This blog by Vermaden is probably one of the most cited in the FreeBSD community when someone in a forum/subreddit asks why FreeBSD. I think it does a good job encapsulating the reasons one would choose FreeBSD over Linux or other OS’s.
I’ve become more partial to the *BSD’s in the past couple of years and respect what each one brings. I do daily drive Debian tho ;)
I do like all of the beasties, but all of them have the same problem that keep me from just setting up a BSD based workstation: Lack of hardware support. Way too many times have I installed a BSD on an old Laptop and the sound doesn’t work, or doesn’t work properly. The WiFi doesn’t work or is flakey. And on both FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD the radeon graphics driver fails to load and you’ll lose the Display. But then any Linux distro has no issues on the exact same hardware.
I’ve compared Linux with FreeBSD on a rack server of mine in terms of power usage and performance. The system has 16 GB of ECC memory and a 6 core 2 threads Xeon and a SAS RAID controller. Both FreeBSD and Void Linux were basic stock installs on an SSD.
To keep it short: Linux won. With Linux on idle (with only htop running in a TTY) the System would use around 85 Watts. The same but on FreeBSD would make the System use ~105 watts. I spent a whole day researching for loader.conf and sysctl tweaks, but I only managed to get it down to 100-101 watts. In terms of performance FreeBSD wasn’t bad compared to Linux (in fact it’s about the same I’d say), however in certain situations Linux was better. Like when all CPU threads are maxed out because of some program FreeBSD tends to become very unresponsive, while Linux can cope with it a lot better.
Now I’m not saying that FreeBSD is bad. But in all my attempts at using it as a daily driver or Server OS has just showed me that it’s less of a headache in the end if I just go with some minimal and simple GNU/Linux distro.
I might try a beastie again as a daily driver once I can get my hands on some decent BSD friendly hardware.
lack of hardware support is a huge problem. FWIW, if you have a thinkpad, OpenBSD should work on it no problem. Free/NetBSD will work on Thinkpads with some minor tuning.
What you said about performance re: FreeBSD v Linux tracks with what I’ve read. Basically, those who know are capable of tuning FreeBSD to their needs, and can make it as performant (or more so) than Linux. Re: graphics, that’s something to research before using any BSD.
I think the biggest advantage of FreeBSD is still storage; ZFS and boot environments are a huge deal. BTRFS is just behind ZFS in this regard. I also like the stability that FreeBSD provides. Linux changes very rapidly and this can be a problem for some.
I will say that I think FreeBSD is way behind in innovating. A lot of their pros (jails, ZFS, boot environments) come from Solaris, or are being equaled by linux (networking performance, as an example).
I still wanna give FreeBSD a try… I just haven’t had much of a reason too yet.
It’s a good os, even if it is lacking in some ways compared to linux. Boot environments/ZFS is pretty great.
I also appreciate that FreeBSD is slower to change, and won’t change just for it’s own sake. Features are thought out and added with care. Linux is obviously a little fragmented, which means development happens quicker and newer features pop up, but then there’s the issue of things breaking, or distros make big changes that force users to find another distro. (Think of the change redhat made to CentOS for example).
yea sometimes I’ll setup a VM with some kind of BSD for fun but whenever I try it on my real hardware I get some weird issues like you mentioned. Similar things happened years ago when I was first messing around with linux and today I have very few (actually almost zero) linux-related hardware problems so hopefully the BSDs follow the same trajectory and eventually become more usable/popular
used thinkpad is your best option I think for BSD
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