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> I may be wrong, but I took GP to mean that FreeBSD is a good enough OS to use daily, But that's not at all what Torvalds's quote means. He meant that, if Fre

> I may be wrong, but I took GP to mean that FreeBSD is a good enough OS to use daily, But that's not at all what Torvalds's quote means. He meant that, if FreeBSD had been available, he would have worked on contributing to that instead and improving it for daily use, rather than building Linux to be used for daily use. (The state of FreeBSD in this hypothetical world has no bearing on the state of FreeBSD today). In terms of FreeBSD today, while it's possible to use it for daily use, it suffers from even worse driver issues than Linux does, and of all the problems of just simply having much smaller market share (both for contributing developers and users) than Linux does. This may or may not be 'good enough' for OP's purposes, but it's disingenuous to suggest that Torvalds's hypothetical from the early 1990s implies that FreeBSD is a clean substitute for end-user Linux today.

imanaccount247 12y ago
>In terms of FreeBSD today, while it's possible to use it for daily use, it suffers from even worse driver issues than Linux does No it does not. It has fewer driver issues by far. Because it does not have broken half-assed binary only drivers by obscure vendor X that don't actually work. Unsupported hardware is simply unsupported, rather than broken.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  > Because it does not have broken half-assed binary only drivers by obscure vendor X that don't actually work. I've always found it interesting that Nvidia offers a more complete and stable BSD driver than its GNU/Linux counterpart. That said, AMD/ATI support is abysmal, and even Intel video is lacking compared to GNU/Linux. > Unsupported hardware is simply unsupported, rather than broken. That's a matter of interpretation. If FreeBSD doesn't support my hardware, it's the equivalent of being broken for me, given that I can't use it anyway. That said, I try to build or buy the most OS-agnostic workstations possible so my options are always open.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    >If FreeBSD doesn't support my hardware, it's the equivalent of being broken for me, given that I can't use it anyway That's the point. People like to pretend linux has more hardware support, but mostly what is has is broken drivers for obscure buggy hardware that you can't actually use. The "well supported stable hardware that actually works" list is practically identical between them.
  - jrapdx3 12y ago
    > ... and even Intel video is lacking compared to GNU/Linux. Not so sure about that, or maybe it depends on the situation. For instance, I've been running FBSD and Linux in VMs (specifically, Hyper-V/Win 8.1 on a Surface Pro 2). After updating to FBSD 10.1, I decided to try the Lumina DE (from PC-BSD). I've been surprised at the performance of the GUI under the constrained memory and CPU availability. It's about as good as the host (Windows), albeit running minimally demanding applications. OTOH Linux versions (SUSE, CentOS) have been much more sluggish and GUI usability much lower. I realize this is impressionistic and hardly a deep analysis. Nonetheless, I think it points out that it's risky to make assumptions when circumstances and system requirements are so tremendously variable.
    - morganvachon 12y ago
      > I've been running FBSD and Linux in VMs Then you're abstracting away from the video hardware, and not getting the same results as you would on bare metal. The only thing really lacking in Intel video versus Nvidia is proper KMS support; Intel video on FreeBSD works generally well otherwise. The FreeBSD Nvidia-provided driver, while closed source and binary only, is more or less feature complete.
morganvachon 12y ago
The thing is though, back then in the early 90s FreeBSD could have been good enough; most x86 computers didn't have a GUI at all, and if they did it was OS/2 or Windows over DOS. Hardware was arguably much simpler too. Linux was created as a response to Minix, not BSD[1], and Minix was just a "teaching" OS, not a daily driving workstation OS. He didn't initally build Linux for "daily use", but as a hobby project, per his own words. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RR...

imanaccount247 12y ago

>In terms of FreeBSD today, while it's possible to use it for daily use, it suffers from even worse driver issues than Linux does No it does not. It has fewer driver issues by far. Because it does not have broken half-assed binary only drivers by obscure vendor X that don't actually work. Unsupported hardware is simply unsupported, rather than broken.

morganvachon 12y ago
> Because it does not have broken half-assed binary only drivers by obscure vendor X that don't actually work. I've always found it interesting that Nvidia offers a more complete and stable BSD driver than its GNU/Linux counterpart. That said, AMD/ATI support is abysmal, and even Intel video is lacking compared to GNU/Linux. > Unsupported hardware is simply unsupported, rather than broken. That's a matter of interpretation. If FreeBSD doesn't support my hardware, it's the equivalent of being broken for me, given that I can't use it anyway. That said, I try to build or buy the most OS-agnostic workstations possible so my options are always open.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  >If FreeBSD doesn't support my hardware, it's the equivalent of being broken for me, given that I can't use it anyway That's the point. People like to pretend linux has more hardware support, but mostly what is has is broken drivers for obscure buggy hardware that you can't actually use. The "well supported stable hardware that actually works" list is practically identical between them.
- jrapdx3 12y ago
  > ... and even Intel video is lacking compared to GNU/Linux. Not so sure about that, or maybe it depends on the situation. For instance, I've been running FBSD and Linux in VMs (specifically, Hyper-V/Win 8.1 on a Surface Pro 2). After updating to FBSD 10.1, I decided to try the Lumina DE (from PC-BSD). I've been surprised at the performance of the GUI under the constrained memory and CPU availability. It's about as good as the host (Windows), albeit running minimally demanding applications. OTOH Linux versions (SUSE, CentOS) have been much more sluggish and GUI usability much lower. I realize this is impressionistic and hardly a deep analysis. Nonetheless, I think it points out that it's risky to make assumptions when circumstances and system requirements are so tremendously variable.
  - morganvachon 12y ago
    > I've been running FBSD and Linux in VMs Then you're abstracting away from the video hardware, and not getting the same results as you would on bare metal. The only thing really lacking in Intel video versus Nvidia is proper KMS support; Intel video on FreeBSD works generally well otherwise. The FreeBSD Nvidia-provided driver, while closed source and binary only, is more or less feature complete.

morganvachon 12y ago

The thing is though, back then in the early 90s FreeBSD could have been good enough; most x86 computers didn't have a GUI at all, and if they did it was OS/2 or Windows over DOS. Hardware was arguably much simpler too. Linux was created as a response to Minix, not BSD[1], and Minix was just a "teaching" OS, not a daily driving workstation OS. He didn't initally build Linux for "daily use", but as a hobby project, per his own words. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RR...