Some thoughts on FreeBSD

[@JoeyGarcia]

FINALLY! Someone acknowledged FreeBSD's lineage all the way back to the original AT&T Unix. Yes, the AT&T source code had been stripped out due to a lawsuit, but it still makes it a descendant. FreeBSD is a great OS. It does shine as a server OS. I mean, Netflix does use it to serve TV shows and movies to millions of homes after all.

[@dschoene57]

Yout can actually build a really good desktop on it too. There is little that hasn't been ported (like google chrome, but you do have chromium) . The downside is, to make it really work, you'll have to rummage around in the bowels of it quite a bit. Lots of kernel parameters need to be modified and they are a bit behind on graphics hardware, so if you have the shiniest new AMD graphics card, you might be out of luck. NVidia provides up-to-date drivers iirc.

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

As far as applications go, I'm using the Linux binary compatability to run Linux software on GhostBSD. The main issue I have in GhostBSD is bluetooth. Other than that, it's been mostly smooth sailing for me so far.

[@OpenSourceTonight]

I've never used that feature under BSD. I need to give it a try... maybe in a video. - Vincent

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

@@OpenSourceTonight Do it! I am using Vivaldi that way in GhostBSD.

[@OpenSourceTonight]

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll make a video it soon. - Vincent

[@ByteMeCompletely]

It's missing the Linux magic of routing audio through the video driver to the HDMI port. Mint, KDE Neon, etc., produce sound out of the HDMI cable, FreeBSD does not.

[@OpenSourceTonight]

Thanks for sharing that info. I wasn't aware of that. - Vincent

[@andreasdrewke3329]

FreeBSD is very interesting for people that want the most performance out of their computers. Its for sure faster than Linux and of course MS Windows, ..., at least for my use cases :)

[@alfre2as]

Furthermore, someone worried about performance not misses Google Chrome at all

[@bertnijhof5413]

I have no problem with support for my hardware of FreeBSD 13.0 and OpenZFS 2.0, most Linux distros would not support my 2003 hardware. I have a 32-bits Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz) with 2 GB of DDR (400MHz); 2 IDE HDDs (3.5"; 250+320GB) and 2 SATA HDDs (2.5"; 320 +320GB). I use its 1.21TB of storage as backup for my Ryzen desktop. During ~1 hour/week the Ryzen sends the changed 128K ZFS records to the Pentium over my 1 Gbps Ethernet link at 25MB/s. The bps speed limitation is caused by a ~95% load on one of the CPU threads of the Pentium 4 :( :) Note that the transfer and both storages (e.g. the Ryzen nvme and the Pentium IDE HDDs) are lz4 compressed. The changed physical and compressed records are read and sent over the Internet by the Ryzen (Ubuntu 21.10 & OpenZFS 2.0) to the Pentium (FreeBSD 13.0 & OpenZFS 2.0) and written as received to the HDDs.

[@MrWarneet]

Yes on hardware their are issues with Wifi and some video drivers. Best to run on older H/W to reduce these problems.

[@OpenSourceTonight]

Sounds like Linux older hardware seems to have better support. Thank you for providing some good feedback on the hardware. - Vincent

[@dschoene57]

Wifi is a weak spot. Video depends on what hardware you run. NVidia provides fairly up-to-date drivers, but especially Intel-graphics are a weak spot. AMD drivers are reasonably up-to-date, but often need lots of manual intervention on UEFI systems.

[@yash1152]

4:31 so, u forgot the VSCodium; Eclipse Theia etc too

[@marinlos]

Thanks for the insight mate 👍🏼

[@OpenSourceTonight]

Glad to hear it helped you out. Thanks for watching! - Vincent

[@thfr4321]

There's a port of electron at least on OpenBSD.

[@OpenSourceTonight]

Cool! I didn't know that. Thanks for the information. - VIncent

[@Blarpington]

Hardware support is terrible. Notoriously, BSD forums are full of people saying that you must use Intel NICs. There are some other NICs that work but specifically Real Tek NICs have problems on BSD that you don't see on other OS. It's unfortunate due to how common RealTek hardware is. Also any obscure peripheral you may have won't work for the same reason Linux struggles with bespoke hardware. If the manufacturer doesn't produce an open source driver then someone else has to reverse engineer and write their own. There are fewer developers on BSD so it's always going to be behind Linux in this way.

[@OpenSourceTonight]

Makes sense. Maybe one day that will be less of a problem on BSD and to a lesser extent on Linux.