For the sake of her “they’ve hacked me” paranoia, my crazy sister made me install OpenBSD on her crappy PC three-four years ago (Intel i3 and a mechanical disk). She stopped using the PC altogether like 6 months after that. It wasn’t really bad, everything seemed to work, taking in account the limitations of the hardware. The upgrade procedure irked me, though - mostly, realizing that you have to be reading documentation constantly even for a freaking minor version upgrade.
Still this made me try FreeBSD on my PC, only to realize after a couple days that pkg/pkgsrc are utter shit compared to Portage. Alas Gentoo/BSD is long gone, otherwise I’d love to try it.
BSD is useful for when you want to program some specialty hardware once and chuck it into the abyss with no updates and without releasing the source code so you can maintain a barely passing level of security through obscurity. Or if you really just don’t want to publish your source code for a unix system.
Things like modems and old routers come to mind. Also PlayStation iirc.
Most modern IoT stuff I’ve messed with uses linux probably because the devs like not having to manually package things and deal with weird edge case bugs. Since they’re usually making software updates anyway, published vulns are less of a concern.
I have FreeBSD on my ThinkPad, and I’d use it on more of my boxes if any of the other WiFi hardware was supported.
BSD = Bondage, Submission, Dominance?
/so sorry, could not resist.
Windows?
Windows is non-consensualBSD
i feel like openbsd doesn’t get the support it should.
One significant vulnerability in 20 years is actually psychotic. I don’t care how desktop ready freebsd is, it’s dead to me now. i’m sorry.
Dude we literally have that unix_surrealism comic there’s at least some love for BSDs here
OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.
Where haiku?
21 subscribers, zero activity. I don’t get such communities. Not even the mod posts anything.
There’s not a lot of non-english speakers on this platform let alone those whom use Haiku, kinda surprised there’s even 21 subs.
The fact that Haiku installs in like 30 seconds, should raise its score
That’s a very useful feature for all those people who reinstall their system each time they turn their computer on.
See I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic because there are some manic distro hoppers out there that are actually like that.
isn’t tailsOS like that
The Mach kernel started as a derivative of a BSD kernel. Years later the XNU kernel was created by combining the Mach kernel with code from newer BSDs, therefore it’s totally fair to describe macOS as a BSD. From my very limited exposure to BSD conferences, using Macs is pretty common there as many developers see their community-developed BSDs more for headless use they SSH onto.
From my little experience with working on BSD Servers, BSD is very reliable and for my use cases fast enough. But the slower updates and lack of most Wi-Fi support and sometimes spotty hardware support combined with the need for porting a lot of Linux software that dose not natively run on BSD is a deal breaker for using BSD on my Main Desktop Computer.
TLDR: For me BSD is a powerful tool that has a very specific job that is not being a Desktop Computer.
Caveat: unless it is Mac OSX. There are… issues there, but it is still a fairly great experience, objectively speaking.
Yep, it is for Sony PlayStations.
The end user has no way of knowing or changing that so it doesn’t matter
In juniper networking hardware. And many others. If you have the capability to create what’s missing (drivers etc) it will work well. If you do not, well, there’s shit tons of drivers for Linux.
BSD is dying and it is not a bad thing
it actually is because that means we effectively have 3 Os (mac windows linux) 2 of which are completely unusable for any privacy minded individual plus bsd is more intuitive than linux but thats just imo
I mean I don’t use nor ever plan on using BSD systems and disagree with their philosophy quite a bit but I think them dying is overall bad for the open source community.
I tried it recently, but eventually gave up. It had so many little and not-so-little issues on my laptop, which I solved one by one over 2 weeks, reading and learning a lot. Even recompiled the kernel with a custom patch to get energy management to work.
Then I did a speed test on Wi-Fi, and it capped out at 6MBit (I have a Gigabit connection). The solution apparently is to install a Wi-Fi network adapter inside a Linux VM and connect to that on boot.
That’s when I went back to Debian where everything just works out of the box on my PC.I cant figure out why windows is still popular!
BSD isn’t really a competitor to Windows, try installing Windows 11 on your router and report back.
Instructions unclear, router stuck in pooper.
Windows CE skeletal hand shoots out of the ground in a cemetery somewhere
Yeah, I’ve had the same issues with BSD distros over the decades, always giving those devs the benefit of the doubt that they would get around to fixing various driver bullshit for older hardware eventually, and they never do.
Meanwhile a bleeding edge distro like my Arch setup runs on a piece of shit Celeron two-threaded dual-core with 3Gb RAM old as fuck Chromebook just fine.
To be fair, 99% of BSD’s probably run in a VM.
Oh, that’s an interesting point. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it’s something I definitely hadn’t considered.
If most BSDs are running on the likes of AWS and azure (which wouldn’t surprise me) then it could well be true
That reminds me of the oldschool Realtek WiFi cards which required you to run drivers through WINE just to have WiFi on Linux. It really is excellent to see how far it’s come. I have a cheap Chinese laptop with a celeron chip (jasper lake) that I use as essentially a thin client. Installing windows fresh: trackpad doesn’t work, audio doesn’t work, WiFi 6 card driver is a generic MS one that caps at 5mb a sec until I install the right Realtek drivers, graphics aren’t accelerated until I install intel’s drivers. Installing Linux: everything works out of the box, just need to install the right graphics drivers for accelerated graphics to work. Only sad spot is the fingerprint reader is just flat out not supported in Linux. Lol if I tried hard I guess I could hook up WINE to run it like the old days
I used OpenBSD on servers for years. I don’t think it’s suited as a daily driver, especially not with a desktop. I absolutely love pf and miss it dearly, though. iptables and nftables are utter shit compared to the glory that is pf. Yes, there is some hyperbole in that statement, but only some.
