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I daily drive FreeBSD on my desktop with KDE. It is not as smooth as Linux and requires a little more tinkering compared to Linux. But I love it! The killer fe
by clan 11mo ago
I daily drive FreeBSD on my desktop with KDE. It is not as smooth as Linux and requires a little more tinkering compared to Linux. But I love it!
The killer features for me:
- The pf firewall. Rules you actually understand!
- Jails! When you cannot have Zones this will do.
- Native ZFS. Stable, mature, safe and with all the features you can dream of.
- Linuxulator. Binary compatibility with Linux if need be. Can be put in jail as well.
- pkg/ports. I really like it but I might have been indoctrinated.
- Networking stack. Good. Stable. Makes sense to me.
For a nice graphical UI Linux is more smooth but if you are willing to tinker it can work. As Linux gets all the attention you will see stuff such as Chromium lag behind.
I can understand that can scare people off. But FreeBSD feels like a comfortable old glove for me. I will suffer the minor holes. My beard has grayed and my hair line is non-existant.
If waiting for a laptop I would perhaps wait for FreeBSD 15 for much needed improvements in WIFI. If you want fast WIFI today you need weird hacks routing through a Linux VM[1]. It works rather well but it is honestly a bit clunky.
[1] https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
- doublerabbit 11mo agoI daily drive FreeBSD with IceWM, four screens 2@4k, 2@1080p running with Xorg on a Sapphire 5600XT, I can't fault any issues.
- clan 11mo agoExactly. When it works it is great. I stick with a single 43" 4K@60 but it was a bit of a challenge to get on the happy path: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-flickering-with-amdgpu-in-both-vt-and-x.93159/#post-672538 https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-fli... All systems can have issues. But the more widely used systems are at an advantage.
- BLKNSLVR 11mo agoAre the screens directly connected or do you use a docking station? If docking station, does it require DisplayLink drivers to drive the monitors?
- doublerabbit 11mo agoNo docking station. Although the 2x4k monitors are daisy chained. I was surprised when it worked first time.
- gerdesj 11mo agoI remember a hack, back in the day, on Linux where a Windows wifi driver was used via a thing called NDISwrapper. Be patient and hopefully you'll soon be looking back on your Linux VM bodge in the rear view mirror.
- tsoukase 11mo agoI haven't realised Ndiswrapper was deprecated in Linux. I thought I was too lucky with my WiFi cards in the last 10-15 years!
- gerdesj 11mo agoWifi isn't quite solved on any platform. It is also quite hard to decide what solved really looks like! My wife and I have identical HP laptops. Her's runs Arch (as you do), with KDE and mine runs Kubuntu 25.10 at the mo. Both use NetworkManager. I look after both. Randomly after wake up from suspend, wifi may or may not still be working. When I say random, I mean after a kernel update or the wind changes direction. I think wifies lappy is OK now because I seem to get a lot less "support" calls for the last few weeks. To be fair, there are a lot of moving parts from a lot of bits of Linux involved in a modern distro these days. When I say hard to decide what solved looks like: if Samba or SSSD crap out, is that wifi's fault or the kernel/driver? This is exactly what Windows has had to solve over the years and I do note things like credential managers and mounts that manage to survive disconnects being bolted on to Linux. All that scrappy stuff needs to be passed on to the BSDs too. Getting a laptop with file systems that come and go, with a dickey clock tick and networking that comes and goes and VPNs and all the rest. Getting all of that to work is quite a job.
- o11c 11mo agoSounds exactly like my mom's Windows computer. Flaky wifi/power issues are not a Linux problem.
- tsoukase 11mo agoSo I suppose: NEVER use WiFi for anything critical (server, security, high avail, medical etc). I don't know if WiFi cards of later devices are of subpar quality to reduce costs. The WiFi debugging is insane.
- alex1138 11mo agoHonestly, the problem is always the f!@#ing hardware, isn't it The reason all this is hard is likely a remnant of what Microsoft did in the 1990s to the point where Non Windows OSes are given the shaft Nvidia, Broadcom, Wifi generally, whatever
- winlundn 11mo agoOh yes, it /is/ the f!@#ing hardware. The core FreeBSD developers have taken their sweet time to add support for WiFi on anything IoT running FreeBSD. In other words — FreeBSD's core developers usually will not listen to users asking for such things unless maximum pressure gets applied in every separate instance. Disclaimer: I'm not a FreeBSD user. Apart from the halfway decent distros which use FreeBSD as their core OS, the FreeBSD developers in charge of FreeBSD itself will not add a GUI installer for some old school reason that really, only they would know of. One issue coming directly from this constraint is that if you run BSD through a VM — either on Linux or Windows it is rather difficult if not impossible to get past 1024 x 768 resolution without going through some major hoops. FreeBSD does not do a thorough job supporting VirtualBox instances, generally speaking. BSD is meant more for the back-end "bare metal" servers.
- sharts 11mo agoIf only there would be a resurgence of BSD. linux always feels like the javascript of OS world.
- feelamee 11mo agoif Linux is a JavaScript, then what is Windows? haha
- tiltowait 11mo agoI'm glad I'm not the only person with similar feelings. I'm perfectly comfortable in Linux, but there's a certain ... uncanniness to it that's hard to pin down. FreeBSD (and, I suspect, the other BSDs as well) just feels more coherent.
- skydhash 11mo agoAfter daily driving OpenBSD and FreeBSD, i can point the finger at the kernel subsystems that tries to handle everything under the sun, but with no clear direction and competing projects with different designs. Everything is three or more layers, each governed by a different team and interacting in opaque ways. Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools. Any other tool is either an alternate version, or a UI paint job.
- 0x457 11mo ago> If you want fast WIFI today Fast still means beyond 802.11g? (11n support is incomplete, last time I checked) Because there is no corporate sponsor that needs good Wi-Fi drivers on FreeBSD, I doubt it will ever be better. I guess Sony, but it's all custom for them. I doubt there is anything to contribute back, even if Sony was open to that idea.
- cperciva 11mo agoFreeBSD has 802.11ac.
- tcmart14 11mo agoBut that is still for a limited number of chipsets though right? I would absolutely love to see way more support. I remember awhile back the FreeBSD Foundation putting some serious (on their scale of funds) funds to WiFi.
- cperciva 11mo agoI can't remember which chipsets support it. But yes, the FreeBSD Foundation has been putting a lot of money into laptop support, including wifi improvements.
- 0x457 11mo agoCan it actually work at 802.11ac speeds? I recall it maxing out at 22mbps.
- cperciva 11mo agoI don't know exactly how fast it runs, and it will absolutely depend on your hardware and network, but I've definitely gotten more than that.
- 0x457 11mo agoI guess it's better now then. To be clear, on linux the very same laptop in the very same location (dual boot) I got proper speed. The issue was entirely in FreeBSD drivers.
- theoldgreybeard 11mo agoFreeBSD is worth using for native ZFS alone. BTRFS doesn't even come close.
- sbseitz 11mo agoIt’s all OpenZFS now, same as Linux lmao.
- theoldgreybeard 11mo agoIt's still out-of-tree though, isn't it?
- tcmart14 11mo agoYes and no. OpenZFS on Linux still isn't as seamless and most distros still don't make it easy to do ZFS on root. Its definitely gotten better though.
- akimbostrawman 11mo agoI don't see any reason to use traditional ZFS on root when ZFSBootMenu is easier and better, also comparable to BSD's boot menus.
- myaccountonhn 11mo agoIs there a linux distro that makes the setup of zfsbootmenu easy? I found it to be quite a bit of work.
- stefantalpalaru 11mo ago[dead]
- jjav 11mo agoWhat is the best (most reliable) way to run multiple Linux instances on a FreeBSD host?