FreeBSD

Post Reply New Topic

What do you think about FreeBSD on desktop computer?

I tried it and hated it for a few reasons:

1. No 3D acceleration. The answer I got on BSD forums: "It's not a desktop OS!"

2. It was a pain in the butt to get my Atheros wireless card to work with encryption. And even if I could get it working, I would get randomly kicked off the network and sometimes have to reboot to reconnect. That's pathetic, considering there was a native driver included with the kernel...

3. I had to use OSS/FreeBSD (proprietary sound drivers) to get my laptop's sound working, and even then, it skipped a lot.

4. The default shell, tcsh, is nowhere near as nice as GNU Bash.

The positive points of FreeBSD:

1. It's free

2. The documentation is very complete.

3. The "ports" system is nice (extra software packages)

4. It's fast.

That was my experience with running it on my Toshiba laptop. Your mileage may vary.

(I don't have the problems I mentioned about FreeBSD on Linux, by the way.)

Bull s**t Detector?

I have freebsd on my gateway / web server

It does its job perfectly.

I tried to implement on the desk top but it wouldn't speak to the graphics card in the intel all in one motherboard, so I got VGA and nothing better. Blech. I did find some drivers later on the intel disk but I'd given up by then.

I like that you can run it on a very old PC and get useful performance - the gateway is 1996 vintage.

I also like the ports, packages, community, reliablity - it's not the script kiddies favourite for hacking...

I don't like that I can't organise my files visually. I will be trying ubuntu on my desk top - to see how that goes.

FreeBSD is a good OS for server stuff, good to administer, though the answer from the BSD forums (not a desktop OS) is correct - its more of an OS for ex-Solaris/other high end unix types who want stability on a narrow set of possible hardware configs.