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Evey time BSD news gets posted, I always come in the comments looking for reasons to switch from Linux. There is consistently high praise accompanied by not so

Evey time BSD news gets posted, I always come in the comments looking for reasons to switch from Linux. There is consistently high praise accompanied by not so minor grips that make me stick with Linux. Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use?

anonymous_union 3y ago
[dead]
gabeio 3y ago
> Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use? For desktop it should mostly depend on you. Does the things you personally run on a regular basis even work on BSD? Unfortunately mine don't (terraform: too few providers support BSD and the one's I specifically work with do not). Yes, I could run terraform within a virtual machine on the system but that's heavier than I would like it to be.
unsungNovelty 3y ago
Not specific to desktop per se. But this is a post which made me dig into BSD more: https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fodkodrasz 3y ago
If you eventually want some multimedia (3d, videos, etc), probably you won't like BSD. (opinion based on 4 year old experience) I have used OpenBSD and NetBSD on desktop and servers. While they have their merits, as a Windows and Mac poweruser I have always felt some void. Linux is bearable from this perspective, BSDs were really far from the limited-priviliege user dynamical reconfigurability needed for a road-warrior notebook user. Linux is almost there. If you have a mostly static setup and a sufficiently outdated Hw setup, you might be able to play high resolution youtube videos. If no other audio is holding the audio device. (though last time I used NetBSD had OSSv4 in the pipeline, and had limited success on openbsd, if all streams had the same sampling rate) Oh, and OpenBSD managed to loose my data. (I liked many aspects of the system despite the above, but after this it got on my nope list, this was not acceptable even 30 years ago)
- anonymous_union 3y ago
  [dead]
- anthk 3y ago
  OpenBSD had sndio since ages.
- alpn 3y ago
  > OpenBSD managed to loose my data. can you elaborate please?
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903911 I was using softdeps on OpenBSD 6.4, on an old Thinkpad x200. Once the battery ran out unexpectedly (old battery reporting incorrect remaining time), while I was doing some downloads and compiling a package. The system became unbootable because of filesystem corruption, after fsck and overwrite of system packages from other boot media I noticed extensive data loss. After clean reinstall experiencing intel drm driver kernel panics during ports install the disk became corrupted once again, with some files lost. I reinstaled the system once again and with disabled intel drm and softdeps the system worked for a while, but was slow as an ancient pentium. I reinstalled windows and the machine worked great for years afterwards (with the wifi being a bit choppy, which was perfect on openbsd) for some tasks I needed a semi-portable windows machine (running some windows only plc programming tools). The ssd was healthy, memcheck did not find memory errors. I reinstaled my openbsd server with linux which was running ok meanwhile, but now I can sleep assured that my data is mostly safe.
dilippkumar 3y ago
> Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use? Let me try. First up, it is extremely possible that OpenBSD is not for you. If you require something that is Linux specific, or you absolutely need Bluetooth or one of the other few things that you don't get with OpenBSD, and you are unable to refactor your life to not need those things anymore, then OpenBSD is a no go. If that is not a concern, the strongest argument I can make for OpenBSD is that it's an operating system that wants you to trust it. It's written by people who understand system correctness matters above all else (and security just happens to be a nice side effect). Most of the time, this has only small and subtle user facing effects: good documentation, sensible defaults etc. But it really shows when you use it for a long period of time and see how over and over again, a decision made 10 years ago made OpenBSD somehow immune to the burning zero-day crisis of the day.
anyfoo 3y ago
OpenBSD itself is a very capable and secure, but also very clean operating system. Everything feels as if it's out of "a single mold", much unlike e.g. Linux which is, in a sense, clearly cobbled together from many different pieces. Changing the system is a breeze, documentation is extremely clear and detailed, and it just "doesn't get in the way". That doesn't mean it's the OS for you. There are disadvantages with using a less common operating system, and it does require a certain mindset of liking to tinker with a UNIX-like operating system. I don't use it as a desktop OS, but for various servers.
- freeplay 3y ago
  My concern is lack of support for certain things and flexibility. To be fair, I have very little knowledge of what's supported and what's not. If it help, here's 2 things I love about Linux: 1. The dev experience. This is obvious. Great package managers, native container support, etc. It all works great and feels snappy. 2. Ability to do obscure things. For example, a family friend may want a bunch of pictures archived. I can mount his google Drive with rclone, grab all of his pics and burn them to a blu-ray. Obviously, this is not an everyday use case but I appreciate the ability to do these types of things if I ever need to. I don't want to have to spin up a VM to support these odd one offs.
gosub100 3y ago
the ports often dont work (or require a rodeo-size production to get them to work). A couple of years ago I installed FreeBSD, went to ports and did a "make install clean" of vim, and it wasted 10 minutes of my time only to fail on some arcane package's compilation. I asked for help and was told that "ports are not the OS, contact the ports maintainer for your pkg", technically true, but they tout their ports as this awesome, universal collection of amazing software. (the real workaround is for common packages like vim, you use "pkg install vim" and it installs binaries). The beauty of ports (if they worked) is that you can do cool things with the USE flags (this should be familiar to Gentoo users, my mind is drawing a blank though for a concrete example to explain this to someone unfamiliar). Recently I tried to install prolog on OpenBSD-7.3, it failed even from pkg. I didn't want to waste my time on ports, so I just wiped the OS from my machine (running neofetch takes a couple seconds, which gives you an idea of how slow it is, however if I ever needed a very secure machine (such as an SSH bastion or anything internet-facing) I wouldn't hesitate to pull it up again. FreeBSD is almost usable as a desktop though. Only thing keeping me is audio wont work over HDMI/DisplayPort, but I totally understand they don't have time to fix all that hoopla. A pro OR a con, depending on your POV is that FreeBSD support really expects you to put your big-boy pants on when you ask for help. They get (justifiably) annoyed if you dont RTFM and concisely lay out everything you tried to do to fix it. For various reasons, the Linux ecosystem is way more tolerant of SO-style "how do I do X on linux" type questions.
- toast0 3y ago
  > Only thing keeping me is audio wont work over HDMI/DisplayPort, but I totally understand they don't have time to fix all that hoopla. What video card? I've got a half done patch for Intel that might help, a little. Some things are easyish; there's a flag I forget the details of that got audio devices to show up, in the likely event that boot time firmware didn't set things up properly. Some things are much harder; at least on haswell era intel video, audio and video clocks are linked, so the audio and video driver really need to communicate, but (when I was last looking at it) there's no plumbing for that in FreeBSD, and the video driver is imported from Linux anyway. Some things seem impossible; on the machine I using HDMI audio with, the audio device stops responding overnight and rebooting is the expedient way to get it back; there's probably something better, but I dunno.
INTPenis 3y ago
Right tool for the right job. I used to say OpenBSD is great for routers and firewalls, but honestly it's so left behind in performance and Linux has gained so much with eBPF that Linux is looking like the better option now. I used FreeBSD on my desktop way back in 2000-2008 but today after 9 years on Fedora it seems like the stoneage.
6r17 3y ago
To be real ; There is no docker and if you have to use it then it's a problem Same might go for anything that needs NVIDIA
- jesterson 3y ago
  > There is no docker I would say it's a huge plus

anonymous_union 3y ago

[dead]

gabeio 3y ago

> Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use? For desktop it should mostly depend on you. Does the things you personally run on a regular basis even work on BSD? Unfortunately mine don't (terraform: too few providers support BSD and the one's I specifically work with do not). Yes, I could run terraform within a virtual machine on the system but that's heavier than I would like it to be.

unsungNovelty 3y ago

Not specific to desktop per se. But this is a post which made me dig into BSD more: https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fodkodrasz 3y ago

If you eventually want some multimedia (3d, videos, etc), probably you won't like BSD. (opinion based on 4 year old experience) I have used OpenBSD and NetBSD on desktop and servers. While they have their merits, as a Windows and Mac poweruser I have always felt some void. Linux is bearable from this perspective, BSDs were really far from the limited-priviliege user dynamical reconfigurability needed for a road-warrior notebook user. Linux is almost there. If you have a mostly static setup and a sufficiently outdated Hw setup, you might be able to play high resolution youtube videos. If no other audio is holding the audio device. (though last time I used NetBSD had OSSv4 in the pipeline, and had limited success on openbsd, if all streams had the same sampling rate) Oh, and OpenBSD managed to loose my data. (I liked many aspects of the system despite the above, but after this it got on my nope list, this was not acceptable even 30 years ago)

anonymous_union 3y ago
[dead]
anthk 3y ago
OpenBSD had sndio since ages.
alpn 3y ago
> OpenBSD managed to loose my data. can you elaborate please?
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903911 I was using softdeps on OpenBSD 6.4, on an old Thinkpad x200. Once the battery ran out unexpectedly (old battery reporting incorrect remaining time), while I was doing some downloads and compiling a package. The system became unbootable because of filesystem corruption, after fsck and overwrite of system packages from other boot media I noticed extensive data loss. After clean reinstall experiencing intel drm driver kernel panics during ports install the disk became corrupted once again, with some files lost. I reinstaled the system once again and with disabled intel drm and softdeps the system worked for a while, but was slow as an ancient pentium. I reinstalled windows and the machine worked great for years afterwards (with the wifi being a bit choppy, which was perfect on openbsd) for some tasks I needed a semi-portable windows machine (running some windows only plc programming tools). The ssd was healthy, memcheck did not find memory errors. I reinstaled my openbsd server with linux which was running ok meanwhile, but now I can sleep assured that my data is mostly safe.

dilippkumar 3y ago

> Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use? Let me try. First up, it is extremely possible that OpenBSD is not for you. If you require something that is Linux specific, or you absolutely need Bluetooth or one of the other few things that you don't get with OpenBSD, and you are unable to refactor your life to not need those things anymore, then OpenBSD is a no go. If that is not a concern, the strongest argument I can make for OpenBSD is that it's an operating system that wants you to trust it. It's written by people who understand system correctness matters above all else (and security just happens to be a nice side effect). Most of the time, this has only small and subtle user facing effects: good documentation, sensible defaults etc. But it really shows when you use it for a long period of time and see how over and over again, a decision made 10 years ago made OpenBSD somehow immune to the burning zero-day crisis of the day.

anyfoo 3y ago

OpenBSD itself is a very capable and secure, but also very clean operating system. Everything feels as if it's out of "a single mold", much unlike e.g. Linux which is, in a sense, clearly cobbled together from many different pieces. Changing the system is a breeze, documentation is extremely clear and detailed, and it just "doesn't get in the way". That doesn't mean it's the OS for you. There are disadvantages with using a less common operating system, and it does require a certain mindset of liking to tinker with a UNIX-like operating system. I don't use it as a desktop OS, but for various servers.

freeplay 3y ago
My concern is lack of support for certain things and flexibility. To be fair, I have very little knowledge of what's supported and what's not. If it help, here's 2 things I love about Linux: 1. The dev experience. This is obvious. Great package managers, native container support, etc. It all works great and feels snappy. 2. Ability to do obscure things. For example, a family friend may want a bunch of pictures archived. I can mount his google Drive with rclone, grab all of his pics and burn them to a blu-ray. Obviously, this is not an everyday use case but I appreciate the ability to do these types of things if I ever need to. I don't want to have to spin up a VM to support these odd one offs.

gosub100 3y ago

the ports often dont work (or require a rodeo-size production to get them to work). A couple of years ago I installed FreeBSD, went to ports and did a "make install clean" of vim, and it wasted 10 minutes of my time only to fail on some arcane package's compilation. I asked for help and was told that "ports are not the OS, contact the ports maintainer for your pkg", technically true, but they tout their ports as this awesome, universal collection of amazing software. (the real workaround is for common packages like vim, you use "pkg install vim" and it installs binaries). The beauty of ports (if they worked) is that you can do cool things with the USE flags (this should be familiar to Gentoo users, my mind is drawing a blank though for a concrete example to explain this to someone unfamiliar). Recently I tried to install prolog on OpenBSD-7.3, it failed even from pkg. I didn't want to waste my time on ports, so I just wiped the OS from my machine (running neofetch takes a couple seconds, which gives you an idea of how slow it is, however if I ever needed a very secure machine (such as an SSH bastion or anything internet-facing) I wouldn't hesitate to pull it up again. FreeBSD is almost usable as a desktop though. Only thing keeping me is audio wont work over HDMI/DisplayPort, but I totally understand they don't have time to fix all that hoopla. A pro OR a con, depending on your POV is that FreeBSD support really expects you to put your big-boy pants on when you ask for help. They get (justifiably) annoyed if you dont RTFM and concisely lay out everything you tried to do to fix it. For various reasons, the Linux ecosystem is way more tolerant of SO-style "how do I do X on linux" type questions.

toast0 3y ago
> Only thing keeping me is audio wont work over HDMI/DisplayPort, but I totally understand they don't have time to fix all that hoopla. What video card? I've got a half done patch for Intel that might help, a little. Some things are easyish; there's a flag I forget the details of that got audio devices to show up, in the likely event that boot time firmware didn't set things up properly. Some things are much harder; at least on haswell era intel video, audio and video clocks are linked, so the audio and video driver really need to communicate, but (when I was last looking at it) there's no plumbing for that in FreeBSD, and the video driver is imported from Linux anyway. Some things seem impossible; on the machine I using HDMI audio with, the audio device stops responding overnight and rebooting is the expedient way to get it back; there's probably something better, but I dunno.

INTPenis 3y ago

Right tool for the right job. I used to say OpenBSD is great for routers and firewalls, but honestly it's so left behind in performance and Linux has gained so much with eBPF that Linux is looking like the better option now. I used FreeBSD on my desktop way back in 2000-2008 but today after 9 years on Fedora it seems like the stoneage.

6r17 3y ago

To be real ; There is no docker and if you have to use it then it's a problem Same might go for anything that needs NVIDIA

jesterson 3y ago
> There is no docker I would say it's a huge plus