Does Desktop have a future on BSD?

6502 said:
What does this mean - AMD and Intel video is not supported under FreeBSD or it will run in generic mode without any acceleration?
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Nvidia is supported in a different way than Intel and AMD. Intel and AMD have opensource parts available, that allow FreeBSD and Linux to build on that driver. Nvidia provides the whole driver for its cards, but it's closed source. It depends on people's opinions, on which they consider better supported.
 
6502 said:
What does this mean - AMD and Intel video is not supported under FreeBSD or it will run in generic mode without any acceleration?
Click to expand...

Does this really need to be explained? AMD and Intel drivers are continuously being ported from Linux by FreeBSD developers, which is a lot of work with occasional spectacular breakages. Although the Nvidia's driver is Linux-first as well, at least the Nvidia's driver developers do the necessary porting work themselves and test the basic functionality with FreeBSD. The resulting driver is much more stable and always up to date.
 
Oh, before anybody accuses me of being biased… The main issue with Nvidia is that they tend to act in a unilateral way. Whether they decide that a particular feature is only useful on Linux or to drop support for something, they aren't interested in feedback and they usually won't even bother to announce the decision. They also have a similarly opaque bug submission process, which certainly doesn't help.
 
Interesting...
But to understand more you need to understand what is a desktop and what you can do ...
I don't think that the future is dull for FreeBSD on desktops ... let's take an example of my work ... I'm working remotely, I need internet, phone, and computer to run pdf, skype, web browser and software to count miles ( dispatcher here ) ... so... PDF? ( opens up in web browser ) , Skype - works on Linux, software for mile counting? found few alternatives PC Miler web or truck router or Truckstop ( dedicated dispatching thing ), need to work with PDF editing ( sign it for example - there are web sites free of charge to do so ) ... so what's stopping me to have FreeBSD on my desktop? Only skype ... so in my case, I can have FreeBSD desktop with minor issue - skype. as the rest of it - works fine. What I do when I'm not working ...? I read forums, play with HTML and CSS and try to customize my PC`s the way I like...watch movies, listen to music.
Conclusion - as many people use PC just for browsing, watching movies, occasional word usage ( Ms office or Open Office, etc, etc ) and gaming - I don't think there is a reason not to use FreeBSD... when I want to play games - I restart my PC to W10 and that's about it... and a lot of Linux users dual boot with W10 as well as there is no way to play AAA games on Linux.
P.s. as there is something in freshports for skype ( if I understood its a web thing ... as you can run skype from the web on windows and Linux as well .. have not tried yet.
Hardware? I'm running FreeBSD on ThinkPad P71 which is about 2-3years old .... so not that old...gonna try to use on my desktop ( dual E5 Xeon ) but I'm 110% sure it will be fine... nVidia? well, this is something awkward in Linux as well ...
But but but .... but what's the reason to switch from Linux to FreeBSD or from W10 to FreeBSD? - my case ? might be a mascot ( I know, I know ... but I put fashion and rarety first ) and just try something else instead of Arch Linux .... ( You might say other Linux flavors? they are sort of the same thing - so I don't see reasons to switch from Pacman to something like apt or whatever they have there ... sorry, my first and last Linux distro - Arch so I don't know anything about other package managers. and Gentoo? a bit too hard to understand how to install it ... I still have not tried to read about Slackware ) other things? Language barrier ... and it makes things complicated. I noted FreeBSD only has few languages ... as I'm used to Arch Linux Wiki I can compare only to them - multilanguage support in their wiki is great so if FreeBSD would have language support in their wiki - I think base could get a bit bigger and more people would contribute to it as its easier to go to FreeBSD instead of googling many pages on the web ( I'm not talking about Google as page 2 counts as dark web for the majority and they are scared of it :D )

Mmy 2 euro cents.
 
Hi everyone,


I'm interested in this topic too.

I tried FreeBSD years ago on a bare metal laptop, but was defeated by the extreme difficulty I found to make the desktop environment work.

Now I've just bought a new High End laptop (it must be shipped to me by days) and I'm eager to leave windows and go for FreeBSD for... reasons. I love how it claim to be a UNIX OS and not a Kernel with some plugin. But...
I'm comparing BSD and Linux distros on virtualbox and for as much I try I'm finding Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, the new UbtuntuDDE, etc) more user friendly to desktop users. Expecially CentOS that I think is more server focused feel more Desktop oriented than FreeBSD.
I'm a professional programmer and I work on .NET, I'm thinking to virtualize Windows 10 to work (I need it for my job) but for everything else I'm planning to use something else.
Now the question is: there is any chance that FreeBSD will operate better on bare metal than virtualized in VM?
For example Opera crashes, Plasma 5 keep to go full transparent and I need to reboot, Chromium need a fix in the memory config to be able to not hang on tabs etc... there are many little problems that summed up keep the system to be unusable from a desktop user perspective.
I'm don't want to give up, but CentOS seems more appealing by now.

What do you think?

Thank you all
 
For me, there is two points and one suggestion.
First :
DusTech said:
I've just bought a new High End laptop
Click to expand...
Linux will be better to handle this hardware. I have a one year old laptop and bluetooth, wifi, graphic card etc only work after picking patch. I know FreeBSD 13 (maybe 12.2) will work out of the box, but you are not living in the future.

Second : This laptop is your working computer. Do not spare time on it with Linux or FreeBSD as the hardware is certified for Windows. If a linux (or BSD) thing require two day to found a solution or to be well configured, do not lose this time on your job.

Suggest :
Dual boot Windows and freeBSD. Use the necessary time to learn, test, configure and virtualize with freebsd.
And when you will be confirtable with FreeBSD as a main OS, switch to it as your main OS with a virtualized Windows.

Be aware that Linux distrubution and FreeBSD do not share the same philosophy. So triple boot is not a good idea ( unless learning is a passion).
Personnaly, I never use Windows, but mac OS (classic), linux (multi flavor), mac OS X and freebsd.
I use FreeBSD now. All (ok, not all...) I learn with an OS was useless for others.
 
Hakaba said:
For me, there is two points and one suggestion.
First :

Linux will be better to handle this hardware. I have a one year old laptop and bluetooth, wifi, graphic card etc only work after picking patch. I know FreeBSD 13 (maybe 12.2) will work out of the box, but you are not living in the future.

Second : This laptop is your working computer. Do not spare time on it with Linux or FreeBSD as the hardware is certified for Windows. If a linux (or BSD) thing require two day to found a solution or to be well configured, do not lose this time on your job.

Suggest :
Dual boot Windows and freeBSD. Use the necessary time to learn, test, configure and virtualize with freebsd.
And when you will be confirtable with FreeBSD as a main OS, switch to it as your main OS with a virtualized Windows.

Be aware that Linux distrubution and FreeBSD do not share the same philosophy. So triple boot is not a good idea ( unless learning is a passion).
Personnaly, I never use Windows, but mac OS (classic), linux (multi flavor), mac OS X and freebsd.
I use FreeBSD now. All (ok, not all...) I learn with an OS was useless for others.
Click to expand...

Thank you for you suggestions.

So you are telling me that there is no way I'll get my brand new machine to run FreeBSD without loose my time to hardware/software probles fixes before becaming productive.

I'm afraid that if I'll dual boot with windows I'll return with using it all the time because it's my comfort zone.
That's way years ago I just gave up, the first step to enter FreeBSD world is too steep.
I'm experimenting with some FreeBSD instances servers on Azure, but it's not the same thing than use it in the everyday jobs.
 
DusTech said:
So you are telling me that there is no way I'll get my brand new machine to run FreeBSD
Click to expand...

Did you buy the machine with FreeBSD in mind? If so I am assuming that you have checked all the components are compatible with FreeBSD. If so, yes it should work fine.

From my personal experience, I tend to believe that all heavy desktop environments (Gnome 3, KDE 4+) are pretty much broken in little annoying ways regardless of which free operating system you use so you might as well stick with FreeBSD.

However you mentioned that you were a .NET developer. This is kinda like saying that you are a Swift/Cocoa developer. Sure there are projects to make it run on other operating systems but you will encounter less issues professionally using the Windows platform it was intended for. Windows VM in VirtualBox may get round that but it might not provide you with the most optimal experience if you spend a lot of time with it. I notice Mono and dotnetcore currently seem to be the minority compared to full fat .NET Framework

Give it a shot; stick with it for a few weeks and see how you get on. If the "correctness" of FreeBSD outweighs the convenience of Windows, then it wins ;)
 
kpedersen said:
Did you buy the machine with FreeBSD in mind? If so I am assuming that you have checked all the components are compatible with FreeBSD. If so, yes it should work fine.

From my personal experience, I tend to believe that all heavy desktop environments (Gnome 3, KDE 4+) are pretty much broken in little annoying ways regardless of which free operating system you use so you might as well stick with FreeBSD.

However you mentioned that you were a .NET developer. This is kinda like saying that you are a Swift/Cocoa developer. Sure there are projects to make it run on other operating systems but you will encounter less issues professionally using the Windows platform it was intended for. Windows VM in VirtualBox may get round that but it might not provide you with the most optimal experience if you spend a lot of time with it. I notice Mono and dotnetcore currently seem to be the minority compared to full fat .NET Framework

Give it a shot; stick with it for a few weeks and see how you get on. If the "correctness" of FreeBSD outweighs the convenience of Windows, then it wins ;)
Click to expand...

No, I'm sorry I just looked wich hardware was the best from the vendor, so I'm guilty on that.

I feel you are just right when you say that desktop envinroments are all a little broken, but I didn't find alternatives.

I'll give it a try as you say... maybe it's the right time.
 
kpedersen said:
From my personal experience, I tend to believe that all heavy desktop environments (Gnome 3, KDE 4+) are pretty much broken in little annoying ways regardless of which free operating system you use so you might as well stick with FreeBSD.
Click to expand...
I'd say the same holds true in regards to Windows 10 no less. I have my desktop dual boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD/KDE and find myself using FreeBSD more and more these days cause KDE delivers a desktop experience that is much more pleasing in so many ways that it's hard to express. Not to mention the good feeling that it is not constantly trying to do things behind my back that I do not wish or approve of, and that configuration changes I make do not magically return to whatever MS had in mind for those.
 
Note that CentOS-8 still has a lot of missing packages, especially for desktop. When I installed it, I had to rebuild several rpms (either from Fedora or older CentOS) and still haven't gotten weechat (a text based irc client that works with slack, which my company uses), working. Depending upon your needs, essential packages, and so on, you might want CentOS-7 or even Fedora, which unlike CentOS, has a smooth upgrade path.
However, having one machine with CentOS and another with FreeBSD, there's still a few things CentOS does without effort that FreeBSD doesn't, such as viewing Netflix. Hrrm, that's the only thing I can think of right now. Linux tends to have better support for wireless cards,especially 802.11ac and later. I haven't gotten my laptops's (two of 'em) Intel 7260 wireless to go full speed on FreeBSD. (though I haven't tried in several months, so I've not kept up with it.)
 
DusTech said:
So you are telling me that there is no way I'll get my brand new machine to run FreeBSD without loose my time to hardware/software probles fixes before becaming productive.
Click to expand...
It is only my feeling, but un short, yes.
Not because it is hard to have a working env (in fact, my laptop with intel graphic and ethernet is ok to work. Wifi/bluetooth/optimus support are not necessary).
But if you often come in this forum, read some news on FreeBSD (same for linux), you will feel the tast to test improbable things.
And that is not compatible with a workstation (stable, only update if needed and so on).
Yes, my hardware have issue with FreeBSD (and linux). But it is not my working laptop.
Some exemples :
- I read an how to run firefox in jails. I really love the idea. Lost 1 day to have something working...
- use jails in my servers. On my laptop, I have experimented ezjail, iocage, bastille... Spend time to do the same thing, but I learn a lot...
- why not experiment poudriere ?
- XFCE is not that sexy. I migrate to dwm, like it and now I am writting C code to extend it... (and relearn C).

Very FEW sample in only one year.
That is not really true with flavored Linux. I use Xubuntu and I see the same philosophy as Windows :
- «automagic» update
- breaking good feature to introduce «modernity»
- follow the movement, experimentation is risky and not supported.
- deep documentation is not really accessible
- installation of tons of unwanted libs/soft/ config tools.
...

I always see the FreeBSD laptop experiment as a fun way to learn and experiment things (for me)

Ok, I use git/vscode/firefox/ssh/... on this laptop for my personal project and it not impossible.
But if I broke something, I do not lose one working day (not the same computer for my client)
 
I re-read the title of this thread and came to the conclusion it really doesn't matter. If FreeBSD works as a desktop for you, then great. If not, then use whatever works for you. I use FreeBSD as a desktop because I am an OS "rebel" (will always go against what everyone else does) and because my use cases allow me to. I have a separate work laptop with windows on it I have to use for work, but for personal use, I can use whatever I want, so my homebuilt PC runs FreeBSD. Might be different if I only had a laptop, mainly because laptops are typically built from random, proprietary components that are not always compatible with open source operating systems. Obviously people here run laptops so folks do have success with them.

If I couldn't run FreeBSD for whatever reason, I would run a non-systemd Linux distro if possible (Gentoo or CRUX), or even OpenBSD but that experiment did not go well last time I tried...
 
DusTech said:
Hi everyone,


I'm interested in this topic too.

I tried FreeBSD years ago on a bare metal laptop, but was defeated by the extreme difficulty I found to make the desktop environment work.

Now I've just bought a new High End laptop (it must be shipped to me by days) and I'm eager to leave windows and go for FreeBSD for... reasons. I love how it claim to be a UNIX OS and not a Kernel with some plugin. But...
I'm comparing BSD and Linux distros on virtualbox and for as much I try I'm finding Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, the new UbtuntuDDE, etc) more user friendly to desktop users. Expecially CentOS that I think is more server focused feel more Desktop oriented than FreeBSD.
I'm a professional programmer and I work on .NET, I'm thinking to virtualize Windows 10 to work (I need it for my job) but for everything else I'm planning to use something else.
Now the question is: there is any chance that FreeBSD will operate better on bare metal than virtualized in VM?
For example Opera crashes, Plasma 5 keep to go full transparent and I need to reboot, Chromium need a fix in the memory config to be able to not hang on tabs etc... there are many little problems that summed up keep the system to be unusable from a desktop user perspective.
I'm don't want to give up, but CentOS seems more appealing by now.

What do you think?

Thank you all
Click to expand...

Hi DusTech

there is any chance that FreeBSD will operate better on bare metal than virtualized in VM?
Click to expand...

for me, always best in bare metal , any operating system

new High End laptop
Click to expand...

I read that some users have problems with new hardware, but there is a list of compatible laptops
Laptop support, you don't check..bad bad ? , lucky for you

I'm thinking to virtualize Windows 10 to work (I need it for my job) but for everything else I'm planning to use something else.
Click to expand...

If you need only the software in Windows, go for it , in FreeBSD are multiple solutions to virtualize some use bhyve. That is the most simple and clean for use (in a plain text file of 10-15 lines you have a full virtual machine) and you have bhyve passthrough. The old VirtualBox, some people says that is a dirty hack, but it works well.

And many more, for me I use emulators/virtualbox-ose-nox11 for Windows7, because bhyve is too slow for me(in RDP session and virtualized ethernet nic is like been behind a 56kbps modem), I think is because of graphics support of bhyve, is too green for now (I don't want 3D acceleration but of course 2D, especially in Windows) and Virtualbox do the job very well, good for everyday use (I don't care about USB passthrough)

there are many little problems that summed up keep the system to be unusable from a desktop user perspective
Click to expand...

That's the magic of all, it's true, there are problems that won't have solution(for now). But the majority have solutions and fixes. And here you have a very good documentation and most of all an excellent community and forums.
 
wolffnx said:
Hi DusTech



for me, always best in bare metal , any operating system



I read that some users have problems with new hardware, but there is a list of compatible laptops
Laptop support, you don't check..bad bad ? , lucky for you



If you need only the software in Windows, go for it , in FreeBSD are multiple solutions to virtualize some use bhyve. That is the most simple and clean for use (in a plain text file of 10-15 lines you have a full virtual machine) and you have bhyve passthrough. The old VirtualBox, some people says that is a dirty hack, but it works well.

And many more, for me I use emulators/virtualbox-ose-nox11 for Windows7, because bhyve is too slow for me(in RDP session and virtualized ethernet nic is like been behind a 56kbps modem), I think is because of graphics support of bhyve, is too green for now (I don't want 3D acceleration but of course 2D, especially in Windows) and Virtualbox do the job very well, good for everyday use (I don't care about USB passthrough)



That's the magic of all, it's true, there are problems that won't have solution(for now). But the majority have solutions and fixes. And here you have a very good documentation and most of all an excellent community and forums.
Click to expand...

Thank you all... I'm not giving up for now... I'm experimenting in VMs.... now in VMWare workstation pro 15, and it is featuring the same problems (some worst) than in VirtualBox.
Now I can't see the lower part of the screen, can't change teh resolution (in Virtualbox I could), and plasma went full transparent again.
I'm aware that I can change desktop env but I like the plasma look, I can't say the same for gnome and xfce is fine but not spectacular.
What I don't understand is why using the binaries in the pkg everything is not working out of the box. I'm not experimenting something strange... I've installed:
- nano
- xorg
- plasma
and I feel the system is corrupted because is not responding well like, say, fedora or ubuntu or some other silly distro.

I can't stand linux and its caotic ecosystem, but I must admit that is more user friendly.

Maybe I'll give XFCE another spin.
 
For sure FreeBSD has a future on a desktop or laptop!

Out of the box most things work, some parts you have to do some homework to make it work, but that is part of the fun. It isn't half as complicated and it is getting better every time.

The other side is: what do you want? Do you want a MacOS but are afraid to buy one? Then you have to do some research and make it, the components are there.

Or do you want a workhorse without the s-load of CPU-consuming frills? Then just do a basic install and use the tool. You don't need all those bells and whistles for writing texts or code, they are mere distraction.
 
I mostly agree with hakaba and kpedersen. For .Net development, you should stick to Windows, it's your job, no kidding.

A possibility for you is to keep your new laptop for work and use the old one to experiment with FreeBSD. On real hardware, you'll come across different issues, but you'll be able to get a good feeling of the "real" thing. There are limits to what you can evaluate using a VM.

Then, you'll be able to make a decision as to which OS you want to use on your personal laptop.

I would also advise you to avoid dual boot as it is a frequent cause of questions on forums. ;)

You can get a small SSD for ~ $50 and an adapter cable to plug it in a USB port. Burn an USB key with FreeBSD's installer, plug it in your laptop along with the SSD, boot the installer and install FreeBSD on the SSD. At the end of the installation procedure, accept the opportunity to open a shell to make modifications and add the following line to /boot/loader.conf: vfs.mountroot.timeout="10"

Then, when your laptop reboots, enter the boot menu again and select your SSD to boot FreeBSD. You're done.

I've tested FreeBSD and OpenBSD on such a configuration, it allows you to test the OS on real hardware without touching your internal hard disk, just at the cost of reduced performance due to using your external SSD via USB.

I've also tried to do the same with Linux, but GRUB doesn't like this configuration at all and I had to reinstall my machine. :/

If you liked XFCE, you'll probably like MATE even more. It shares a sense of simplicity with XFCE, but is more consistent and featureful, and much easier to customize for mass installations and/or (in my case) professional use.
 
If your CPU and motherboard support VT-x, and VT-d (and consider AES-ni), then fast virtualisation is possible.

Otherwise, if you need speed, the operating system might need to be native.

There's plenty of good advice above, for all cases.

I run FreeBSD native; under VirtualBox on Windows (notebook); and under KVM on Linux (virtualisation server) -- where the native platform was chosen for appropriate performance and functionality.
 
rootbert said:
FYI: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-review-freebsd-12-1-release/
Click to expand...

Quite a good review. In general the author knows quite a bit (which is nice and less biased). Some things were a little incorrect though.

"Frustratingly, like every other bit of documentation so far, it doesn't say a peep about xorg—and installing gdm didn't bring xorg in as a dependency."

Well... no. Xorg isn't a dependency of gdm. Take the "consumer desktop" hat off for a bit and think about Xvnc or XDMCP queries to gdm allowing remote logins. You don't necessarily want to run gdm on Xorg just to serve remote access. Your server might not even have a capable GPU.

Also, a few things came out that suggests he hadn't read the FreeBSD handbook. For example there are clear instructions there for installing Xorg via the meta package.
 
For me, the only thing that works in Linux that does not (easily) in FreeBSD is the Steam gaming platform. Other than that, sure, Linux is "easier", but FreeBSD is so simple to configure for my use case that I prefer it. I don't use a desktop environment, only a window manager. Oddly enough on Linux, I have always used a desktop environment, typically Mate`. I know desktop environments work in FreeBSD but to me, they go against the simplicity of FreeBSD somehow. That makes no sense but it's how I feel.

The only functionality that does not work out of the box on FreeBSD for me is thumbdrive mounting but Vermaden's sysutils/automount works perfectly for this and is very easy to set up.

I really like the fact FreeBSD keeps user installed software "virtually" separated from the base OS, instead of lumping/mixing it all together like Linux does. I can easily experiment with using ports or packages and go from one to the other without breaking the base OS. That is something Linux users trying FreeBSD don't initially get, and their first instinct is to reinstall the OS if they somehow break a piece of user installed software.
 
one of the most annoying things for me, and thats where the author is absolutely right, is the speed of the package management, at least here in central europe ( I can only speak for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Czech Republic). No matter at what time, installing software feels like in the past millenium. Just installed firefox on a machine with gigabit internet - downloading all packages with 165 megabytes needs 645 seconds.
 
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