this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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    Is there anyone here who uses BSD on their desktop? (lemmy.world)
    submitted 6 months ago by Waffelson to c/linuxmemes
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    [–] KISSmyOSFeddit 109 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    I tried it recently, but eventually gave up. It had so many little and not-so-little issues on my laptop, which I solved one by one over 2 weeks, reading and learning a lot. Even recompiled the kernel with a custom patch to get energy management to work.

    Then I did a speed test on Wi-Fi, and it capped out at 6MBit (I have a Gigabit connection). The solution apparently is to install a Wi-Fi network adapter inside a Linux VM and connect to that on boot.
    That's when I went back to Debian where everything just works out of the box on my PC.

    [–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    Yeah, I've had the same issues with BSD distros over the decades, always giving those devs the benefit of the doubt that they would get around to fixing various driver bullshit for older hardware eventually, and they never do.

    Meanwhile a bleeding edge distro like my Arch setup runs on a piece of shit Celeron two-threaded dual-core with 3Gb RAM old as fuck Chromebook just fine.

    [–] KISSmyOSFeddit 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    To be fair, 99% of BSD's probably run in a VM.

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    Oh, that's an interesting point. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's something I definitely hadn't considered.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

    If most BSDs are running on the likes of AWS and azure (which wouldn't surprise me) then it could well be true

    [–] kautau 20 points 6 months ago

    That reminds me of the oldschool Realtek WiFi cards which required you to run drivers through WINE just to have WiFi on Linux. It really is excellent to see how far it’s come. I have a cheap Chinese laptop with a celeron chip (jasper lake) that I use as essentially a thin client. Installing windows fresh: trackpad doesn’t work, audio doesn’t work, WiFi 6 card driver is a generic MS one that caps at 5mb a sec until I install the right Realtek drivers, graphics aren’t accelerated until I install intel’s drivers. Installing Linux: everything works out of the box, just need to install the right graphics drivers for accelerated graphics to work. Only sad spot is the fingerprint reader is just flat out not supported in Linux. Lol if I tried hard I guess I could hook up WINE to run it like the old days

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    [–] [email protected] 69 points 6 months ago

    [–] [email protected] 45 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I see little reason to use any of the BSDs. Neither for desktops nor for servers. The only benefit I see is that you can take the BSD licensed code and use it to create a closed source product like the PlayStation without having to contribute anything back. I dislike that benefit with quite some intensity.

    I ran FreeBSD on my home server for a while since the old TrueNAS versions use it. The supposed simplicity of BSD rings hollow to me as it is just another thing I'd have to learn. I also don't care much about the Unix philosophy or any other clerical reasons that distinguish the various BSDs. Computers and their OSes are a tool to me not a religion. Admittedly TrueNAS worked well for me, but reading up on the differences from Linux got old rather quickly. I migrated to the newer Debian Linux based TrueNAS Scale a couple of months ago because I feel more confident that if anything goes wrong I'd be able to fix it.

    [–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

    openbsd seems interesting to me, it's entire existence seems to be "secure OS" and i think that's rather respectable. I'll get around to messing with it some day.

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    [–] [email protected] 44 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    From my little experience with working on BSD Servers, BSD is very reliable and for my use cases fast enough. But the slower updates and lack of most Wi-Fi support and sometimes spotty hardware support combined with the need for porting a lot of Linux software that dose not natively run on BSD is a deal breaker for using BSD on my Main Desktop Computer.

    TLDR: For me BSD is a powerful tool that has a very specific job that is not being a Desktop Computer.

    [–] Everythingispenguins 22 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yep, it is for Sony PlayStations.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

    The end user has no way of knowing or changing that so it doesn't matter

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

    In juniper networking hardware. And many others. If you have the capability to create what's missing (drivers etc) it will work well. If you do not, well, there's shit tons of drivers for Linux.

    [–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    Caveat: unless it is Mac OSX. There are... issues there, but it is still a fairly great experience, objectively speaking.

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    (Oops... wrong thread, I'll leave it here)

    I've been using FreeBSD for 20 years on my desktop. I've been also mainly using it because I was literally afraid of using Linux filesystems for data storage, when I learned how ZFS works.

    Now with bcachefs the situation is different. It's nice to see an advanced filesystem on Linux, even it's still beta. I migrated my desktop to Linux, but will keep FreeBSD on my servers for a while, because it's less hassle for me.

    Actually I stopped liking the FreeBSD community. They made a lot of drama in the past years and I stopped being active there. I haven't reported bugs anymore and fixed them privately or reported directly to upstream. I have many nice things running on servers, but I'm thinking about moving to Debian entirely.

    [–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    I have a sneaking suspicion that there is one person at least [email protected]

    [–] finkrat 25 points 6 months ago

    Dude we literally have that unix_surrealism comic there's at least some love for BSDs here

    [–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago

    OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.

    [–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    BSD = Bondage, Submission, Dominance?

    /so sorry, could not resist.

    [–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    Windows?

    [–] EuroNutellaMan 17 points 6 months ago

    Windows is non-consensualBSD

    [–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

    I used OpenBSD on servers for years. I don't think it's suited as a daily driver, especially not with a desktop. I absolutely love pf and miss it dearly, though. iptables and nftables are utter shit compared to the glory that is pf. Yes, there is some hyperbole in that statement, but only some.

    [–] knolord 12 points 6 months ago

    I personally have tried FreeBSD and some FreeBSD "distros" on the desktop, and have used *BSD-based stuff as servers/single-purpose machines.

    As a desktop system (user-centric use case), you notice how hardware support is sometimes problematic, especially on laptops. I personally had problems with NVIDIA GPUs, already a problem on Linux, being a big problem here as well, and don't mention WiFi (FreeBSD doesn't support 802.11ac and up currently) or Bluetooth. Software-wise, if your applications do not have a *BSD version, well, then you are relying on Linux ports, which for desktop use isn't exactly great.

    But, in servers/headless setups, *BSDs are shining, with the most important things running rock-solid, stable and resource-friendly.

    [–] Rustmilian 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    [email protected]
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    [–] Hobbes_Dent 9 points 6 months ago

    I use OpenBSD on the desktop.

    [–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    netbsd don't give a damn

    [–] KISSmyOSFeddit 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    I heard netbsd runs on anything, even toasters.
    Does that mean it runs well on laptops too?

    [–] woelkchen 3 points 6 months ago

    I heard netbsd runs on anything, even toasters.

    Does that mean it runs well on laptops too?

    It runs as well on a laptop as it runs on a toaster.

    [–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Where haiku?

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    The fact that Haiku installs in like 30 seconds, should raise its score

    [–] AnUnusualRelic 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

    That's a very useful feature for all those people who reinstall their system each time they turn their computer on.

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

    See I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic because there are some manic distro hoppers out there that are actually like that.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

    isn't tailsOS like that

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

    i feel like openbsd doesn't get the support it should.

    One significant vulnerability in 20 years is actually psychotic. I don't care how desktop ready freebsd is, it's dead to me now. i'm sorry.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

    For the sake of her "they've hacked me" paranoia, my crazy sister made me install OpenBSD on her crappy PC three-four years ago (Intel i3 and a mechanical disk). She stopped using the PC altogether like 6 months after that. It wasn't really bad, everything seemed to work, taking in account the limitations of the hardware. The upgrade procedure irked me, though - mostly, realizing that you have to be reading documentation constantly even for a freaking minor version upgrade.

    Still this made me try FreeBSD on my PC, only to realize after a couple days that pkg/pkgsrc are utter shit compared to Portage. Alas Gentoo/BSD is long gone, otherwise I'd love to try it.

    [–] woelkchen 7 points 6 months ago

    The Mach kernel started as a derivative of a BSD kernel. Years later the XNU kernel was created by combining the Mach kernel with code from newer BSDs, therefore it's totally fair to describe macOS as a BSD. From my very limited exposure to BSD conferences, using Macs is pretty common there as many developers see their community-developed BSDs more for headless use they SSH onto.

    [–] Thcdenton 6 points 6 months ago

    I used openbsd on my 2005 aluminum mac book. It was a lot of fun.

    [–] jaxxed 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I'm quite fond of my fbsd laptop. Wifi is a bit clunky, but it never bothered me. Full wayland-niri desktop works well, and there are pretty cool virtualization features.

    [–] KISSmyOSFeddit 5 points 6 months ago

    Wifi is a bit clunky

    Can you elaborate? Are you just dealing with the slow speed or did you do something special to it?

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

    niri is awsome

    [–] mlg 3 points 6 months ago

    BSD is useful for when you want to program some specialty hardware once and chuck it into the abyss with no updates and without releasing the source code so you can maintain a barely passing level of security through obscurity. Or if you really just don't want to publish your source code for a unix system.

    Things like modems and old routers come to mind. Also PlayStation iirc.

    Most modern IoT stuff I've messed with uses linux probably because the devs like not having to manually package things and deal with weird edge case bugs. Since they're usually making software updates anyway, published vulns are less of a concern.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

    I have FreeBSD on my ThinkPad, and I'd use it on more of my boxes if any of the other WiFi hardware was supported.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    BSD is for a rock solid server stack. Desktop? Why??

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    [–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

    Check out Root BSD on YouTube (or on Odysee or PeerTube!). He has quite a few interesting videos about various BSDs, and he actually uses OpenBSD on the desktop. Zaney's older videos are also about BSD, nowadays he mostly covers Linux, but I still like his videos. I also like Joshua Stein's blog jcs.org, he's an OpenBSD developer and has some pretty interesting posts. He's also on Mastodon: @[email protected]

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