Thinking of switching to BSD for something more cohesive than Linux. What issues am I likely to have doing this?
What am I in for?
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The logo is a demon. What do you expect?
A cute succubus wife.
FreeBSD is stuck in the 90s, i.e. no drivers for anything, and the ones that do exist are buggy
(Additionally, will it interact well with Linux machines? If I just use it as a home server for instance.)
Should be transparent through a network since it runs the same software as Linux
cuck experience
>kys troon
You're a really funny guy, and I think it's great that you are on this board to bring your unique charm to every thread for all to enjoy
CHUD
FreeBSD is the server version of macOS
Bruh girls love a guy who can bsd. You're gonna have girls all over you man no joke, I am telling you. You install bsd and you'll have girls from miles away knocking at your door.
Hey! I use BSD and I just had sex with my wife.
WTF? I'm never installing BSD after reading this.
Wifi drivers. Freebsd targets an audience of aging server operators, no desktop or even xorg out of the box you'll have to do the xorg install and config dance. Freebsd has the best Linux compat out of the bsds.
Also, my advice is to skip zfs and use ufs unless you're willing to learn, it's a whole other world compared to Linux filesystems. ZFS is great though, maybe wait to jump into it because you have some other weird differences to learn. Some switches on unix utils have different behavior or are missing compared to gnu.
I would gently recommend openbsd as a bsd intro it has better out the box pc experience including an x server, but openbsd project gives zero shits about what anyone else is doing and being compatible with Linux software. Do yourself a favor and use cwm instead of fvwm if you use openbsd though.
Oh fuck csh too btw pdksh on openbsd is better.
>audience of aging server operators
I work for an ISP and BSD is still very much in vogue for strong network performance
Old rumours die hard.
Way easier than FBSD.
Xorg is easy, setting sound and gpu acceleration sucks.
I don’t get your confusion with zfs it’s not like it’s esoteric and hard to find info on and for daily use you won’t even think about what file system you are using
>ntly recommend openbsd as a bsd intro it has better out the box pc experience including an x server, but openbsd project gives zero shits about what anyone else is doing and being compatible with Linux software. Do yourself a favor and use cwm instead of fvwm if you use openbsd though.
If user-friendly installation is that important, choose GhostBSD. The installation is literally easier than Ubuntu's.
What you say about UFS and ZFS is not helpful either. ZFS is, according to almost all FreeBSD users, many times better than UFS in terms of reliability and data integrity. In tests, ZFS is also usually faster than UFS in terms of performance. And I've been using ZFS for 5 years on a desktop that only has 4GB of RAM. That desktop has never crashed in 5 years, unlike any other file system and operating system I've used.
As someone who uses FreeBSD for their home server, the only real compelling advantage is easy root on zfs. I do run root on zfs on my Linux desktop too but it's so much easier on FreeBSD.
You should not use FreeBSD as a desktop. Not even the freebsd devs themselves use freebsd as a daily driver desktop. FreeBSD server, Linux desktop, Windows virtual machine is the way.
Incorrect, OpenBSD on desktop is the way.
NetBSD is better thoughever
I've been using FreeBSD on the desktop for almost 5 years now. In some domains it is less strong than other options, in other domains it is stronger. In my opinion, it is the best desktop operating system in the most important areas. Wi-Fi is sometimes a problem, and if you're a Bluetooth fan, FreeBSD isn't the ideal choice either. It supports Intel CPUs up to 11th generation. Intel's 12th and 13th generations work partially, but not yet perfectly as they should. It has quite a lot of software and you also have Linux emulation, Wine, VirtualBox and bhyve for those situations when your software is not among the 35 000 standard packages.
You're in for 802.11g
I use FreeBSD for my file server and it is rock solid. A base install with just the packages I needed came to 174. I have used it as a desktop before and it is fine. The driver support borrows from Linux so if your hardware is bleeding edge you might not have support.
Honestly better than Linux in pretty much every way unless you want to do anything vidya- or AI-related. Although if you're not doing anything vidya- or AI-related, I'd recommend OpenBSD instead. It's the single most straightforward OS I've used, only drawbacks are no Nvidia drivers and no virtualization or linux/windows compatibility layers like FreeBSD has.
- install oksh (csh sucks)
- bad wifi compat (802.11n only)
- no easy NVIDIA install
- issue to use bhyve-vm but works well for linux vm
- sound issue if you have two sound boards dedicated for mic and the other for speaker
- no DRM (means no spotify, etc.)
~ linux compat isn't recommanded but you can check on ports.freebdsd.org which apps are available
- no docker obviously since it's a container linux... But don't worry you have another container "jail" which is historically the first
- learning curve could be hard at the beginning
Otherwise, notable goodpoints :
+ nice and clean os
+ rc script
+ man
+ lightweight
+ kinda futuristic (first to create ZFS, containers, ...)
Advice :
. if you want install ZFS cause you can snapshot before upgrades
. wait a month between ZFS version realease before to upgrade
Conclusion :
do not install freeBSD if you :
- want to play video games
- are student in Uni with CS class
>Conclusion :
do not install freeBSD if you :
- want to play video games
- are student in Uni with CS class
Gaming:
You have 1237 native games. You can install these games with the package manager like any other package.
Then you have cloud gaming, which gives you access to a lot of games:
https://geekflare.com/best-cloud-gaming-services/
You have https://www.freshports.org/games/linux-steam-utils/ which gives access to quite a few additional quality games.
You also have Suyimazu: https://codeberg.org/Alexander88207/Suyimazu
You can use VirtualBox or bhyve to virtualize windows in FreeBSD. You can probably play that way too.
Finally, you have quite a few emulators that you can use in FreeBSD that make many additional games available:
https://www.freshports.org/games/retroarch/
https://www.freshports.org/emulators/dolphin-emu/
https://www.freshports.org/emulators/rpcs3
Etc.
I often play CS:GO on FreeBSD on a PC that only has 4GB of RAM. On windows11, the most popular gaming distro, it doesn't even run on the exact same hardware. Because it doesn't have enough RAM. So in some standard situations FreeBSD is simply better for gaming than windows, by the way it also has a better audio stack than windows which makes games feel more realistic.
And I think most of the time you'll be able to use FreeBSD even if you're studying CS at university. Most of the commands in the terminal are Unix commands that work the same in Linux as BSD, and it also supports all major programming languages and has plenty of great text editors with syntax highlighting for your code.
The advantage over OpenBSD is that FreeBSD has much higher performance than OpenBSD.
As you wish but I consider that install a vm to do something is a bad idea. Ok maybe I wasn't right for videogames cuz I don't care. But for Uni CS/Math it could be problematic : how do you install Mathematica ? install VM and I don't like this answere
Gaming on FreeBSD is OK, under two conditions:
1. You are not a demanding gamer and are happy if you have fifty or so decent games to play.
2. You have the knowledge to install Steam on FreeBSD and you can work with simple tools like antimicro.
You can install Mathematica on FreeBSD in the following way, and you don't need a VM.
https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/doc/data/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu-mathematica.html
For most things, I'd recommend Wine or Linuxulator rather than jumping all the way to VMs. Compatibility layers are a pain in the ass, sure, but VMs with PCIe passthrough are a much bigger pain in the ass unless you've got exactly the right set of hardware.
>https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/doc/data/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu-mathematica.html
Are you sure this isn't an outdated wiki ?
Anyone who is going to use Mathematica is normally going to have the skills to make it work properly on FreeBSD.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-13-0-runs-mathematica-11-fully-gl-accelerated-nvidia.80361/
I think the above person is a noob and he just had to install the nvidia libs package which can be found among the standard FreeBSD packages.
But most importantly, he says it works decently:
'It works very well for MM11 and Firefox seems to run snappy: that's all I need.'
https://www.freshports.org/x11/linux-nvidia-libs/
These are the Linux versions of common NVidia OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES/GLVND
libraries and Vulkan ICD.
Someone with mediocre skills should be able to install Wolfram Mathematica very easily on FreeBSD.
It is almost exactly as easy as installation on Linux. He should have just installed the linux-nvidia-libs package instead of manually installing the libglvnd.
>want to play video games
If you want to play games you should be using windows. Just do a dualboot, I boot my PC into windows exclusively to play games.
I think I just explained why Windows 11 is not suitable for gaming on my hardware. By the way, systems are still being sold that only have 4GB of RAM in 2023.
I also have to say that I enjoy the games I play on FreeBSD much more because the audio is much better. You also see this problem on Xbox, for example in certain shooters that gamers die quickly because they no longer properly hear the position of approaching enemies. While they perfectly perceive that position or a PlayStation 5, because the audio is much more detailed, with more correct frequencies and with lower latency.
AI post
Thanks for the replies so far. Sounds like I might be using BSD for my server. From what everyone is saying, openBSD is better for desktop use but probably not for server? Also any resources regarding hardening?
>Advice :
>. if you want install ZFS cause you can snapshot before upgrades
>. wait a month between ZFS version realease before to upgrade
what do you mean by this?
no pussy
GhostBSD if you're new to BSD.
want to configure some aspect like network > /etc/rc.conf
pkg management >pkg search fagware && pkg add fagware
it just works
the installer is pretty nice too probably puts ubuntu to shame on simplicity
>s*tanic logo
No thanks
>uses a mac and doesnt know
Many major game consoles also
Tinkered with BSDs in virtual machines, can't comment on real hardware, but they were surprisingly simple. Good manpages and fairly simple, intuitive environment. Sadly if you wish to run a graphical environment, you will pull a bunch of linuxisms as dependencies. On gentoo I could patch out most of the redhat cruft but didn't attempt it on bsd.
I use bspwm + Polybar + Conky and it works very well on FreeBSD. bspwm is close to the most lightweight window manager possible, and it feels like a desktop (in my setup). It's more elegant, snappy and refined than most desktops if I may be honest.
For a server? Not much difference.
For a desktop? Less functionality for no reason.