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

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

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.