2 ms·
It’s worth running a FreeBSD or NetBSD desktop
- ggm 4y agoAt one level, in the world of "less time is available to fix DRI and like" the decision in BSD is "am I prepared to live in a 2D VESA driver world" Mostly I am. As long as I dont get tearing and can still do xrandr and adjust flicker and multiscreen, I'm good. If you need DRI, GL, if you need events like hotplug and complex cut/paste glue of binary data (images, sounds) then you can be in a place where BSD is sometimes frustrating. Less than it used to be, but it's there. I have friends in Linux who deliberately run in a 2D VESA world to have a simpler life. But, they do it knowing they are the monks of cool and are rejecting 3D fully active OSX like experiences. If you come at this expecting "BSD is like darwin so this will be as good as a Mac" then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I think its worth doing. But know what you are doing. Diving into "is it Wayland? is it the i915 or my AGI card, is it multi head, does it sleep, does it blank, does it honour my touchpad, my fingerprint sensor, my camera..." is also "out there". Some people treat these as "non-X question" and of course thats literally true, but it's also not: the naieve user thinks the whole lived experience inside the GUI is a bundle. Explaining that "desktop" has a lot to unpack inside it, is hard. I went for months, years even, thinking "DRM" meant the whole thing about intellectual property rights management and not "make it do graphics like Windows"