The still not-so-great wifi support and lacking certain apps such as zoom makes FreeBSD a more challenging desktop OS, but I'm hoping this will improve soon.
Im kind of hoping that Zoom will never be available on my FreeBSD workstation - its saved me from losing countless hours of productive coding time, thanks to missing every single standup, planning meet, retrospective, 1 on 1, fireside chat, HR presentation, marketing team monthly summary, and ... salary review. :)
Not the simplest workaround but if you have freebsd unsupported hardware that has drivers on linux, you can set up a minimal Linux virtual machine with bhyve and it will interface with the hardware. In the case of a wifi card or dongle, you can pass the network connection from the Linux vm back through to the freebsd host machine and effectively use the VM as a wifi manager (this can be configured to start automatically at boot of course). You can do this with most types of devices you would want to use. Lack of discord and zoom is a bit of a tough sell but at least in my experience, the browser implementations have the same functionality
@@CardfightVanja Why bother, why fight the fight? I just wanna be happy. The servers I use, FreeBSD... The router I use, FreeBSD. The hypervisor is Linux for now. The workstation I use is Windows (sadly :'( but no choice). I tried so hard. Several times too. But no, it doesn't even come close. All the tools I use, every utility, everything I do, the difference is so darn massive. Whatever I do in Windows quite fluently, I struggle in FreeBSD. It's like racing against a speed train on foot. But still have a machine running FreeBSD sitting beside the Windows one, even with all the keyboard mouse switch and all. Don't know why I keep it still. So... Am I happy? Are you insane, how can one be happy using Windows!!! It's like against my will... Funny though, with Windows, the applications and hardware are great, the OS sucks though. Wish they stopped developing and keep it the way it was :P With FreeBSD; the OS is the best. Though, everything else sucks. Yeah, so why bother? Why should I constantly tire myself... Well the answer is quite clear. The way to it is not that easy though...
I'm lazy so use GhostBSD which I find probably the best Mate setup available. Under the hood I find BSD more logical and super easy to fiddle with init options.
I'm trying to make freebsd my primary desktop over the last few weeks. So far the big challenges I have seen in my setup are 1) Slack not being available 2) Zoom's absence 3) Some level of gui instability with Xfce (I guess). I have run into a few ui freezes so far. Why i'm still continuing setting up my desktop is a) I can understand freebsd as a beginner to the os b) I love the challenge c) ZFS sounds amazingly useful d) vm-bhyve is easy to use (hoping I could run some office stuff in ubuntu vm) e) OSS sounds so friggin amazing!!
If you have the deskspace - try this, it works brilliantly for me : - Setup FreeBSD as your primary workstation. - Dont know about Xfce, but KDE has been rock solid for me for years on BSD - Get a cheap macbook air / windows laptop / linux laptop ... sit it to the side of your monitor, and load barrier on both your BSD box and the laptop. The laptop becomes just like another monitor. You can do everything but drag windows between the machines - including copypaste. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hNKNVuBNolA.html So that gives you a solid FreeBSD worstation, with native mac/windows on its own hardware, and multiple linux machines in VMs using bhyve. Cant think of a more awesome setup.
Thank you... I am a software developer since around 30 years. Unix focused. And I am also an administrator. But if I look in the software area, it is getting always faster and faster. Many new standards - new paradigms. People from today even does not know anything about Pascal, what was a brilliant language many years ago. What to say? We are moving faster and faster in a circle. And that is a big reason I like *BSD so much. It is mostly very well tested, sometimes a bit of lag behind - but working and working. That are my cents for today!!! Cheers, Norbert
BSD could do with a bit more focus on the desktop user front. All documentation and forums clearly say we are server focused, bigger adaption comes with desktop focus. I think X should optionally be included in the default system instead of one of the pkgs in usr local
@@levskilevov4888 I'm not a specialist, but when running virtualized I prefer Linux like Alpine and Debian. But I do see big benefits when running everything on the distro itself. Still also Jails and bhyve need more adaptation I would say. More desktop focus is the way to go ....
The only thing keeping me from using FreeBSD as my main is the wifi situation. I still use it on a VM and as soon as I can get wifi to work the right way, I'm jumping straight on. Fedora it is for me until then
FreeBSD seems to have pkg and ports available and it runs pretty stable on my second boot partition (multi boot) Only issue I have. My 3d driver for the amd GPU won’t work on it, which is why I still run gentoo linux as my primary OS.
I like how the BSD teams control their platforms in reasonable ways. Linux teams seem to be plagued by grifters, having their heads in the clouds, project halts over insignificant details, or a lack of interest in the projects they service. Almost all the teams who don't suffer from at least one of those things are in Cannonical or Red Hat, who are always on the lookout for ways to lock out the open source community. The BSD platforms might have a hit or miss work ethic for routine maintenance; but they can be counted on to build an operating system that can do everything it aught to.
I am using both. I distro hopped a lot and finally settled using arch with kde and freebsd with kde. FreeBSD is way too fast and smooth compared to Linux, but software availability arch is a winner, but both are customizable. but i prefer to spend most of the time on bsd due to its performance being very smooth.
I tried in both ways, with freebsd on hdd and arch on arch, but still freebsd was found to be faster when it comes to performance, but arch is unparallel when it comes to package availablity with most of the microsoft apps, like ms teams, skype etc...I used redhat 9 for some days, looks very polish, but perfornanace was very poor...hangs every now and then..so moved to arch
