    > I don't use BSD nor Linux for desktop because I like the third party tools offered on macOS for work and now I don't know what BSD is for me. I'm also amazed how FreeBSD doesn't care to make it work on Raspberry Pi. Where did you get that from? Maybe they care, but it's not that easy for some technical reason?
    - mekster 5y ago
      I got that too far. I had the impression it was borked but it just didn't have wi-fi support. Other parts work. But it does limit its usage like making a wireless router out of it. (Can attach an external antenna via USB maybe.) https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi#What_works https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi#What_works

Koshkin 5y ago

People 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 ago
Gaming 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 ago
    Nope, 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.
- noirbot 5y ago
  I'm sure it depends on the games you want to play - competitive games where anti-cheat is a thing, sure, but if you're ideologically against having kernel level anti-cheat then that's not that Linux gaming is bad, it's just that gaming as a whole is bad. Most single-player stuff I've tried has worked fine on Linux with either Lutris + Wine or Steam + Proton. The only games that haven't are super small indie stuff where I just assume they're coded a little poorly in some way.
- gundamdoubleO 5y ago
  You're kidding right? Linux gaming compatibility has been near ideal for me for the past year and we already know the anti-cheat situation is at least being worked thanks to vendors like Valve. I haven't boot into Windows for a long time for gaming. The only real exceptions being Microsoft exclusives or multiplayer EGS titles.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  This comment is wrong on so many levels. But to tackle the main one, gaming on Linux is in the best position it's ever been in. It's not getting 'worse' due to anti cheat, in fact the steamdeck and valve are actively bringing compatibility to linux for those things. What can you possibly be basing your claim on there? Are you aware of proton?
- headhuntermdk 5y ago
  I'm guessing you haven't heard of Netflix then https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-epyc-cpus-netflix-bandwidth-400-gbps-per-server https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-epyc-cpus-netflix-band...
  - mrits 5y ago
    The widely known use cases for FreeBSD doesn't have much to do with it "excelling" as a server OS.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      Where does FreeBSD excel then, because last time I checked all the widely known use cases were split about 50/50 serving and routing, with a side of Playstation. Re: Linux gaming: Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of the MCC playing on my Linux box. And Ori. And Stardew, RoR2, Everspace, XCOM2, SWTOR, Hades, DST, Hollow Knight, FTL, Terraria, Human Fall Flat, Portal 1/2, and a variety of other games. As far as anticheat is concerned, that's actively being worked on by Valve and the largest stake holders.
      - mrits 5y ago
        Now list the games that you can't play
        Shared404 5y ago
        Literally none that I've tried have given me problems. But to the working games, let me add: Overwatch, League of Legends, Anything from GBA/GB/NES/SNES/DS/OtherRetroSystems, Starcraft. Oh, and Minecraft of course. I'm sure I can come up with more. Edit: One steam library checking later - and I'll note, this is stuff that I've actually played on Linux (and is also filtered by names I think people would recognize): Arma 3, Blitzkrieg 2, Pit People, Castle Crashers, BattleBlock Theater, Unturned, Invisible Inc., Baldurs Gate, Undertale, Speedrunners, Dota 2, Gary's Mod, Everspace, Raft, AoE 3. This makes up the VAST majority of my steam library, none of which was purchased checking for Linux compatibility. It's one thing to say that a specific game you want doesn't work, and quite another to say it in general doesn't work. Edit again: Rocket League. That's it. That's the only one that I know of issues with, and I don't know if it even still has issues - I stopped playing when it required an Epic account. Oh hey, lookie there: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 . Sounds like that works too.
- wang_li 5y ago
  >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. Examples come to mind: Whatsapp and Hotmail used to use it before being acquired by companies with their own tech stacks. Netflix's streaming service is based on it. Pfsense was based on it at one time, not sure if it still is. Juniper uses it. If you go check out the FreeBSD Foundation donations pages you'll see Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and others. Reality is that on the server and in the data center all I need from an OS is a near posix userland and wired network and storage drivers.
  - mekster 5y ago
    I always wondered how FreeBSD foundation is run. https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/about-the-foundation/financials/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/about-the-foundation/... They have so little income with those sponsors and multiple times that expense and who is covering the cost? The total income is like one guy's salary and is that all those big names are paying as sponsors?
    - soupbowl 5y ago
      I am an avid fan and user of FreeBSD, l have wondered the same thing myself over the years.
city41 5y ago
Windows excels at development if you're using Microsoft tech. Virtually all other tech stacks are at a disadvantage on Windows. WSL and WSL2 were created largely to address this gap.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  WSL and WSL2 were created to target the market of people that buy Mac laptops when they should be supporting Linux OEMs. People that don't care what OS they are running, as long as they get their POSIX toys. In fact, given the size of that market, most likely Linux would never happened if Microsoft had been half as serious with Windows NT POSIX subsystem.
  - hnfong 5y ago
    Yeah, GNU/NT would have changed everything. Instead we got cygwin :-/
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Windows NT POSIX subsystem was more like BSD/NT, basic effort. And SUA was also not much GNU related.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Instead we got cygwin :-/ I've only used what I think is a subset (of a clone or subset?) of Cygwin: "git bash". At two jobs, on two different Win 10 laptops now. Is the rest of Cygwin also as excruciatingly slow?
      - remexre 5y ago
        My understanding is that the general problem description for "this Unix program is really really slow when recompiled for Windows" is generally either "lots of small files is good style on Unix, but expensive on Windows," or "fork() is nearly free on every Unix, but potentially expensive in NT."
sgjohnson 5y ago
> People say it’s Windows that excels for development (because of Visual Studio) Depends on the development you're doing. .NET or C# -- Windows, hands down. That's about it. Besides, I prefer JetBrains IDEs anyway, which are platform agnostic. And I'm in the same boat, macOS for work/development, loonix on VMs/servers, and Windows is strictly for gaming.
dilippkumar 5y ago
> …and Dragonfly, in particular… Can you please elaborate? My exposure to DragonflyBSD is limited to knowing that they have an interesting new filesystem (Hammer2). What is it like to actually use it? Is Hammer2 a significant improvement over ZFS on FreeBSD? Does Dragonfly have other selling points? I’d love to hear the strongest case for deploying Dragonfly.

UI_at_80x24 5y ago

I use it (FreeBSD) because I want my workstation to match my servers when it comes to basics like the environment variables, kernel versions, and packages. I manage 100+ servers, and 1000+ domains. If I want to make sure that a security patch for a critical CVE doesn't fuck with our systems, or I want to test a new script to make sure it works I do the following: ZFS snapshot of my "dev jail". Apply the patch/write the script. Test everything and make sure it still works. Ansible: ZFS snapshot the fleet, apply the patch/deploy the script So gaming and other 'fun' things are not my goal on my workstation, I do use it. There's at least One of us! Because it's what my servers use, it's what I want to use on my desktop. I'd like to add here that I LOVE using i3. I'm from an age where the OS is supposed to get out of the way. I want to use my programs, not my operating system.

moffkalast 5y ago

> Mac for development Is Mac really any better than Windows or Linux for dev? Or is it just that a Macbook is more convenient to carry around?

kergonath 5y ago
Compared to Linux it’s a toss up. Though the Mac UI is miles ahead of standard Linux; you have to spend quite a long time tuning your DE to get something good and even then there is UI consistency across toolkits. The Mac has things like Office, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, more games as well. Linux has better package managers and is more customisable. Both are vastly better than Windows for development.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  The Mac OSX UI is at least as bad as Windows. FFS Finder, guys!
  - mekster 5y ago
    Never liked Finder but you can have alternatives like ForkLift and Transmit. I even enabled "Quit Finder" to get it out of my alt-tabbing.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Cocoa is much, much better than anything I have seen on Windows. Finder is just an application, but the toolkit is pervasive.
gglitch 5y ago
For me personally, moving back to Linux has been a huge improvement. Absolutely the only thing I miss from my mbp was having out-of-the-box keymapping of Control to Control and Command to Super, giving me readline throughout the system. I'm sure there's a straightforward way to produce this in KDE, but it'd be nice not to have to monkey with it. Readline is amazing.
mekster 5y ago

inopinatus 5y ago

> Also I really don't get why BSD developers care to develop desktop environment with their limited resource Because they want to: they are the limited resource, and have agency. They may allocate their time as they please, and to their own benefit and preferences. Why should they pander to yours, when you don't even use it, let alone contribute? I struggle to comprehend how such an over-entitled expectation arises. > if they want to stay relevant I don't think you realise the sheer scale of the unobtrusively installed BSD base, from fundamental infrastructure (SANs, routers) to home entertainment systems (PS5) and more besides. And of course, rather notoriously, BSD origins still account for a fair chunk of the userland on that Mac of yours.

mekster 5y ago
I used to use BSD on my hobby server just to keep up with the BSD world but nowadays on Linux, I use various packages from Docker hub and little tools from Homebrew but they don't work on BSD and I've lost the reason to use BSD especially when Ubuntu offers zfs in easy to use packages. I don't use BSD nor Linux for desktop because I like the third party tools offered on macOS for work and now I don't know what BSD is for me. I'm also amazed how FreeBSD doesn't care to make it work on Raspberry Pi. Perhaps I'm not the only one in the same boat and people may stop packaging tools for BSD and less people may use it. Not my business but just an advice. I see the license is a big part that keeps BSD rolling where the manufacturers want to keep their changes to their own and I get it that people should thank how OpenSSH is developed upstream at OpenBSD.
- 1500100900 5y ago
  > I don't use BSD nor Linux for desktop because I like the third party tools offered on macOS for work and now I don't know what BSD is for me. I'm also amazed how FreeBSD doesn't care to make it work on Raspberry Pi. Where did you get that from? Maybe they care, but it's not that easy for some technical reason?
  - mekster 5y ago
    I got that too far. I had the impression it was borked but it just didn't have wi-fi support. Other parts work. But it does limit its usage like making a wireless router out of it. (Can attach an external antenna via USB maybe.) https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi#What_works https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi#What_works