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.
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.
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.OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.
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.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there is one person at least !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org
BSD = Bondage, Submission, Dominance?
/so sorry, could not resist.
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.
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: @jcs@jcs.org
I use OpenBSD on the desktop.
BSD is dying and it is not a bad thing
I mean I don’t use nor ever plan on using BSD systems and disagree with their philosophy quite a bit but I think them dying is overall bad for the open source community.
