Why do you use FreeBSD on desktop?

MrX86 said:
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Just a note, this is only relevant if using the VESA framebuffer. wsconsctl(8) should tell you.

Likely if using a recent VM system, it will emulate UEFI and thus use the efifb(4). Typically during installation you won't even be asked about aperture if it detects this UEFI.

However I was hesitant to mention this because this is the FreeBSD forum and this kind of stuff is probably better explained on the OpenBSD mailing list (or IRC).
 
jb82 said:
You guys who use FreeBSD as a daily driver on desktops.
Just curious, why you've picked FreeBSD instead of Linux, Mac...? IMHO, it would be great to have this kind of information up to date in 2023.
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Short answer: It's concise and coherent.

Longer answer: I think the documentation is superb and the devs seem to be in a league of their own. It can be painful getting things setup, but once they are it's solid. Pain is the guide out of the wasteland!

I like Mac for plenty of reasons and there are just as many reasons that I don't like Mac. Windows is...well...Windows. But those systems have their place too. I can't articulate what I dislike about Linux. I think it peaked in the early 00s or late 90s and has become something too chaotic for me.

I don't know if BSD is technically considered Unix, but to me it IS Unix. And it does the Unix thing wonderfully.
 
zer0page said:
I don't know if BSD is technically considered Unix
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There are two straight-forward answers:
  • No. UNIX® is a trademark, offering a certification program (which of course is quite costly as well), and none of the BSD systems is a certified UNIX.
  • Yes. There's a direct line of "ancestry" back to AT&T Unix. BSD started as a distribution of software ("Berkeley Software Distribution") for that Unix, but could step by step replace all components of it.
When the latter is meant, it's typically spelled Unix (not UNIX, like the trademark). It still wouldn't be wise to officially claim BSD was a Unix (by the projects themselves) because that would most likely violate the trademark for being quite easy to confuse.
 
zirias@ said:
There are two straight-forward answers:
  • No. UNIX® is a trademark, offering a certification program (which of course is quite costly as well), and none of the BSD systems is a certified UNIX.
  • Yes. There's a direct line of "ancestry" back to AT&T Unix. BSD started as a distribution of software ("Berkeley Software Distribution") for that Unix, but could step by step replace all components of it.
When the latter is meant, it's typically spelled Unix (not UNIX, like the trademark). It still wouldn't be wise to officially claim BSD was a Unix (by the projects themselves) because that would most likely violate the trademark for being quite easy to confuse.
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That is an interesting link! I remember reading something about Novell verifying that one of the early releases of FreeBSD no longer contained code from AT&T. I didn't know it was because they were involved with UNIX(tm). I remember long ago seeing their NetWare software on store shelves and I'm pretty certain at some point they owned or were partnered with SuSE. Thanks for sharing that cool piece of history!
 
To draw a kind of far-fetched line back to the original topic: The first "desktop" I ever used was the C64 running GEOS, an OS manufactured by "Berkeley Softworks", a company founded by a graduate of UC Berkeley :cool: ... and I still think it was a shame back then that PC/GEOS (the port to the x86 PC) wasn't successful: for a short period of time, it was a lot better than the early Windows versions. It seems the major mistake was being late releasing a good SDK and tools for application developers to get application support (which Windows got instead). Well, nowadays with BSD available for the PC, it doesn't really matter any more 😉
 
zer0page said:
That is an interesting link! I remember reading something about Novell verifying that one of the early releases of FreeBSD no longer contained code from AT&T. I didn't know it was because they were involved with UNIX(tm).
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This is probably what you remember:

UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc. - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
zer0page said:
I remember long ago seeing their NetWare software on store shelves and I'm pretty certain at some point they owned or were partnered with SuSE. Thanks for sharing that cool piece of history!
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Novell bought Suse at one point:

SUSE Linux - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
New user here (so apologies for potential formatting errors), but I would like to share my thoughts and experiences, a lot of which overlap with things that have been said already. Personally, I use FreeBSD as a daily driver because it's by far the best and most elegant Unix-like OS for any purpose, whether server or desktop. (A relatively minimalist GNU/Linux distribution would be my second choice.)

All of my essential workflows can be implemented flawlessly using GUI or CLI programs available from the Ports database. For occasional work-mandated videoconferencing, I use either the Web clients (Zoom, Skype, Teams) in the Chromium port, or on my desktop, Electron/Qt5 versions in a Linux VM with PCIe forwarding from a USB 3 extension card for audio/webcam.

Here, in brief, are some of the other things that I especially/enjoy about FreeBSD when I use it on my desktop:
  • beautiful simplicity and impeccable design philosophy that make the base system a joy to configure and use
  • quick and straightforward installation (including of a DE using sysutils/desktop-installer)
  • Linuxulator, which makes it possible to run even certain closed-source Linux binary blobs with native 'feel' and integration
  • excellent documentation; stability and consistency in design mean that a lot of guides and manuals from 10, even 15 years ago remain valid (versus how many times has the default Ubuntu network management changed?)
  • ifconfig(8)() as default in most GNU/Linux distros.
  • huge, well-maintained collection of ports (if I am not mistaken, the second largest after the AUR)
  • clear filesystem hierarchy (HIER(7)()), ports are installed to /usr/local
  • no malignant creepware influenced by corporate interests (e.g. HDCP in the Linux kernel or the Widevine binary blob for Linux Chrome)
  • GELI(8)() for encryption, zfs(8)() with RootOnZFS, and generally the entire GEOM(8)() framework
  • great BSD-specific system administration tools such as gstat(8)() for monitoring disk I/O, which can be run in a desktop environment in a terminal emulator
While it would be even better if they could open-source their drivers, it is fantastic that Nvidia supports FreeBSD enough that the software on my desktop with a recent Nvidia chip (TU116) can tap into hardware graphics acceleration.

Another important (subjective) factor for me is that undescribable genuine 'UNIX feel', which, curiously, I get a lot less from GNU/Linux nowadays and which makes it clear to me that FreeBSD is the closest modern OS to genuine Unix, regardless of trademarks and copyrights.
 
vidmak said:
huge, well-maintained collection of ports (if I am not mistaken, the second largest after the AUR)
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And just to put it into perspective a bit more: Nothing about AUR is "well-maintained", it's more or less "throw in here whatever you like" 🤨 (case in point, a package build for one of my own tools appeared there and I was shocked what I found ... package seems to build/work somehow, but it's really messed up -- while I just maintain the FreeBSD port of it myself 😏)
 
zirias@ said:
And just to put it into perspective a bit more: Nothing about AUR is "well-maintained", it's more or less "throw in here whatever you like" 🤨 (case in point, a package build for one of my own tools appeared there and I was shocked what I found ... package seems to build/work somehow, but it's really messed up -- while I just maintain the FreeBSD port of it myself 😏)
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For this reason, it can be advantageous to use an AUR helper like paru that by default enforces checking of PKGBUILDs, but even so there can be problems.
 
zirias@ said:
And just to put it into perspective a bit more: Nothing about AUR is "well-maintained", it's more or less "throw in here whatever you like" 🤨 (case in point, a package build for one of my own tools appeared there and I was shocked what I found ... package seems to build/work somehow, but it's really messed up -- while I just maintain the FreeBSD port of it myself 😏)
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Also, it wasn't but a few years ago and there was a hidden crypto miner that made it into the AUR after a project maintainer turned the project over to someone else. That made the Linux news everywhere.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

Malware Found in Arch Linux AUR Package Repository

Malware has been discovered in at least three Arch Linux packages available on AUR (Arch User Repository), the official Arch Linux repository of user-submitted packages. The malicious code has been removed thanks to the quick intervention of the AUR team.
www.bleepingcomputer.com www.bleepingcomputer.com

Edit: After reading that it seems I got Ubuntu and Arch mixed up. Either way the user repos are suspect.
 
LibreQuest said:
it seems I got Ubuntu and Arch mixed up. Either way the user repos are suspect.
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Didn't even know Ubuntu had a similar "idea".

Sure, you want as many contributors as possible, but this is just a stupid shortcut. Without proper review and assistance for new contributors, you will end up with very, uhm, "mixed" quality. :oops:
 
This whole Linux thing has gotten just plain stupid and I'd never use it unless forced to.
  • If you want a professional environment you have to go RedHat and pay for it.
  • You could use Ubuntu but then you get systemd which is controversial to say the least.
  • Other distros that would otherwise seem reasonable to use also use systemd which, again, is controversial.
  • Some use wayland which is controversial.
  • To avoid systemd and/or wayland, you have to go with a distro that's not backed by a company or large support group.
  • Those same distros are often unreliable and unpredictable and can't be used if you need consistent, reliable performance that won't break down after an update.
I'm stuck where I need a consistent, reliable distro that does not use systemd (though I do not know if I'm unnecessarily afraid of it). I should not have to spend much time with making such a decision but have not been able to decide. When even my neighbor, Jeff Geerling, goes off on RedHat and gets rid of it himself, I know the problem is not just me.

I have always considered Linux to be indecisive, confusing, messy and one big mess I never want to deal with.

Note: Not looking for suggestions on which distro to use. That's off topic. I'm not using Linux on this project instead of FreeBSD. I'm working on a project that needs it for a temporary measure as we switch them over to FreeBSD.
 
Well, for me, the source code of FreeBSD is clean and i can learn a lot from it, but about Linux, emm, it's hard to say.....
 
zirias@ said:
And just to put it into perspective a bit more: Nothing about AUR is "well-maintained", it's more or less "throw in here whatever you like" 🤨 (case in point, a package build for one of my own tools appeared there and I was shocked what I found ... package seems to build/work somehow, but it's really messed up -- while I just maintain the FreeBSD port of it myself 😏)
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Out on the Internet, I see that the attitude "We're the best, other guys are just sloppy" frankly goes both ways. Every project with big software repos has contributors that work hard on a package, only to discover that their work got re-packaged (rather hastily, without good coordination with original author) for a repo elsewhere. Case in point: FreeBSD Ports has tons of ports that have no maintainers, but are included in the Ports Collection anyway. Same thing happens with the AUR and Debian's repos. Package maintainers who are actually committed to keeping the code tested and usable - they are few and far between. If the code runs (even after author drops the project), it's a testament to the quality of the code, maybe? 😏
 
Not sure what you're trying to say here? Unmaintained ports are an issue because they're prone to "bitrot". Still, they don't allow any quality of commits, it's still either a ports committer, or a contributor with review by a ports committer touching them, so it's a whole other game than just allowing anyone to put whatever they like in some repo without any form of review. And btw, review practice doesn't even end there, lots of committers monitor commits and comment (internally) if they spotted something wrong with them.

But, still a nice opportunity to remind everyone that every port (unless it's a candidate for removal because nobody uses it) deserves to be maintained 😏 Come on, adopt one 😉
 
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