I got a hand-me-down computer with 386/BSD installed on it. I appreciated the irony that the computer carried the AT&T brand, running an OS stripped of all AT&T code!
I made the switch to FreeBSD a few months ago and haven't looked back since. I come from a Fedora/Debian background with some MS Windows. FreeBSD isn't for everyone unless you're ready for it. What I mean is that you need to know what you're getting yourself into. It is a different mindset and different way of looking at your system.
@@RoboNuggie It is not a great way, because you create a lot of hate towards BSD by making all these false claims All 'myths' are 100 percent accurate.
Being honest I preffer openBSD. I have a separate drive for it that I ofter boot to update/upgrade it (since 7.4) and check how development is going and learn about security configurations, also it has planned wayland support and and gnome latest builds. FreeBSD is cool and probably is more suited for desktop anyways. Unfortunatelly the closest mirror in my zone might have some issue because the package manager is really slow😢 (tried from different connections since I carry nomadBSD on a pendrive). Just to mention, as far as I know, ghostBSD was named after gnome-host, I would really like to try it, but it runs mate, no gnome. I love mate (I'm from Argentina), but I don't like mate DE (I preffer xfce). Thanks for the interesting content!
I've been using it as a desktop five years this April. Still using the original install, updated numerous times and now on 14.2. I leave my computer on, sometimes with several months of uptime. While the FreeBSD is my daily driver, I do have Windows on some other computers and Debian on one.
FreeBSD with KDE5 is an awesome and beautiful desktop OS. I love it and it is because of this channel that I have it. This channel might very well be one of, if not the best, FreeBSD desktop resources on the internet.
"Ready for the Desktop". Which Desktop? Company, personal? The use cases are vast and all different... I appreciate that you said 'it works for me and on my hardware, at least'. For me, for example, the hardware support (yes, WiFi in first instance, but then also suspend/resume, hibernation on laptop) is still nowhere. I also use a lot my laptop (I'm both a desktop and laptop user) while traveling and I'd love to encrypt my disk in case my laptop is stolen; the FreeBSD setup doesn't directly support encryption out of the box during the installation process if, like me, you want to use UFS (ZFS is a complete overkill in my opinion and it make sense only on servers); unless, during the setup process you exit to a shell and manually partition your disk(s), setup the encryption with GELI and install manually the boot loader (eeek!) -but that procedure is not for the average user...- You see what I mean? FreeBSD in 2025 is ready for the desktop? If you mean that is capable to install a couple of desktop environment and run few (ported) application, then, maybe. It's a fully featured Desktop solution for the user? No. There are too many gaps to fill. It's better than 10 years ago but it's still quite rough. On the opposite, I found OpenBSD incredibly much more Desktop (and laptop) friendly; things like encryption at installation of suspend / resume / hibernation works out of the box. The only real issue with OpenBSD are the performance; it's an OS developed with the security in mind, not the performance (and unfortunately in a day to day use it's noticeably slower than FreeBSD or Linux on the same hardware). Shame. Finger crossed for 2026, hopefully the FreeBSD team can knock down one or 2 few more myths (I would love hibernation and encryption to work please). 😉
The FreeBSD Foundation is currently adding support for suspend/resume, hibernation, better WiFi support, improved audio and I believe disk encryption.,
@ suspend / resume is not bad, hibernation, Wi-Fi and disk encryption (with ufs) are the real issues. Many “professional” desktop/laptop users refrain to use FreeBSD because of the lack of these capabilities (including lack of support for SMB3 and others -no, SMB3 via gvfs/ fuse is not viable as painfully slow)
Installer could certainly benefit from some rework in the area of modularly setting up geom providers for both UFS and ZFS during install. I don't remember if its there or not but it likely would be more straightforward to add geli as an option to the UFS installation steps than the changes I think need to be done as a whole. There are non-overkill benefits to ZFS: - Everyone brags up checksums and raid redundancy so I won't repeat the details here. These are obtainable without ZFS but usually have performance and disk space drawbacks in implementations I am familiar with while usually not offering a benefit over the ZFS equivalent even when viewing just that feature alone. - higher data throughput from disk for any data the compression setting compresses; load is adjustable but the default LZ4 compressor is rarely beneficial to work without. - ZFS ARC has both good and bad to itbut once files are compressed on disk, their ARC copies are mainly stored compressed so you can generally cache more file data in the same amount of RAM. - replication: comparable to dump for full transfer but allows transferring only blocks instead of full files for newer content on incremental transfer. - boot environments: Also doable with UFS but uses separate partitions per point to choose to go back to and requires time to copy the data there instead of the higher performance of snapshots . Snapshots are nearly instant to create and deleting later is much faster still than the full file copying..Duplicated data is only stored once until blocks are altered later while not using any of the deduplication record/search overhead. All that said, ZFS certainly has its drawbacks and UFS is still a fine choice of filesystem. I'm a desktop user myself (normally left on for convenience and I give it work to do) and when I use other people's laptops I've normally either on or off. If its a family member's laptop I disable fastboot for reliability reasons and if I will be using it regularly for a while I disable sleep+hibernation timers and only activate it on request but normally I just shut down so they go unused. On desktop I don't use hibernation or sleep as I found too many buggy implementations. If you are waiting for a boot from a magnetic drive (or those really bad SSDs that communicate just as slow) or use the computer in very short sessions (only a few minutes total) then hibernation and sleep can be a big deal. Even if I don't use it, I'm still hopeful for better support for it. I thought OpenBSD security related slowdowns were optional slowdowns. I did think they had less development go toward performance by comparison. FreeBSD also has started implementing some handcrafted assembly optimizations into standard system libraries so 'every' call to certain functions are accelerated for compatible hardware. I'd assume such changes could be traded among different BSD systems much easier than rewriting them so if they weren't there yet then they may come to OpenBSD soon enough.
@@fdg394 suspend/resume depends on available S# states that your BIOS/UEFI provide and drivers have to properly support entering/exiting it. I thought FreeBSD is still lacking the sleep state modern machines use now and they often don't offer the older+lower power state that the old ones did. Old and new sleep both have issues depending on OS and hardware.
@ "I'd assume such changes could be traded among different BSD systems much easier than rewriting them"... yes and no. Both are *BSD but the philosophy behind is quite different and that also reflect into the implementation. As OpenBSD is more security focused, hardware wise it will only support what's in the kernel (no external modules). This makes also the Hibernation implementation more easy to implement (and on the opposite, a nightmare for FreeBSD as you will need to deal with a lots of misbehaving kernel modules when the system wake up). OpenBSD is 'choked' to death to implement all the security controls but this translate in a quite slow system (ie, try to open 3 or 4 tabs of whatever browser...). Also the OpenBSD team are not keen to follow any trend; for them the security is the only focus and if something doesn't fit, it's out (see Bluetooth for example). Re UFS and ZFS; I believe that the installer (many, many moons ago) used to support encryption with UFS -when ZFS was not a thing-; not seems that the team is pushing for ZFS over UFS as default filesystem for FreeBSD (not saying that this a good or bad thing; I just can't be bother to have all of my RAM eaten by the ARC (yes you can choke that but then... who cares about compression, deduplication, snapshot etc? I'm sure many people need that, for my personal use case, I don't).
Do you plan to make a video of the how old hardware can support modern application running FreeBSD? For example, on my iMac 2009 running Chromium will consume beyond its appetite of 8GB RAM and into the swap but everything runs ok despite the slowness when returning to start using the PC the next day.
I'm curious about your Pi 400 OS. Last I checked FreeBSD still didn't support Raspberry Pi built-in WiFi but other BSDs did. Did you add an extra driver, add a USB device, or just use wired networking only?
I just use ethernet.... if I wanted wifi I would have to use a compatible USB device..... it's not ideal, and I don't know why there seems to be a problem in getting drivers for the Pi
@RoboNuggie I was pleasantly surprised to find that when I upgraded my Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero from NetBSD 9.x to 10.1 that the built-in WiFi started working, so my current solution for very small ARM devices is "of course it runs NetBSD."
I like to have a backup OS on my machines. I usually use Linux, it's my main OS since 1998. But back in the days I also used FreeBSD a lot. Now I prefer Linux because of hardware support and more up to date softwares I use. But I don't want to spend hours configuring a system. So I use Linux Mint, and GhostBSD. GhostBSD is really easy to install, update, the wifi is correct, so it's my FreeBSD choice since I discovered it.
Thanks for this video. What I like most about FreeBSD is that it is reasonably fast and absolutely rock solid uptime. What surprises me is when FreeBSD is used on a laptop. It is stable and fast - faster than Windows 10. I'm using GhostBSD on 2 Dell laptops and the only thing that didn't work was the Dell wireless card which was a Broadcom. I replaced it with a Intel 7260 and off we go. I get about 3 1/2 hours out of the battery and will attempt to get more through some tuning. Your videos are a great inspiration so keep it up! Please.
@@RoboNuggie I would say that myth number one is myth that I did propagate and realize with time it is false. People often see the unknown as hard, with it is not when you learn it. The GhostBSD project got started at a time that I was fairly new with using a computer with no knowledge of what I needed to do to start that project and was barely able to use FreeBSD. Curiosity is what helped me with a bit of obsession.
@@EricTurgeon It's getting the message across that's the hard part - the learning of something new is the easy part, changing minds isn't.... GhostBSD has done an enormous amount to promote what FreeBSD can do and it beggars belief that the FreeBSD Foundation hasn't done more to support you and your project to be honest.
The RoboBSD is a full desktop FreeBSD out of the box for the Raspberry Pi 4/400.... it works, I just didn't have time to fully commit to it yet....I am thinking of reviving it... I didn't notice it said 3000+.....I just saw the list of new companies....crikey. 6sense.com/tech/server-and-desktop-os/freebsd-market-share
As a BSD enthusiast I would say that it is almost ready for the Desktop, I say that in the sense of being 100% comfortable for the common user to set it up nicely!! I'm not 100% on the desktop yet but a'm on my way!!!
@ They are indeed!..... and more credit to them for doing this..... It takes time, but the effort will bear fruit...we just need to get the word out more.
@@RoboNuggie It's only officially supported on Windows and macOS. However, the Linux community has done a great job of getting the Elgato Stream Deck to work. There are certain ones that don't work in Linux, I believe, but I used to have the Stream Deck XL and it worked very well using StreamDeckUI for Linux, as well as a few other programs I tried. But I never could get it working on FreeBSD. Due to some things that happened that were beyond my control, I no longer have an Elgato Stream Deck but once I have a job or a decent amount of freelance work again, I will be buying one again.
@@RoboNuggie We can use streamdeck-ui to set up the images and the macros. It's mostly Python so there's no *real* reason it wouldn't work under FreeBSD.
My problem with FreeBSD is that there's no live GUI environment since GhostBSD's installer doesn't support UFS autosetup anymore. It would be great if NomadBSD was installable on a hard drive.
@@RoboNuggie I've confirmed that but They just need to support installing to a partition instead of the whole disk. I would like to dualboot with Void Linux since my work/study stuff is setup at Void. And it's not like I love making excuses or anything because for me, if an OS intrigues me enough to want o dive in, I will. I dived into Linux from Windows. (Less availble software but do I need that much). I dived into Void Linux from an Arch-based distro.(Even lesser packages). It would be great to dive into the BSD world, but there's no much choice for me as of right now. I mean GhostBSD was a choice before July 2024, but now a poor man like me who has no ethernet cable and has only one laptop, could only dream of dailying a BSD.
I use FreeBSD on x86_64, old Opteron and modern Ryzen 9, on ppc64, old G5 and modern Talos 2. Unfortunately, on my oldest machines AlphaServer ES40, ES45 and Sun Enterprise R420 FreeBSD does not work. This is basically the fault of the design decision to switch to Clang. For me, it was and is a huge disappointment.
hiya my friend across the sea, had no idea about robobsd ! I have been Linux guy past few months honestly, but seriously have place in my heart for BSD
Hi Jeff.... I put together a Raspberry PI out of the box FreeBSD image along the lines of GhostBSD....I am thinking of carrying on with it..... You use what works best for your needs Jeff, nothing wrong with that :-)
I agree there is much needed improvments in those two areas to make it easier to get everyone up and running.. It can feel like a wrestling match at times, either you already are lucky to have supported and tested hardware, or if you are able to purchase supported and tested hardware. I am not gaming on Freebsd so I cannot comment much on video drivers as none of my FreeBSD set ups have Nvidia or AMD video cards, I use the intel drm-kmod i915 driver for video on my desktop and laptop machines, and vesa on a old netbook I use as a MP3 player in my workshop. I struggled with a Linksys AE1200 usb wifi adapter on one of my desktop machines, I finally threw in the towel and purchased a TP-link a600 archer T2U plus which was listed in the FreeBSD hardware notes, stating it uses the rtwn driver. $15 bucks later and a day delivery from Amazon and boom, up and running wifi. www.freebsd.org/releases/14.2R/hardware/ I use Mint as my main daily driver for stable (no tinkering) and hassle free audio work running Reaper and Renoise, but I enjoy using FreeBSD as well for running older tracker programs like fast tracker 2 and protracker 2 among other computing tasks, it feels like I am using a computer.
I use GhostBSD happily on my Lenovo X230,no problems at all with it. However BSD does not like my Dell 1700 desktop no matter what I try,but as long as BSD works fine on my ThinkPad I don't care.I also use Linux but no way will I use Windows or Mac.
I totally agree with you. The only thing I use Windows (10 in my case) is to play video games and things not important for me. So my hope is that the user experience for BSD will grow solidly faster.
If you haven't figured things out and have interest in having the Dell work then it may be worth filing a PR if one doesn't already exist. Sometimes a BIOS may be buggy or hardware support may be completely missing but if its just a FreeBSD bug then it would be good to have it known and hopefully reviewed/resolved. Sometimes developers learning about a machine that didn't work but was thought it should leads to workarounds for the buggy hardware being placed into the operating system.
Lack of software really is a myth. Ports has more packages than most Linux distros. Desktop is as mature as Linux with the exception of… Hardware! Be honest now. Desktop hardware support on FreeBSD is poor. Wifi, Bluetooth, and cameras would not work on half the hardware I use. How about fingerprint readers or media controls? Power management? Apple hardware? Hopefully some recent investments in FreeBSD will improve hardware support. Until then, let’s be honest.
My dad started with 386BSD from Bill Jolitz (RIP) articles in Dr Dobbs magazine when he was a teenager. We're a Linux household now.
Wow that's a deep cut. Our household uses Linux as well, although our Router/Firewall and NAS are BSD.
@esra_erimez That's pretty cool...
I got a hand-me-down computer with 386/BSD installed on it. I appreciated the irony that the computer carried the AT&T brand, running an OS stripped of all AT&T code!
I made the switch to FreeBSD a few months ago and haven't looked back since. I come from a Fedora/Debian background with some MS Windows. FreeBSD isn't for everyone unless you're ready for it. What I mean is that you need to know what you're getting yourself into. It is a different mindset and different way of looking at your system.
This is a great way to explain the process
As for me, if I can go for Sun Solaris Administration and know everything there is to know, FreeBSD comes natural to me.
Not at all, it is just linux with worse hardware support and less software. Feels like any Linux 20 years ago.
@@RoboNuggie It is not a great way, because you create a lot of hate towards BSD by making all these false claims
All 'myths' are 100 percent accurate.
Even though I started with Slackware Linux (1997), I eventually went to FreeBSD. It was as if I was using the old SunOS at my job.
Being honest I preffer openBSD. I have a separate drive for it that I ofter boot to update/upgrade it (since 7.4) and check how development is going and learn about security configurations, also it has planned wayland support and and gnome latest builds. FreeBSD is cool and probably is more suited for desktop anyways. Unfortunatelly the closest mirror in my zone might have some issue because the package manager is really slow😢 (tried from different connections since I carry nomadBSD on a pendrive). Just to mention, as far as I know, ghostBSD was named after gnome-host, I would really like to try it, but it runs mate, no gnome. I love mate (I'm from Argentina), but I don't like mate DE (I preffer xfce). Thanks for the interesting content!
I've been using it as a desktop five years this April. Still using the original install, updated numerous times and now on 14.2. I leave my computer on, sometimes with several months of uptime.
While the FreeBSD is my daily driver, I do have Windows on some other computers and Debian on one.
That's pretty cool.... and still the original install..... nice one!
FreeBSD with KDE5 is an awesome and beautiful desktop OS. I love it and it is because of this channel that I have it. This channel might very well be one of, if not the best, FreeBSD desktop resources on the internet.
Thank you for your kind words!
"Ready for the Desktop". Which Desktop? Company, personal? The use cases are vast and all different... I appreciate that you said 'it works for me and on my hardware, at least'. For me, for example, the hardware support (yes, WiFi in first instance, but then also suspend/resume, hibernation on laptop) is still nowhere. I also use a lot my laptop (I'm both a desktop and laptop user) while traveling and I'd love to encrypt my disk in case my laptop is stolen; the FreeBSD setup doesn't directly support encryption out of the box during the installation process if, like me, you want to use UFS (ZFS is a complete overkill in my opinion and it make sense only on servers); unless, during the setup process you exit to a shell and manually partition your disk(s), setup the encryption with GELI and install manually the boot loader (eeek!) -but that procedure is not for the average user...- You see what I mean? FreeBSD in 2025 is ready for the desktop? If you mean that is capable to install a couple of desktop environment and run few (ported) application, then, maybe. It's a fully featured Desktop solution for the user? No. There are too many gaps to fill. It's better than 10 years ago but it's still quite rough. On the opposite, I found OpenBSD incredibly much more Desktop (and laptop) friendly; things like encryption at installation of suspend / resume / hibernation works out of the box. The only real issue with OpenBSD are the performance; it's an OS developed with the security in mind, not the performance (and unfortunately in a day to day use it's noticeably slower than FreeBSD or Linux on the same hardware). Shame. Finger crossed for 2026, hopefully the FreeBSD team can knock down one or 2 few more myths (I would love hibernation and encryption to work please). 😉
The FreeBSD Foundation is currently adding support for suspend/resume, hibernation, better WiFi support, improved audio and I believe disk encryption.,
@ suspend / resume is not bad, hibernation, Wi-Fi and disk encryption (with ufs) are the real issues. Many “professional” desktop/laptop users refrain to use FreeBSD because of the lack of these capabilities (including lack of support for SMB3 and others -no, SMB3 via gvfs/ fuse is not viable as painfully slow)
Installer could certainly benefit from some rework in the area of modularly setting up geom providers for both UFS and ZFS during install. I don't remember if its there or not but it likely would be more straightforward to add geli as an option to the UFS installation steps than the changes I think need to be done as a whole.
There are non-overkill benefits to ZFS:
- Everyone brags up checksums and raid redundancy so I won't repeat the details here. These are obtainable without ZFS but usually have performance and disk space drawbacks in implementations I am familiar with while usually not offering a benefit over the ZFS equivalent even when viewing just that feature alone.
- higher data throughput from disk for any data the compression setting compresses; load is adjustable but the default LZ4 compressor is rarely beneficial to work without.
- ZFS ARC has both good and bad to itbut once files are compressed on disk, their ARC copies are mainly stored compressed so you can generally cache more file data in the same amount of RAM.
- replication: comparable to dump for full transfer but allows transferring only blocks instead of full files for newer content on incremental transfer.
- boot environments: Also doable with UFS but uses separate partitions per point to choose to go back to and requires time to copy the data there instead of the higher performance of snapshots . Snapshots are nearly instant to create and deleting later is much faster still than the full file copying..Duplicated data is only stored once until blocks are altered later while not using any of the deduplication record/search overhead.
All that said, ZFS certainly has its drawbacks and UFS is still a fine choice of filesystem.
I'm a desktop user myself (normally left on for convenience and I give it work to do) and when I use other people's laptops I've normally either on or off. If its a family member's laptop I disable fastboot for reliability reasons and if I will be using it regularly for a while I disable sleep+hibernation timers and only activate it on request but normally I just shut down so they go unused. On desktop I don't use hibernation or sleep as I found too many buggy implementations. If you are waiting for a boot from a magnetic drive (or those really bad SSDs that communicate just as slow) or use the computer in very short sessions (only a few minutes total) then hibernation and sleep can be a big deal. Even if I don't use it, I'm still hopeful for better support for it.
I thought OpenBSD security related slowdowns were optional slowdowns. I did think they had less development go toward performance by comparison. FreeBSD also has started implementing some handcrafted assembly optimizations into standard system libraries so 'every' call to certain functions are accelerated for compatible hardware. I'd assume such changes could be traded among different BSD systems much easier than rewriting them so if they weren't there yet then they may come to OpenBSD soon enough.
@@fdg394 suspend/resume depends on available S# states that your BIOS/UEFI provide and drivers have to properly support entering/exiting it. I thought FreeBSD is still lacking the sleep state modern machines use now and they often don't offer the older+lower power state that the old ones did. Old and new sleep both have issues depending on OS and hardware.
@ "I'd assume such changes could be traded among different BSD systems much easier than rewriting them"... yes and no. Both are *BSD but the philosophy behind is quite different and that also reflect into the implementation. As OpenBSD is more security focused, hardware wise it will only support what's in the kernel (no external modules). This makes also the Hibernation implementation more easy to implement (and on the opposite, a nightmare for FreeBSD as you will need to deal with a lots of misbehaving kernel modules when the system wake up). OpenBSD is 'choked' to death to implement all the security controls but this translate in a quite slow system (ie, try to open 3 or 4 tabs of whatever browser...). Also the OpenBSD team are not keen to follow any trend; for them the security is the only focus and if something doesn't fit, it's out (see Bluetooth for example). Re UFS and ZFS; I believe that the installer (many, many moons ago) used to support encryption with UFS -when ZFS was not a thing-; not seems that the team is pushing for ZFS over UFS as default filesystem for FreeBSD (not saying that this a good or bad thing; I just can't be bother to have all of my RAM eaten by the ARC (yes you can choke that but then... who cares about compression, deduplication, snapshot etc? I'm sure many people need that, for my personal use case, I don't).
Do you plan to make a video of the how old hardware can support modern application running FreeBSD? For example, on my iMac 2009 running Chromium will consume beyond its appetite of 8GB RAM and into the swap but everything runs ok despite the slowness when returning to start using the PC the next day.
I'm curious about your Pi 400 OS. Last I checked FreeBSD still didn't support Raspberry Pi built-in WiFi but other BSDs did. Did you add an extra driver, add a USB device, or just use wired networking only?
I just use ethernet.... if I wanted wifi I would have to use a compatible USB device..... it's not ideal, and I don't know why there seems to be a problem in getting drivers for the Pi
@RoboNuggie I was pleasantly surprised to find that when I upgraded my Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero from NetBSD 9.x to 10.1 that the built-in WiFi started working, so my current solution for very small ARM devices is "of course it runs NetBSD."
I like to have a backup OS on my machines.
I usually use Linux, it's my main OS since 1998. But back in the days I also used FreeBSD a lot.
Now I prefer Linux because of hardware support and more up to date softwares I use.
But I don't want to spend hours configuring a system. So I use Linux Mint, and GhostBSD.
GhostBSD is really easy to install, update, the wifi is correct, so it's my FreeBSD choice since I discovered it.
Thanks for this video. What I like most about FreeBSD is that it is reasonably fast and absolutely rock solid uptime. What surprises me is when FreeBSD is used on a laptop. It is stable and fast - faster than Windows 10. I'm using GhostBSD on 2 Dell laptops and the only thing that didn't work was the Dell wireless card which was a Broadcom. I replaced it with a Intel 7260 and off we go. I get about 3 1/2 hours out of the battery and will attempt to get more through some tuning. Your videos are a great inspiration so keep it up! Please.
Thank you!
It's great to hear your success with GhostBSD.... a great OS in it's own right...
FreeBSD has no software is a laughable one.
Indeed....but people still believe that.....
@@RoboNuggie I would say that myth number one is myth that I did propagate and realize with time it is false. People often see the unknown as hard, with it is not when you learn it. The GhostBSD project got started at a time that I was fairly new with using a computer with no knowledge of what I needed to do to start that project and was barely able to use FreeBSD. Curiosity is what helped me with a bit of obsession.
@@EricTurgeon It's getting the message across that's the hard part - the learning of something new is the easy part, changing minds isn't.... GhostBSD has done an enormous amount to promote what FreeBSD can do and it beggars belief that the FreeBSD Foundation hasn't done more to support you and your project to be honest.
RoboBSD, I love it! Great video. Where did you find the list of over 3000 commercial users?
The RoboBSD is a full desktop FreeBSD out of the box for the Raspberry Pi 4/400.... it works, I just didn't have time to fully commit to it yet....I am thinking of reviving it...
I didn't notice it said 3000+.....I just saw the list of new companies....crikey.
6sense.com/tech/server-and-desktop-os/freebsd-market-share
I have firefox 134 on FreeBSD 14.2 RELEASE but the DRM doesn't work on it. You said it works. Which browser?
It will work with chrome if you also load in the 'foreign-cdm' port...
@@RoboNuggie So chromium should be built from ports?
As a BSD enthusiast I would say that it is almost ready for the Desktop, I say that in the sense of being 100% comfortable for the common user to set it up nicely!! I'm not 100% on the desktop yet but a'm on my way!!!
I'm sure you will get there :-)
Superb, thanks Man. This is the kind of work that the foundation should do much more.
Great Job RoboNuggie 👋
Appreciated, thank you.....
They are investing a lot of money in better laptop/desktop support right now!
@ They are indeed!..... and more credit to them for doing this.....
It takes time, but the effort will bear fruit...we just need to get the word out more.
Myth #3: FreeBSD has great desktop hardware support as long as you run certain models of older ThinkPads. 🤣
🤣
I agree with you sir,and Happy New Year!
Same to you!
Last I checked, the Elgato Stream Deck doesn't work work on FreeBSD. Unfortunately I lost mine since I last tried, though.
It doesn't? Well, I think Linux has problems as well..... is it a Windows only device?
@@RoboNuggie It's only officially supported on Windows and macOS. However, the Linux community has done a great job of getting the Elgato Stream Deck to work. There are certain ones that don't work in Linux, I believe, but I used to have the Stream Deck XL and it worked very well using StreamDeckUI for Linux, as well as a few other programs I tried.
But I never could get it working on FreeBSD.
Due to some things that happened that were beyond my control, I no longer have an Elgato Stream Deck but once I have a job or a decent amount of freelance work again, I will be buying one again.
@@RoboNuggie We can use streamdeck-ui to set up the images and the macros. It's mostly Python so there's no *real* reason it wouldn't work under FreeBSD.
@@dmmikerpg I tried. I did manage to get the interface loaded but it wouldn't detect the Stream Deck on FreeBSD.
@@thefearlessgeek Probably a driver issue, then. Pity, OS choice shouldn't matter, things should just work.
My problem with FreeBSD is that there's no live GUI environment since GhostBSD's installer doesn't support UFS autosetup anymore. It would be great if NomadBSD was installable on a hard drive.
IIRC, you are able to install it onto hard drive. Just check through applications menu.
NomadBSD can install to the HDD....it copies over the Live USB to the harddrive. It's pretty cool, and lightweight.....
@@RoboNuggie I've confirmed that but They just need to support installing to a partition instead of the whole disk. I would like to dualboot with Void Linux since my work/study stuff is setup at Void.
And it's not like I love making excuses or anything because for me, if an OS intrigues me enough to want o dive in, I will.
I dived into Linux from Windows. (Less availble software but do I need that much). I dived into Void Linux from an Arch-based distro.(Even lesser packages).
It would be great to dive into the BSD world, but there's no much choice for me as of right now. I mean GhostBSD was a choice before July 2024, but now a poor man like me who has no ethernet cable and has only one laptop, could only dream of dailying a BSD.
I use FreeBSD on x86_64, old Opteron and modern Ryzen 9, on ppc64, old G5 and modern Talos 2. Unfortunately, on my oldest machines AlphaServer ES40, ES45 and Sun Enterprise R420 FreeBSD does not work. This is basically the fault of the design decision to switch to Clang. For me, it was and is a huge disappointment.
Any LLM run on freebsd ?
I think so..... Ollama is there, so that may be an option///
hiya my friend across the sea, had no idea about robobsd ! I have been Linux guy past few months honestly, but seriously have place in my heart for BSD
Hi Jeff.... I put together a Raspberry PI out of the box FreeBSD image along the lines of GhostBSD....I am thinking of carrying on with it.....
You use what works best for your needs Jeff, nothing wrong with that :-)
I would love to move to FreeBSD as a daily driver, but the graphics drivers and wifi support just isn't there yet.
The Foundation is currently working on this in their FreeBSD laptop project.
I agree there is much needed improvments in those two areas to make it easier to get everyone up and running..
It can feel like a wrestling match at times, either you already are lucky to have supported and tested hardware, or if you are able to purchase supported and tested hardware. I am not gaming on Freebsd so I cannot comment much on video drivers as none of my FreeBSD set ups have Nvidia or AMD video cards, I use the intel drm-kmod i915 driver for video on my desktop and laptop machines, and vesa on a old netbook I use as a MP3 player in my workshop.
I struggled with a Linksys AE1200 usb wifi adapter on one of my desktop machines, I finally threw in the towel and purchased a TP-link a600 archer T2U plus which was listed in the FreeBSD hardware notes, stating it uses the rtwn driver. $15 bucks later and a day delivery from Amazon and boom, up and running wifi.
www.freebsd.org/releases/14.2R/hardware/
I use Mint as my main daily driver for stable (no tinkering) and hassle free audio work running Reaper and Renoise, but I enjoy using FreeBSD as well for running older tracker programs like fast tracker 2 and protracker 2 among other computing tasks, it feels like I am using a computer.
I use GhostBSD happily on my Lenovo X230,no problems at all with it. However BSD does not like my Dell 1700 desktop no matter what I try,but as long as BSD works fine on my ThinkPad I don't care.I also use Linux but no way will I use Windows or Mac.
I totally agree with you. The only thing I use Windows (10 in my case) is to play video games and things not important for me. So my hope is that the user experience for BSD will grow solidly faster.
If you haven't figured things out and have interest in having the Dell work then it may be worth filing a PR if one doesn't already exist. Sometimes a BIOS may be buggy or hardware support may be completely missing but if its just a FreeBSD bug then it would be good to have it known and hopefully reviewed/resolved. Sometimes developers learning about a machine that didn't work but was thought it should leads to workarounds for the buggy hardware being placed into the operating system.
If FreeBSD isn't a desktop OS, then Linux is just a useless kernel.
Lack of software really is a myth. Ports has more packages than most Linux distros.
Desktop is as mature as Linux with the exception of…
Hardware! Be honest now. Desktop hardware support on FreeBSD is poor. Wifi, Bluetooth, and cameras would not work on half the hardware I use. How about fingerprint readers or media controls? Power management? Apple hardware?
Hopefully some recent investments in FreeBSD will improve hardware support. Until then, let’s be honest.
Which Distro has less? I believe you, just never encountered any.
Free pascal compiler is not available
It is....version 3.2.3, or the developer version 3.3.1... along with the Lazarus IDE
Yes it is!. At my company we build apps (mostly web and command line) with fpc/lazarus on FreeBSD.
❤
❤
Sorry, BSD can't touch the greatest OS of all time.....TempleOS 🤣😝
I'm not worthy yet to review that.... :-)
@RoboNuggie 🤣🤣🤣 Just remember gods chosen animal is the Elephant lol
who uses freebsd?
robonuggie :)