A brief look at FreeBSD

I daily drive FreeBSD on my desktop with KDE. It is not as smooth as Linux and requires a little more tinkering compared to Linux. But I love it!

The killer features for me:

- The pf firewall. Rules you actually understand!

- Jails! When you cannot have Zones this will do.

- Native ZFS. Stable, mature, safe and with all the features you can dream of.

- Linuxulator. Binary compatibility with Linux if need be. Can be put in jail as well.

- pkg/ports. I really like it but I might have been indoctrinated.

- Networking stack. Good. Stable. Makes sense to me.

For a nice graphical UI Linux is more smooth but if you are willing to tinker it can work. As Linux gets all the attention you will see stuff such as Chromium lag behind.

I can understand that can scare people off. But FreeBSD feels like a comfortable old glove for me. I will suffer the minor holes. My beard has grayed and my hair line is non-existant.

If waiting for a laptop I would perhaps wait for FreeBSD 15 for much needed improvements in WIFI. If you want fast WIFI today you need weird hacks routing through a Linux VM[1]. It works rather well but it is honestly a bit clunky.

[1] https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox

I daily drive FreeBSD with IceWM, four screens 2@4k, 2@1080p running with Xorg on a Sapphire 5600XT, I can't fault any issues.

I remember a hack, back in the day, on Linux where a Windows wifi driver was used via a thing called NDISwrapper. Be patient and hopefully you'll soon be looking back on your Linux VM bodge in the rear view mirror.

Exactly. When it works it is great.

I stick with a single 43" 4K@60 but it was a bit of a challenge to get on the happy path:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-fli...

All systems can have issues. But the more widely used systems are at an advantage.

Honestly, the problem is always the f!@#ing hardware, isn't it

The reason all this is hard is likely a remnant of what Microsoft did in the 1990s to the point where Non Windows OSes are given the shaft

Nvidia, Broadcom, Wifi generally, whatever

I haven't realised Ndiswrapper was deprecated in Linux. I thought I was too lucky with my WiFi cards in the last 10-15 years!

If only there would be a resurgence of BSD. linux always feels like the javascript of OS world.

Oh yes, it /is/ the f!@#ing hardware. The core FreeBSD developers have taken their sweet time to add support for WiFi on anything IoT running FreeBSD. In other words — FreeBSD's core developers usually will not listen to users asking for such things unless maximum pressure gets applied in every separate instance. Disclaimer: I'm not a FreeBSD user. Apart from the halfway decent distros which use FreeBSD as their core OS, the FreeBSD developers in charge of FreeBSD itself will not add a GUI installer for some old school reason that really, only they would know of. One issue coming directly from this constraint is that if you run BSD through a VM — either on Linux or Windows it is rather difficult if not impossible to get past 1024 x 768 resolution without going through some major hoops. FreeBSD does not do a thorough job supporting VirtualBox instances, generally speaking. BSD is meant more for the back-end "bare metal" servers.

Wifi isn't quite solved on any platform. It is also quite hard to decide what solved really looks like!

My wife and I have identical HP laptops. Her's runs Arch (as you do), with KDE and mine runs Kubuntu 25.10 at the mo. Both use NetworkManager.

I look after both.

Randomly after wake up from suspend, wifi may or may not still be working. When I say random, I mean after a kernel update or the wind changes direction. I think wifies lappy is OK now because I seem to get a lot less "support" calls for the last few weeks.

To be fair, there are a lot of moving parts from a lot of bits of Linux involved in a modern distro these days.

When I say hard to decide what solved looks like: if Samba or SSSD crap out, is that wifi's fault or the kernel/driver? This is exactly what Windows has had to solve over the years and I do note things like credential managers and mounts that manage to survive disconnects being bolted on to Linux.

All that scrappy stuff needs to be passed on to the BSDs too. Getting a laptop with file systems that come and go, with a dickey clock tick and networking that comes and goes and VPNs and all the rest.

Getting all of that to work is quite a job.

> If you want fast WIFI today

Fast still means beyond 802.11g? (11n support is incomplete, last time I checked)

Because there is no corporate sponsor that needs good Wi-Fi drivers on FreeBSD, I doubt it will ever be better. I guess Sony, but it's all custom for them. I doubt there is anything to contribute back, even if Sony was open to that idea.

I asked a question to ChatGPT about WiFi support on IoT devices running FreeBSD. It appears that my info gleaned from about two years ago while experimenting with FreeBSD installs is already possibly outdated. Hey! I meant no disrespect before to any FreeBSD developers. I know that adding drivers is hard work: https://nickwinlund.dev/~nick/img/FreeBSD%20WiFi%20IoT%20sup...

I'm glad this fits with my intuition

I think they assume people know what they're doing but a little x session never hurt anyone?