Solved Why FreeBSD secret tricks?

Similar: The reason I gave up on OpenBSD (about 10 years ago) was that it had such awful WiFi drivers in AP mode that it was not workable. Half the clients were running at hundreds of kBit/sec instead of the expected 11 MBit, and the server needed to be rebooted every day or so. So I switched to FreeBSD, and while it AP mode WiFi drivers weren't that awful, they were by no means good. The obvious fix it to buy an actual AP, and costs about $100 and 10 watts.
 
Similar: The reason I gave up on OpenBSD (about 10 years ago) was that it had such awful WiFi drivers in AP mode that it was not workable. Half the clients were running at hundreds of kBit/sec instead of the expected 11 MBit, and the server needed to be rebooted every day or so. So I switched to FreeBSD, and while it AP mode WiFi drivers weren't that awful, they were by no means good. The obvious fix it to buy an actual AP, and costs about $100 and 10 watts.
And hope the crappy hacked Linux firmware it comes with doesn't have too many bugs and isn't loaded down with too much crapware you don't want and spyware. Heck, buy an Eero or a Unifi, and let the vendor decide when's a good time to "upgrade" your firmware.
 
Maybe my expectations are low but I can't imagine buying a Wireless AP. It is not a money thing.
It is the pride of knowing every bit of code running on your rig. I will never EOL myself.
I am happy with 6-8 Megabytes per second for my notebook.
 
with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz enabled. Does FreeBSD not work well with this type of thing?
Well to do both bands requires 2 Wifi networks with two wifi modules. One for each band.
But to answer your question yes. HostAPD can do both.
But 2.4 band is inferior for my usage. I did need it once to upgrade the firmware on my flip-phone.

Create one AP on one card and another AP on a second card, all within a single instance of Hostapd;
 
(Speaking of external WiFi APs, as opposed to using the *BSD machine as an AP)

And hope the crappy hacked Linux firmware it comes with doesn't have too many bugs and isn't loaded down with too much crapware you don't want and spyware. Heck, buy an Eero or a Unifi, and let the vendor decide when's a good time to "upgrade" your firmware.

Well, my first AP definitely did not run Linux internally, it was made by Apple. The second one does. But why does that mean "crappy hacked Linux firmware"? They use Linux as a kernel. So? With some care, it is possible to build perfectly good embedded devices using the Linux kernel. "Crapware"? It does ONE job: moving packets from wired to WiFi. There is no room for any wares in the middle. "Spyware"? The device has no connection to the outside world. Certainly it sees most packets going over the network (duh), but it can't send them anywhere.

I see no reason for paranoia here. Nor for the hatred of Linux.
 
Well, my first AP definitely did not run Linux internally, it was made by Apple. The second one does. But why does that mean "crappy hacked Linux firmware"? They use Linux as a kernel. So? With some care, it is possible to build perfectly good embedded devices using the Linux kernel. "Crapware"? It does ONE job: moving packets from wired to WiFi. There is no room for any wares in the middle. "Spyware"? The device has no connection to the outside world. Certainly it sees most packets going over the network (duh), but it can't send them anywhere.

I see no reason for paranoia here. Nor for the hatred of Linux.
I don't see how my post contained either. The "Linux" you get is encrusted with vendor patches that usually don't even get submitted upstream because they'd get flamed to a crisp on the LKML, and rightly so.

The last commercial AP I worked on came pre-configured to use the vendor's DNS resolvers, purely for reliability. I'm sure they'd never dream of keeping track of the DNS domains you're visiting. There were also a bunch of other "special features" and "enhanced services" that depended on the vendor's cloud backend. I mercifully forget the details.
 
Spoken like a true mac fanboi
He really isn't far off reality to be fair. I highly recommend simply storing it away for 2-4 years until a time when it is well supported.

What else you going to do? Sit there with a fancy $3000 Alienware laptop that is effectively useless?

If you have noticed, it is a constant treadmill and you will *never* be able to walk into a shop like PC World and buy an off the shelf laptop with good open-source support.

If you don't like second hand, you need to create yourself a buffer of a couple of years old laptops (still brand new out of the box) and make do with what you can get rather than blaming the OS.

It sounds counter intuitive but FreeBSD developers spending all their time on drivers is time taken away from making the OS better. Drivers are effectively temporary things that become fairly useless once the original hardware stops being common.

(Yes, buying the very latest Thinkpad, only to box it back up and leave it in a dark room for the next couple of years is... hard haha :))
 
It's an evergrowing thread. Guess I should have asked a specific question.
Well you lost some respect after this:
I don't understand why working with FreeBSD means reading manuals and helpful forums while typing commands that other people have already typed.
We have a different philosophy than Linux in this regard.
Here is an example. Zoneminder is a complex port that requires configuring at least 5 applications to run it.
On FreeBSD none of the files are configured for you. You are expected to configure a database and webserver.
On Linux you just apt-get install zoneminder and enjoy your beer.
So there are two different philosophies at play. One is to make it so simple an idiot could do it.
The other you have to learn what is going on behind the scenes. So it's harder to use by design.
 
Many Linux distributions are the same way, and will require you doing some reading and the like before being able to setup a usable system.

Most of us who use a BSD consider this a good thing. There are various reasons, for example, GUI installers often fail because of video problems whereas a text or curses based installer won't have this problem. Some systems may configure things to a point where the first thing you're doing is redoing their default configs.

Neither way is necessarily good or bad, but to say all Linux distros are for newcomers is incorrect. Many are, and probably at least partially because of that, it became more popular and it's far easier to get support for various hardware and software on it.
 
Note that almost all the problems or questions regarding all these things are little to nothing to do with the operating system itself but user applications or devices. Sound, games, video, cameras, etc. These things are either not coded to run on anything but some other OS or it's the glue to make them work on FreeBSD that is an issue. Too often FreeBSD gets blamed for things outside its purview but FreeBSD is expected to pick up the pieces.
 
I was conducting invasive surveillance on a well-known Linux forum as a well-known Agent of Chaos when I saw a thread there much like the ones we see here titled something like "Why is FreeBSD not asked to the Prom as often as Linux?"

When the OP was advised to ask that question here, someone we probably all know and love responded:

"There is a certain contingent at the FreeBSD forums who think Linux is somehow inferior and using FreeBSD makes them l33t. If you ask such a question you will get lots of attention from that contingent (and biased opinions), while normal users won't get much involved."


I ran that thread question through our forum search feature and it gave this thread as the #1 response out of 10 pages of search results.

I was going to respond with information regarding how people from this thread spilled the beans on all our "FreeBSD secret tricks", me included and how I was probably one of the posters he was referring to, but got an urgent message to meet Vladimir in the Urals and had to log off.
 
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