Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

Linus is too in-bed with Microsoft.

RedHat the main powerhouse behind Linux ans is now owned by IBM. And Ubuntu is just corporate Debian who pushes their own proprietary (Flatpak) software which is cobbled together and just generally sucks.

Systemd is bloated in wanting to do everything at once. I have never had a linux systemd distribution that just shutdowns without prompting me "waiting x/2minutes - x/y retries".

FreeBSD is my daily driver and will always be my primary. Once you get over the "eww it's bsd" linux snobbery you start to realise how solid it actually is.

Wifi works, graphics work. Wine and Proton works. Ports is fantastic and kernel compiling is easy. It even works on my MSI 2024 laptop. [1]

Linux is lost in a communistic maze of leap frog.

[1] https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=b7f27b9528

Wifi? You mean the thing where people often resort to running a Linux VM to handle it?

I have had no issue with Wifi on multiple occasions. Works just fine nowadays without any Linux compatibility add-on.

Wifi not being available isn't the fault of FreeBSD. If vendors actually gave open sourced drivers to their products and not locked behind a proprietary binary blob then we would be in a completely different world.

I can recall when WiFi on Linux was pretty much non-existent until deals were made back in 2018.

So stop throwing that this is FreeBSDs fault, it's 100% down to the vendors locking down hardware.

> Wifi not being available isn't the fault of FreeBSD.

No. Just because it's available doesn't mean it's good. Until FreeBSD supports modern Wifi (4/5, i.e 802.11n/ac) then you're just ticking the box to say you've got it, but Linux actually supports these modern network setups and FreeBSD does not. There is no debating this at this point in time.

And to be clear, I'm referencing wifibox (https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox) which has been written about extensively and exists to work around FreeBSDs well known poor wifi support.

> So stop throwing that this is FreeBSDs fault

Nope, it's on FreeBSD if they want it. They appear to have finally prioritized it but it's not there yet.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/january-2025-laptop-suppo...

Wifi vendors supply drivers for Linux. They do not supply drivers for FreeBSD. It is not FreeBSD's fault.