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.
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.
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'm glad I'm not the only person with similar feelings. I'm perfectly comfortable in Linux, but there's a certain ... uncanniness to it that's hard to pin down. FreeBSD (and, I suspect, the other BSDs as well) just feels more coherent.
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.
I fondly remember working with FreeBSD in my younger days when I would tinker more.
Back in those days I could make any Windows installation unrecoverable. I could severely botch a Linux system. But FreeBSD would always keep chugging, no matter what crazy idea I wanted to try.
It may not be the fastest. It may not be the flashiest. But in my mind, it has this whole "reliability" thing written all over it like no other OS has.
For instance, when I was a student (and thus poor), I had a PC made of (free) scavenged parts. It wouldn't boot Windows. Linux would crash during boot. But FreeBSD just chugged along like there were no issues at all.
I later discovered there were some physical issues with the UDMA mode on the IDE controller, and that's probably what tripped of the other OSes, but FreeBSD would just work. Albeit slowly, but it actually ran fine. For years.
So while I no longer rely on FreeBSD myself, I look back on it with fondness. That's also why I decided to help port .NET to FreeBSD when the first cross-platform version of .NET Core was launched (for Windows, Linux and Mac only). I thought every decent OS deserved to have a working .NET version ;)
A little less than 25 years ago, my then-new day job wanted me to build them a new mail server, using Linux.
I'd put together one or two public-facing mail servers before, but it'd been a few years and the landscape had changed (postfix was the new hotness, sendmail was old news, etc). And I had a FreeBSD machine at home that I'd previously built from garbage that I was using for NAT and a few other things.
So, wanting to appear all slick and stuff at the new job, I built a prototype at home on that FreeBSD box using a freebie dyndns subdomain (which was still practical at that time).
It all worked great. For a couple of years I even used it to host my own email at home. It was less trouble to maintain than the Linux-based thing I'd built at work even though they both started with the same software configs.
But that FreeBSD box was only ever a little forgettable trash-built machine, so there were no backups at all when the hard drive crashed completely (there were grooves worn into the platters) while I was out of town.
Which might normally be the end of the story, but: FreeBSD kept rolling just fine. Whatever data was in RAM (which apparently included at least sshd and bash) remained in RAM and stayed usable, and it kept routing packets like nothing had ever happened at all.
I marveled at this for a few weeks as this very broken machine kept flawlessly doing its NAT duties and providing solid Internet access for my LAN until I scrounged up enough pennies to buy my first "home router": A Linksys WRT54GS. (That little hackable Linux box was a very fun introduction to the rabbit hole of using hardware in unintended ways, but that's a story for a different comment section.)
> Besides that there is a bigger question that I need to answer for myself: given the quirks of FreeBSD, what actually would the benefit of using it be?
I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.
I have been daily driving FreeBSD for a while now (as a newcomer, coming from Linux) and surprisingly the experience for me was different from what you usually hear.
Pros:
- It is actually in a way easier than Linux. The installation is less complex and more reliable than a Fedora if you are not afraid of the TUI. More important it will soon include a desktop installation script.
- All the software you will ever need is in pkg or ports unless you are a degen
- You will pick up jails for container use cases in 10 minutes and will never want to go back
- VM with vm-bhyve is simpler than libvirt and no XML to deal with.
- Same with networking, you will pick it up quickly and no more confusion between NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, ifup, etc.
- The linux-compat feature will get you very far and there are a lot of Linux apps packaged already
A lot of your points are valid, however... some are taking some liberties. Are you actually running into usecases where FreeBSD is easier or faster to install than current release Fedora Server?
> The wifi thing is no problem with...
You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?
A lot of wishful thinking in this thread about FreeBSD on workstations.
> A lot of your points are valid, however... some are taking some liberties. Are you actually running into usecases where FreeBSD is easier or faster to install than current release Fedora Server?
It is just that the Fedora installer is more complex... and also will fail often at partitioning or during install. I've done it hundreds of time and it failed dozens on time.
I would still recommend Fedora to Linux users but the FreeBSD installer much more simple and straightforward.
> You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?
It is an Alpine running on the hypervisor you won't even notice it. It consumes less than web browser tab...
Plus it has benefits from a security point of view.
I would rather FreeBSD devs focus on other things than porting all wifi drivers.
> You won't be able to mount/read your LUKS drives from your Linux era.
I did this a few times by just running Linux in bhyve and mounting from within that. Not ideal, but worked for just accessing old files on an old LUKS partition.
> and technically you can also use ZFS on Linux, even if it's painful
Maybe on some distros, but on Ubuntu is just an `apt-get install` away, or can be even be added from installation time. I've been using it for many years without any issues and the experience is great.
I actually combine some non-ZFS filesystems with ZFS with encryption and compression for all my setups, including my laptop. I plan to blog shortly about it and how I'm automating it all. Target is also a Framework laptop, too.
Can you actually do a full root-on-zfs setup with linux these days? Last I heard support wasn't 100% in the ubuntu installer. I recently installed FreeBSD on my new media server box, with the full os being in one ZFS pool spread across 4 disks (raidz1).
This is one of my favorite things about FreeBSD, I love being able to take a snapshot of my system before doing an update.
I recently did an arch with zfs root setup. You have to make a custom install ISO that has the zfs module to do it. After it's installed the main annoyance is the zfs module only works with certain kernel versions and often arch has updated the kernel to a version not supported. There's a repo with pinned kernel versions or you can just use the lts kernel.
FreeBSD is much easier but I needed better Linux compatibility for this machine
If I'm not mistaken, since 25.04 root-on-ZFS is available (as experimental) in the installer.
I still prefer to do root on ext4 and then a proper ZFS pool for all the mountpoints I want, where I can configure as I wish with encryption and compression. Primary reason is that I don't keep sensitive data on root, but I want a bootable system whatever happens. And this use case is perfectly supported, so it's more than enough for me.
I feel like I'm seeing a lot about FreeBSD lately. I know they released a new version recently, but is there anything else going on? Is it picking up some steam? Or am I trapped in the algorithm?
I've tinkered with it in the past and I once had a job where we ran in on our servers. It seems pretty nice, but it never gets the attention Linux gets and the hardware support situation is sorta sad. I always chalked it up to the license and assumed people using it just don't contribute anything back. I love Linux and the support it receives from seemingly everyone these days, but it would be nice to have other options too.
I've noticed the same. At first, I thought it was Baader-Meinhof, since I recently decided to set up a FreeBSD server after over a decade since I last used it, but it's definitely hitting the news more (15.0-RELEASE comes soon, and a Swift build was just announced), which I guess naturally leads to more discussion.
Would love to see it surge in popularity. Underrated OS.
They are finally adding the option to setup a user desktop to the installer in a build shortly. Which needed to be done years ago IMO. They are doing some outreach on their YouTube channel.
If they do I might try it. However I've had issues getting the video drivers to behave on BSDs even ones that "should" work. Hopefully podman and/or docker is something I can use easily.
I don't know either but it would be funny for me as a FreeNAS then TrueNAS user who resents that after being a famously FreeBSD distro for 20 years iXsystems just switched over to Linux and I had to switch to a community fork to keep on freebsd.
Then somehow freebsd becomes a new darling and they just got done spending a couple years going out of their way to make sure they miss out on that wave. Or worse try dust off their last version of Core and act like "our proud tradition ..." Ugh I'm so not happy with that company...I paid way too much for one of their official own-brand servers instead of just running it on whatever random way better hardware I want.
But I'll say that even I only use freebsd for zvault and opnsense. I try every now and then to make it my laptop daily driver but there are just too many annoyances and things that don't work or aren't supported well enough or that break with updates or that aren't automated or preconfigured well enough etc. I cannot give examples without writing way too much. This is the short version. And I've been a linux daily driver forever without really minding those same sorts of extra efforts needed for linux vs windows or mac, so this does not come from someone who just can't tolerate rough edges or can't figure things out.
But I have also avoided "cheating" by using one of the purpose built desktop distros like ghostbsd or dragonfly etc, so I might be shooting myself in the foot. I do have an old laptop with freebsd 14.something on it currently which is more or less working but not all the hardware works and it kills the battery in 20 minutes. But it runs, even the weird proprietary Sony 2-in-1 ssd and the wifi. Probably not the bluetooth and I never even dared to hope or try the webcam or the fingreprint. I don't remember about backlight or keyboard backlight control.
I was really hoping that FreeBSD would support Apple Silicon, particularly the Mini. Hector Martin and friends did the hard and under appreciated work of the m1n1 bootstrap. Indeed, OpenBSD uses m1n1. However, the FreeBSD effort seems to have stalled.
FreeBSD has had a hard time supporting Intel Thinkpads, and they're making progress at getting better. Supporting Apple arm64 is a much heavier lift than that.
I tried FreeBSD as a desktop OS a few years ago, but what killed it for me was lack of (or too complicated for me) support for multiple monitors via a docking station using DisplayLink.
Even under Linux DisplayLink support was a bit iffy, with kernel updates breaking support with frustrating regularity, but that hasn't happened in the last couple of years.
Apparently FreeBSD has had DisplayLink support built into the kernel since 2015[0], and I'm sure I've tried it since then and couldn't get it to work. However it's been at least five years since I tried it last, so maybe I need to try again (although I'm very comfortable with my Linux desktop flow now).
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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
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 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.
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
Dead Comment
Back in those days I could make any Windows installation unrecoverable. I could severely botch a Linux system. But FreeBSD would always keep chugging, no matter what crazy idea I wanted to try.
It may not be the fastest. It may not be the flashiest. But in my mind, it has this whole "reliability" thing written all over it like no other OS has.
For instance, when I was a student (and thus poor), I had a PC made of (free) scavenged parts. It wouldn't boot Windows. Linux would crash during boot. But FreeBSD just chugged along like there were no issues at all.
I later discovered there were some physical issues with the UDMA mode on the IDE controller, and that's probably what tripped of the other OSes, but FreeBSD would just work. Albeit slowly, but it actually ran fine. For years.
So while I no longer rely on FreeBSD myself, I look back on it with fondness. That's also why I decided to help port .NET to FreeBSD when the first cross-platform version of .NET Core was launched (for Windows, Linux and Mac only). I thought every decent OS deserved to have a working .NET version ;)
I'd put together one or two public-facing mail servers before, but it'd been a few years and the landscape had changed (postfix was the new hotness, sendmail was old news, etc). And I had a FreeBSD machine at home that I'd previously built from garbage that I was using for NAT and a few other things.
So, wanting to appear all slick and stuff at the new job, I built a prototype at home on that FreeBSD box using a freebie dyndns subdomain (which was still practical at that time).
It all worked great. For a couple of years I even used it to host my own email at home. It was less trouble to maintain than the Linux-based thing I'd built at work even though they both started with the same software configs.
But that FreeBSD box was only ever a little forgettable trash-built machine, so there were no backups at all when the hard drive crashed completely (there were grooves worn into the platters) while I was out of town.
Which might normally be the end of the story, but: FreeBSD kept rolling just fine. Whatever data was in RAM (which apparently included at least sshd and bash) remained in RAM and stayed usable, and it kept routing packets like nothing had ever happened at all.
I marveled at this for a few weeks as this very broken machine kept flawlessly doing its NAT duties and providing solid Internet access for my LAN until I scrounged up enough pennies to buy my first "home router": A Linksys WRT54GS. (That little hackable Linux box was a very fun introduction to the rabbit hole of using hardware in unintended ways, but that's a story for a different comment section.)
I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.
You can read the source without worrying about getting sued for violating the GPL
Pros:
- It is actually in a way easier than Linux. The installation is less complex and more reliable than a Fedora if you are not afraid of the TUI. More important it will soon include a desktop installation script.
- All the software you will ever need is in pkg or ports unless you are a degen
- You will pick up jails for container use cases in 10 minutes and will never want to go back
- VM with vm-bhyve is simpler than libvirt and no XML to deal with.
- Same with networking, you will pick it up quickly and no more confusion between NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, ifup, etc.
- The linux-compat feature will get you very far and there are a lot of Linux apps packaged already
- Hardware support is ok if you check first on https://bsd-hardware.info/
- The wifi thing is no problem with https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
Cons:
- You won't be able to mount/read your LUKS drives from your Linux era.
- Sometime very critical packages like Chromium disappear because they won't build (for example no chromium in pkg on the current FreeBSD 15 BETA)
- Bhyve do not support SPICE so you are stuck with the perf of VNC.
- Bhyve do not have vsock so no blazing fast waypipe
- You basically loose a lot of security feature of web browsers, most of the sandboxing of Firefox and Chrome. This is really bad.
- I haven't really dived into it but it seems there is no Bluetooth LE
- It is fast but doesn't feel as fast as an Alpine
If you are thinking about it and this is ok for you, I would say go for it.
> The wifi thing is no problem with...
You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?
A lot of wishful thinking in this thread about FreeBSD on workstations.
It is just that the Fedora installer is more complex... and also will fail often at partitioning or during install. I've done it hundreds of time and it failed dozens on time.
I would still recommend Fedora to Linux users but the FreeBSD installer much more simple and straightforward.
> You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?
It is an Alpine running on the hypervisor you won't even notice it. It consumes less than web browser tab...
Plus it has benefits from a security point of view.
I would rather FreeBSD devs focus on other things than porting all wifi drivers.
I did this a few times by just running Linux in bhyve and mounting from within that. Not ideal, but worked for just accessing old files on an old LUKS partition.
Maybe on some distros, but on Ubuntu is just an `apt-get install` away, or can be even be added from installation time. I've been using it for many years without any issues and the experience is great.
I actually combine some non-ZFS filesystems with ZFS with encryption and compression for all my setups, including my laptop. I plan to blog shortly about it and how I'm automating it all. Target is also a Framework laptop, too.
This is one of my favorite things about FreeBSD, I love being able to take a snapshot of my system before doing an update.
FreeBSD is much easier but I needed better Linux compatibility for this machine
I still prefer to do root on ext4 and then a proper ZFS pool for all the mountpoints I want, where I can configure as I wish with encryption and compression. Primary reason is that I don't keep sensitive data on root, but I want a bootable system whatever happens. And this use case is perfectly supported, so it's more than enough for me.
I've tinkered with it in the past and I once had a job where we ran in on our servers. It seems pretty nice, but it never gets the attention Linux gets and the hardware support situation is sorta sad. I always chalked it up to the license and assumed people using it just don't contribute anything back. I love Linux and the support it receives from seemingly everyone these days, but it would be nice to have other options too.
Would love to see it surge in popularity. Underrated OS.
Not sure where I'd jump to next as I enjoy my OS's non-mainstream but life is life. Maybe Open Indiana or TempleOS.
If they do I might try it. However I've had issues getting the video drivers to behave on BSDs even ones that "should" work. Hopefully podman and/or docker is something I can use easily.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd_desktop/comments/1opmb9k/op...
Then somehow freebsd becomes a new darling and they just got done spending a couple years going out of their way to make sure they miss out on that wave. Or worse try dust off their last version of Core and act like "our proud tradition ..." Ugh I'm so not happy with that company...I paid way too much for one of their official own-brand servers instead of just running it on whatever random way better hardware I want.
But I'll say that even I only use freebsd for zvault and opnsense. I try every now and then to make it my laptop daily driver but there are just too many annoyances and things that don't work or aren't supported well enough or that break with updates or that aren't automated or preconfigured well enough etc. I cannot give examples without writing way too much. This is the short version. And I've been a linux daily driver forever without really minding those same sorts of extra efforts needed for linux vs windows or mac, so this does not come from someone who just can't tolerate rough edges or can't figure things out.
But I have also avoided "cheating" by using one of the purpose built desktop distros like ghostbsd or dragonfly etc, so I might be shooting myself in the foot. I do have an old laptop with freebsd 14.something on it currently which is more or less working but not all the hardware works and it kills the battery in 20 minutes. But it runs, even the weird proprietary Sony 2-in-1 ssd and the wifi. Probably not the bluetooth and I never even dared to hope or try the webcam or the fingreprint. I don't remember about backlight or keyboard backlight control.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon
Even under Linux DisplayLink support was a bit iffy, with kernel updates breaking support with frustrating regularity, but that hasn't happened in the last couple of years.
Apparently FreeBSD has had DisplayLink support built into the kernel since 2015[0], and I'm sure I've tried it since then and couldn't get it to work. However it's been at least five years since I tried it last, so maybe I need to try again (although I'm very comfortable with my Linux desktop flow now).
[0]:https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-DisplayLink-Support