8 ms·

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of uns

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.

nullpoint420 7mo ago
100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.
- frumplestlatz 7mo ago
  We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.
    - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
      I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.
      - pjmlp 7mo ago
        Looking to some complaints doesn't feel like everyone is.
  - hideout_berlin 7mo ago
    do you remember opendarwin? i was also at puredarwin but the project seams death
    - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
      Yes, and Apple did kill it, unfortunately — but it was never an effort to push code upstream into the BSDs.
iotku 7mo ago
It's not really a demerit of FreeBSD given their lesser resources (and even less vender support) than Linux. Most of the major ethernet chipsets for networking you'd expect to find in a server are well supported and the system is quite solid for many server use cases, but you're probably not going to be running bleeding edge consumer hardware day one on it. On the desktop side of things Linux has far superior hardware support for current GPUs/Wifi chipsets. AMDGPU support is a few card generations behind (they have to spend effort porting from the Linux drivers) and things are still mostly in X11 land and you don't have Valve supporting gaming on BSD. I'd still be interested in running FreeBSD on severs, it just takes a bit of different knowledge (the handbook is excellent) and with OpenZFS being a thing on Linux there's not as much exclusive to the BSDs on a surface level that Linux can't at least mostly provide.
freeopinion 7mo ago
FreeBSD supports a much larger range of hardware than MacOS. It's a bit strange to bemoan hardware support, then switch OS and buy very specific hardware for that OS. Imagine quitting MacOS because it doesn't support Realtek RTL8188CUS.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Something that a Mac user or developer, those that have been on the ecosystem for decades would never bother to do anyway.
- bitwize 7mo ago
  Well it just so happens that the best hardware in the world for desktop use—literally years ahead of any competition—is made by the makers of macOS and is totally supported by macOS.
  - adrian_b 7mo ago
    What you say is true only when you define "desktop use" in a certain way, which corresponds to what an Apple PC is good for. I define "desktop use" in another way, and for my definition any Apple PC is completely non-competitive, by having a much lower performance and a much higher price than a desktop PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU. Apple PCs have exceptional single-thread performance, but that is irrelevant for me. I care about multi-threaded performance and especially about floating-point FP64 and big integer computational throughput, for which the Apple CPUs are weak, one could say years behind their competition, except that Apple does not make any attempt to compete in this domain. An Apple PC may be the optimum PC for your needs and that is fine, but you should not believe that any computer user has the same needs as you.

nullpoint420 7mo ago

100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.

frumplestlatz 7mo ago
We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.
  - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
    I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Looking to some complaints doesn't feel like everyone is.
- hideout_berlin 7mo ago
  do you remember opendarwin? i was also at puredarwin but the project seams death
  - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
    Yes, and Apple did kill it, unfortunately — but it was never an effort to push code upstream into the BSDs.

iotku 7mo ago

It's not really a demerit of FreeBSD given their lesser resources (and even less vender support) than Linux. Most of the major ethernet chipsets for networking you'd expect to find in a server are well supported and the system is quite solid for many server use cases, but you're probably not going to be running bleeding edge consumer hardware day one on it. On the desktop side of things Linux has far superior hardware support for current GPUs/Wifi chipsets. AMDGPU support is a few card generations behind (they have to spend effort porting from the Linux drivers) and things are still mostly in X11 land and you don't have Valve supporting gaming on BSD. I'd still be interested in running FreeBSD on severs, it just takes a bit of different knowledge (the handbook is excellent) and with OpenZFS being a thing on Linux there's not as much exclusive to the BSDs on a surface level that Linux can't at least mostly provide.

freeopinion 7mo ago

FreeBSD supports a much larger range of hardware than MacOS. It's a bit strange to bemoan hardware support, then switch OS and buy very specific hardware for that OS. Imagine quitting MacOS because it doesn't support Realtek RTL8188CUS.

pjmlp 7mo ago
Something that a Mac user or developer, those that have been on the ecosystem for decades would never bother to do anyway.
bitwize 7mo ago
Well it just so happens that the best hardware in the world for desktop use—literally years ahead of any competition—is made by the makers of macOS and is totally supported by macOS.
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  What you say is true only when you define "desktop use" in a certain way, which corresponds to what an Apple PC is good for. I define "desktop use" in another way, and for my definition any Apple PC is completely non-competitive, by having a much lower performance and a much higher price than a desktop PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU. Apple PCs have exceptional single-thread performance, but that is irrelevant for me. I care about multi-threaded performance and especially about floating-point FP64 and big integer computational throughput, for which the Apple CPUs are weak, one could say years behind their competition, except that Apple does not make any attempt to compete in this domain. An Apple PC may be the optimum PC for your needs and that is fine, but you should not believe that any computer user has the same needs as you.