I am a longtime Linux user. I love the platform and would not be in IT if not for Linux. That being said, my tastes and the platform has changed over the years. At present, most distros work out of the first install without troubleshooting, cli, and config files. Linux hardware support is fantastic too. All that being said, I am a big supporter of the UNIX philosophy. I see Linux on a path that is veering towards standardization and monolithic subsystems. I think part of this trend is to simplify but mostly it’s driven by commercial interests and RHEL. With most major distros using systemd and it’s underlying tools many developers are dropping support for alternatives because of development costs. FreeBSD really shines in that you can make it whatever you want; they even avoid in choosing a standard or default option. Any BSD really takes the best of UNIX and pairs it with modern computing tools. I have decided to setup two of my laptops as full desktop environments and use them just as I would Linux so that I can learn more and perhaps one day switch to FreeBSD as my daily driver.
I won’t be going too in depth right now but I do want to provide some initial impressions after setting up a KDE desktop on my new T495s. First off, if you are new to NIX you might be better served starting with Ghost, Nomad, or Midnight BSD or for that matter Ubuntu. The installer is TUI but it’s not particularly hard and pretty much automated if you are doing a full disk install. FreeBSD provides a handbook which is built in and also has a web version. It’s an amazing learning tool; I found it to be equal if not better to many of the system administration books I’ve read. After setup It’s ideal to have a wired network connection to start and get a base of packages installed. In terms of configuration I would say arch, gentoo, or even void are more challenging. It really only took me about 2 hours for the basics and maybe another 6 mostly for polishing and testing for limitations. Really the only show stopper that would hold many new users back is documentation on hardware support. Most lists of supported hardware are outdated, there are multiple versions of drivers with no clear indication what to use and different versions of FreeBSD often require different choices. Considering the size of the FreeBSD project they do remarkably well but these limitations will really hold people back from adopting. The bottom line is that you need to use trial and error to find the right drivers and settings although the forums and reddit provide a general sense of the direction you need to go. Most of the time the wrong driver choice will just mean it does not work but I did have at least one kernel panic to deal with. I did manage to get wifi running but it’s slower because they are still implementing features in the drivers. Once I found the right drivers everything was seamless and just as usable as Linux. pkg provides almost any needed app but you can also use ports, linux apps, wine, or even virtualization. As far as resource usage and performance I would say the FreeBSD outperforms most Linux Distros except the few that are designed to be lightweight. One small hiccup that will hurt adoption is that you can run a SAMBA server but you can only access servers that support SAMBA 1. I also tried NFS and have had some difficulties accessing Linux servers. If you want to move files it’s an SSH or external HDD sadly.
Bottom Line to Get more First Time Users:
Better Support for and Documentation of Hardware
Better WIFI Drivers (In Progress)
Full SAMBA Support (?) – There might not be the resources from this but I would think porting from Linux would be trivial compared to drivers.
An automated Install for New Users — I would really like to see FreeBSD’s desktop group to collaborate with and support Ghost and/or Nomad. If they could just include an sub option in the default installer that could switch to a GUI and auto select drivers and a DE option or too that could really open this great OS up to a whole new audience without alienating power users.
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