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 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.

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!

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.