What makes BSD stand out as its own system? I’ve been thinking about installing it in a new computer mainly for reading but I don’t know much about it.
I like using FreeBSD, the setup feels a lot nicer and more coherent than Linux in a lot of ways. I mainly tried it for native zfs.
The only downside is that nobody knows it exists so I have to compile things myself a lot or even patch it to get it to compile.
I’m going to get crucified for this… for a desktop end-user it’s basically Linux with completely different syntax, lesser hardware compatibility and limited support channels.
I am certainly not going to crucify you for it. While FreeBSD is a fantastic operating system, its hardware support is lacking.
I really wish it was more popular. The userspace feels way more cohesive and the GNUisms of some Linux utilities is annoying sometimes.
It’s actually amazing they got this much hardware support. Heck, they even have Nvidia driver support. It could’ve been worse.
that’s the catch though: it’s more cohesive because it’s not popular… people work and design and finesse it into a standard… linux however is popular so has a lot of opinions going into it! and that reinforces itself: it has a lot of stuff so that makes it popular and it’s popular so that means it has a lot of stuff!
BSD is great for what it’s great for and Linux is good for… pretty much everything
It’s because one of its tenets is POLA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment). I use it for every server I run (4 physical, 37 ‘jailed’). Desktop it’s “OK” and can be hit and miss with a lot of hardware, I’ll admit it. It works on my laptop perfectly, and on my desktop generally.
I do as well but FreeBSD made a lot of self-inflicted wounds. OpenBSD on the other hand runs surprisingly well on a variety of hardware. It won’t run well on the absolute latest but one or two generations behind it works gangbusters.
No that’s 100% the standard take. FreeBSD is a fantastic operating system but it doesn’t make sense as a daily driver for a personal computer
