FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop (phoronix.com) 66
Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week's Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation:
With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops...
With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen "just worked" as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop.
With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen "just worked" as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop.
Re:Horses for courses (Score:4, Informative)
No systemd.
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Re:Horses for courses (Score:4, Informative)
No, systemd doesn't exist on the BSDs after all these years, and they don't plan to either, given the number of Linux-specific dependencies they have. It's a tad different from Wayland, which although it also had Linux specific dependencies, has also developed somethings to work w/ the BSDs
Anyway, all the BSDs have endorsed XLibre, which is the only option left for platforms not going Wayland. Similarly, the BSDs are still on InitV or the other alternatives out there
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Nobody plans to get an STD, but after enough fucking around it becomes inevitable. FreeBSD and certain Linux distros are capable of running Desktop Environments without systemd due to extensive implementations of shims, which are essentially duct tape to provide the functionality that gets shifted to systemd over time. As systemd continues to extend its tentacles further into the Linux ecosystem, it requires far mor
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No systemd.
There are several ways to get linux without systemd, though, and you still wind up with better software compatibility than BSD, which has all the no-systemd problems plus all the not-Linux problems.
Re: Horses for courses (Score:2)
Re:Horses for courses (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure what you mean by "poorly" and "constant handholding"? Its full blown KDE on a very capable base operating system. Its at the point where Steam gaming is working, it has all the great server/developer tools needed for productivity, and pretty much any F/OSS app you can name on Linux is also on FreeBSD, but without most of the headaches of modern Linux.
Having more options for end-users is a good thing, not a bad thing.
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The lack of consistency. I know the while "customize everything" is praised as good, but that only goes so far. We're to the point where there is so much fragmentation, its almost a form of anti-standardization. Just look at package management for example. A single application, in different packages (dnf/apt vs flatpak) for instance, will have wildly different permissions models to the point that things break in, like camera or screen sharing in Discord or similar applications. Its a complete mess, but brin
Re: Horses for courses (Score:2)
This has to be the most obnoxious demonstration of why open source software culture is the greatest impediment to mainstream adoption of open source software that I've seen in a while.
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I have never noted that the Linux community is welcoming to newbies who are looking for help figuring things out. Quite the opposite, in fact, active hostility to basic questions that "everybody should know."
There's a considerable appeal to keeping the club exclusive.
(Not all open source communities are like this. But it's certainly common enough.)
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Quite often, they resent being told that because they have read the manual, and it didn't make sense because open source projects don't generally have dedicated documentation writers, and programmers have little skill and less interest in writing it. And when they say that, they get called stupid and worse.
Yes, I have had that experience. And I've got 30 years experience in IT. If the documentation doesn't make sense to me, it doesn't make sense. Blaming that on the newbie makes you the asshole.
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Frankly, in 2026, this is inexcusable. You can easily and trivially build high quality documentation using AI (assuming the underlying project is of high quality).
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High quality hallucinatory slop is still slop.
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You're blaming me for not knowing what you refuse to tell me. Where I come from, that's one of the definitions of "asshole."
Attitudes like yours are why the "year of Linux on the desktop" is 20 years away, and always will be. Enjoy your tiny urine soaked sandbox.
Re:Horses for courses (Score:5, Informative)
The differences b/w the 3 BSDs are due to their different goals. NetBSD tries to be there on the widest assortment of hardware, from 1970s computers, and so it deliberately doesn't include features that can't be easily ported to all of them. OpenBSD is security obsessed, so disables any features that could be potential attack vectors. FreeBSD is the one most people might gravitate towards, since it's the one that tries to be competitive w/ Linux
Apt? Is that the only package manager in Linux? RedHat has rpm/yumm last I checked, Arch has pacman and Gentoo or Slackware has something else I forget. Are you sure that your favorite Linux package is supported by the package manager of your distro?
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NetBSD tries to be there on the widest assortment of hardware, from 1970s computers, and so it deliberately doesn't include features that can't be easily ported to all of them.
That description does not seem fair to me. NetBSD has different support status depending on architecture. The fact that nobody can find a ns32k to run NetBSD on it does not hold the whole project, it just made ns32k unsupported.
The initial goal divergence between NetBSD (keep BSD portability) and FreeBSD (focus on i386) existed but blurred over time, this is now just history.
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Well, there are exceptions of CPUs that never got supported by NetBSD - Itanium comes to mind. But the main goal of NetBSD has been to never abandon support for legacy platforms that it once ran on, such as the WE 32000 CPU. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have no such hangups. FreeBSD has pretty much dropped support for things like Itanium, Alpha, Sparc, and MIPS, while OpenBSD, while supporting 64-bit versions of legacy platforms like Sparc & PowerPC, has dropped it for 32-bit
If there is a new emerging CPU,
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If you use debian based distros, the answer is 'yes'. The size of the package repository is excessive, and it's markedly cleaner to install sidecars on Linux than it is using the ports tree (or rather, adding packages which are not in the ports tree, because that happens a lot too).
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https://github.com/romanlefler... [github.com]
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but without most of the headaches of modern Linux..
Yes, it had a great community of people that were never willing to assist if there was someone asking a question that had been answered 15 years prior. It might be the BetaMax vs VHS debate (sure FreeBSD was superior). FreeBSD died long ago when the community was filled with people too smart to be bothered. Maybe it still is better but it will never get the community support and only gets mentioned on Slashdot to stir these types of feedback. Only us old p
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Yes, FreeBSD has most of the headaches of Linux in 1996 (mainly around package management, compatibility, and hardware support). Other than all the important things to an OS, it's great.
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FreeBSD is a non-starter for anything beyond hobbyist or large fleets of generic boxes due to its shortcomings in package management. It hasn't meaningfully changed in 30+ years.
You've got pkg and you've got ports - and neither provides an adequate means of keeping systems up to date en masse, by itself or in aggregate.
pkg (and related tools/repo) is severely limited - it doesn't really do security updates. It's not meaningful beyond the quarterly updates; it's a base working set.
The ports tree is another p
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1994: I want an OS for my PC. There are already options like Windows 3.1. Why do I want to run XWindows on Slackware, which might do most of what I want it to do, but poorly and with constant handholding? Linux should stay with their strengths.
Re: Horses for courses (Score:3)
Windows 3.1 was not an OS. It couldn't even open files without external help.
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I would imagine the FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director might have reasons for wanting to run a modern DE on FreeBSD.
I remember a possibly apocryphal tale from many years back that Larry Ellison demanded Oracle's internal payroll was run on alpha quality software because he believed in "Eating our own dog food"
I love that FreeBSD exists (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's great we have FreeBSD as a more "unix-like" operating system that is freely available and of solid quality. I remember playing with FBSD 20 years ago and even then, it felt pretty solid and would of very likely made a great server platform, depending on your particular service needs.
Trying to use it on a laptop or as my main desktop driver seems like a step to far but then again, that entirely depends on what you need it to do. If you can get it to work with your hardware and it has the apps you need for your work flow, then why not!
If I used my laptop regularly, I might very well try out BSD just to feed them some data. I sort of feel one year, possibly The Year Of The Linux Desktop, I'll be moving over to BSD to escape the enshitification of Linux. I could probably do that now if I didn't want to play games. It's rather ironic, 20 years ago, I could not move over to Linux because "games" and now I can't move over to BSD because of "games".
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I think it's great we have FreeBSD as a more "unix-like" operating system that is freely available and of solid quality. I remember playing with FBSD 20 years ago and even then, it felt pretty solid and would of very likely made a great server platform, depending on your particular service needs.
Trying to use it on a laptop or as my main desktop driver seems like a step to far but then again, that entirely depends on what you need it to do. If you can get it to work with your hardware and it has the apps you need for your work flow, then why not!
Why not? When the article flexes about a working touchscreen, webcam working after fiddling, and Zoom having issues and kinda worked on Teams, and "Basic" things working, I gotta say, it's a niche thing. If you need none of that, and are really into not having systemd, then it sounds okay. Most of us have other needs.
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Really? It wasn't that long ago (6 years) that there was a FreeBSD based distro targeted at desktops/laptops - called PC-BSD. They had a beautiful installation system called PBI (Push-Button Interface), which tested each package for its library dependencies, and separately collected any old ones needed by the package, so that the user wouldn't have had to resolve conflicts
Beyond that, they had a beautiful lightweight Qt-based DE called Lumina, which was very similar to LX/QT or Razor/QT on Linux. I use
What was he using before??? (Score:3)
FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop
What OS was he using before?
If the executive director wasn't already using it almost solely, that's an OS I'm going to use exactly never.
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What OS was he using before?
Good question, but as the summary says, "... she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop."
Re: What was he using before??? (Score:2)
Perhaps he/she had a desktop, not a laptop.
No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
"Microsoft Teams only partially worked".
No surprise. Teams only partly works on Windows.
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"Microsoft Teams only partially worked".
No surprise. Teams only partly works on Windows.
Yeah. I mean I hope they compared side by side, lol. Gotta have a control ...
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But is that Teams for Work, Teams (Classic), Teams for Home, New Teams for Office, Teams 365 for Work or School....
FreeBSD is great (Score:3)
I've been daily driving FreeBSD on my laptop since 2019. I'm posting from it right now. They've really improved wifi support in the last couple of releases.
I haven't needed much proprietary software support in a long time. I do run Google Earth, using the Linuxulator.
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I used to daily drive PC-BSD while it was around: all I needed was web browsing and email. However, the lack of WiFi support did hurt, and so did the lack of direct Steam support. I do hope that FreeBSD addresses these 2 shortcomings and then resurrects PC-BSD for this particular market segment
Never have I ever (Score:3)
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The only hard part is getting the hardware to work, since there's less driver support for FreeBSD than for Linux. (Admittedly, that's a serious drawback if it impacts you, but nothing if it doesn't).
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I would rather use one OS so I have one way to do things. While in theory a heterogeneous network can be more secure, in practice it's a PITA because everyone has their own way to do everything.
With that said, I'd rather use Linux as my firewall or NAS than use BSD as my desktop. The world has moved on from UNIX to Linux. Maybe it'll move on to some other thing in a while, and then I'll move on again, but I doubt it will be to a BSD.
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Daily driver^ (Score:2)
Using a Framework Laptop, she tried FreeBSD as a daily driver for at least 10 minutes a day.
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^ that's a hell of a qualifier:
Using a Framework Laptop, she tried FreeBSD as a daily driver for at least 10 minutes a day.
Well, at least she tried (and found FreeBSD, on her laptop, not ready for her daily needs). That is not, really, surprising as you you are not running Windows or MacOS you are going to experience cases where things just do not work well (or at all), as the vendors basically don't care about the fractional market share users.
Alternative viewpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
Zoom failing for video calls ... Microsoft Teams only partially worked
That's not a bug, it's a feature. We get *nix machines to get work done, not for emplotainment.
Linux Desktop requires constant handholding ? (Score:3)
FreeBSD: The Really Alternative Desktop OS [youtube.com] (19:57)
Used to use Unix as a daily driver at work (Score:4, Informative)
I've always had a Unix desktop. I've had SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1, Irix, Solaris, Linux, MacOSX, Windows w/ cygwin. I had email, word processing, spreadsheets. Internet arrived with Mosaic while I was on SunOS.
WHERE'S MY ELEPHANT?!! (Score:2)
I have been testing FreeBSD 15.1 on my extra PC (Score:2)
I have been running a KDE desktop lately using FreeBSD 15.1 Beta for a few weeks on my extra PC and using it for some stuff, and its been surprisingly nice, even with Wayland.
And the "boot environments" stuff with ZFS snapshots, makes it very nice and easy to have automatic bootable snapshots, and provides pretty much the same functionality as btrfs+snapper+gru