Desktop FreeBSD won't improve unless people are using it

I gave it the old college try a few years ago out of some weird retro desire to use something &quot;cool&quot; like when I first found Linux in the late &#x27;90s. It was an obnoxious hassle nearly every step of the way, but I stuck with it as long as I could stomach. I did what felt like some pretty substantial work trying to update a port, and my issue just sat with no responses for months until someone else came along and independently re-did the work for a newer release.<p>The running joke about Linux is that next year is perennially the &quot;year of the Linux desktop&quot;, but by comparison, FreeBSD feels like it&#x27;s a decade away from achieving that kind of maturity outside of the server&#x2F;middlebox space.

It is really difficult to suggest or even use a BSD myself. The hardware support is years behind Linux; Linux is often a year or behind Windows for new hardware, but much more for more niche things. Linux drivers, at least Intel and AMD graphics drivers, do tend to mature faster than their Windows counterparts in my limited experience.<p>Then you go into development work where the GNU version of many command line tools have more features than the BSD counterparts. Systemd offers very nice unification of a lot of previous disarrayed scripts. Wayland is the future, wish it was smoother and more unified, but people should not be using Xorg as it just does not handle things that well, such as different refresh rate monitors or screen tearing.<p>The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back. This harms the community. The GPL was very important for establishing a somewhat sustainable open source ecosystem.

I&#x27;m willing to give a BSD a shot. But trying out OSes is so tiring now that I&#x27;m nearly 40. I really just want to pay for a working computer.<p>I recently was given an Apple computer for work, and I really loathe the whole experience. I&#x27;m completely spoiled by how flexible Linux is. You can make it do whatever you want. Apple seems hell bent on not letting you do anything, and what it does do is inefficient or clunky or just broken.<p>I would go back to Windows, but I keep hearing about how new versions are worse recently. And I expect it&#x27;s a resource pig.<p>So before I switch away from Alpine (I finally got it working mostly well; but I have to be extremely careful before installing any package, because it likes to brick itself by removing packages like <i>the wifi support</i>), I&#x27;ll give BSD a shot. But I anticipate hardware problems and maybe software problems too.

I&#x27;m still trying to make the full time switch to Linux<p>When I use MacOS and Windows these days I am baffled by the design choices.<p>It&#x27;s like the design process involves the CEO, their yogi, and the finance department.<p>I have no idea what&#x27;s going on but the big two desktop operating systems have gotten worse in the last decade.<p>Linux has been my last hope and it&#x27;s getting to be passable recently, but there&#x27;s a lot of work yet before I can make the switch full time.

I can&#x27;t think of any reason why would one use BSD on desktop or anywhere really. BSD flavours were popular 10-20 years ago for licensing reasons. Think like Junos 9 (FreeBSD), FTOS (NetBSD). Now the world largely moved to Linux.

Well, I also only use Desktop Linux via VMs, since Virtual Box and VMWare got good enough to run it, around 2010.<p>ChromeOS and Android don&#x27;t really count, as the Linux kernel is the only thing from GNU&#x2F;Linux being used for their desktop like purposes.<p>So in that regard, BSD and Linux are on the same boat anyway.<p>And as Steve Jobs used to point out, UNIX was never designed for the desktop anyway, note how NeXTSTEP and OS X developer stack barely care for UNIX workflows other than getting the UNIX (TM) stamp.

&gt; People who are into BSD don’t use BSD. This seems to be a reason for lacking hardware support.<p>Ryzen 9 5950x - no issues<p>AMD 5700 XT - no issues<p>Nvidia 3070 - no issues<p>Presonus - no issues<p>While waiting for replacement morherboard I did a complete swap from AMD to Intel 4770k and no issues. Linux kernel panicked and Windows BSOD.<p>What issues are people having?<p>My desktop runs like a charm. sound works, Internet and WiFi, works perfectly and this is all pretty recent hardware.

Anybody wanting to give a decent FreeBSD implementation a go, try:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghostbsd.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghostbsd.org&#x2F;</a>

I have a FreeBSD vm running kde, but I don&#x27;t remember if it&#x27;s 12 or 13... it took a while to get the desktop running, but after that, it just felt like I was running Linux...<p>Is that a bad thing? I don&#x27;t know. How come BSD doesn&#x27;t have its own desktop? Or maybe it does and I didn&#x27;t know about it at the time... but if I&#x27;m going to set up wayland I feel like I might as well run Linux.

But maybe there isn&#x27;t much to &#x27;improve&#x27;...? I suspect this is the feeling shared by those who appreciate it.

Too bad, it&#x27;s a chicken or egg issue. People won&#x27;t use it unless it fits their needs. Have kept an eye on it for over two decades now, I still have an active FreeBSD installation but unfortunately, it&#x27;s nowhere near usable as a desktop environment. In the meantime, Linux has improved a lot, and it&#x27;s more or less ready.

I’m using it, and I really like it. I’ve been using FreeBSD as my main operating system for more than two decades. Though I’m fairly OS agnostic, I keep a copy of Linux and Windows just in case. I accept its limitations(Bluetooth) and I think it’s great software

The way netbsd does drivers has always interested me. It seems like you could solve the problem with new distros not supporting lots of basic hardware by using netbsd’s drivers with your kernel

Issues i had with (Free)BSD:<p>- different partitioning scheme, wants a primary partition for it<p>- old style filesystem, tried to run it in a VM, run out of inodes when installing ports.<p>- in the good old days, OpenBSD had the best documentation.

I gave FreeBSD a try a couple of years ago and it was a hassle all the way for me. It&#x27;s not beginner friendly from what I remember but I hope that has changed.

I stopped paying attention to FreeBSD since the day they adopted their moronic code of conduct.