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Unfortunately, I haven’t had much personal luck getting NetBSD (or OpenBSD, for that matter) to run well with networking and a GUI on any of my computers. FreeBSD I can only get working if it’s a distro with GUI included, like helloSystem. It makes me feel like part of my brain is missing. ._.
If you ever want to give it a shot again, feel free to ask me for help. Trying them out in virtual machines is a great way to get used to them before installing on an actual computer.
For all of them, just check that your hardware is supported before. Slightly older thinkpads are the stereotype across all BSD’s. OpenBSD on a thinkpad, everything just works.
With OpenBSD I found wireless easy to setup as long as it’s supported hardware. You just edit a text file and you’re on your way. OpenBSD also has good documentation; they do a great job keeping it up to date. Free and NetBSD use wpa_supplicant, which is on many linux distros too.
Check out this page if you want a decent up to date tutorial for OpenBSD:
https://sohcahtoa.org.uk/openbsd.html
During install of Open/Net, you should be able to select to install the X11 sets. That should allow you to have a gui when you finish the install and reboot and login. From the console just login and type “startx” and it should go. NetBSD has ctwm as a default, Open has both CWM (my favorite) and FVWM as defaults. Obviously you can install what you want after install.
FreeBSD has a handbook. If you follow that you should be able to get a GUI working. Also on youtube search “robonuggie;” it’s a yt channel dedicated to FreeBSD and he has good tutorials.
Strangely, I had a bit of an urge to try out FreeBSD the other day. I’m at the point in my GNU/Linux-use where I’m very cosy and comfortable but I still get the itch to learn some new things and BSD is just different enough to appeal. People who love BSDs really seem to love BSDs but also don’t appear to be as toxic about it as some fanatics pushing their Linux distro of choice. I also like how BSDs seem to be, for now, immune to some of the more questionable trends in GNU/Linux land such as systemd, Wayland, Flatpaks/Snaps etc. It would also allow me to start developing scripts that were more POSIX compliant, especially if I had to run them across two different OSs.
I have reservations about the licensing but that’s because I’m a diehard GPL fan for software and don’t like how “permissive” licenses basically open up community-generated resources for exploitation by capital e.g. macOS being based on FreeBSD. However, that there are major corporate players in the GNU/Linux kernel-space cannot be denied. So that’s hardly perfect either!
I might give FreeBSD a spin in a VM soon, but I likely won’t be able to install it on bare metal until I get a desktop machine; I’ve only got laptops and by the looks of it my wireless cards won’t be supported out of the box :-(
I likely won’t be able to install it on bare metal until I get a desktop machine
If you’re in the US, you can get a thinkpad like a T430 used for pretty cheap online. Everything for the BSD’s should work fine.
Either way I think it’s at least worth trying it out however you can. FreeBSD is definitely the one with the most support, so it would be the one worth trying out. Each BSD has it’s own idiosyncrasies. Basically, using it for the first time will be like when you went from windows to Linux.
The BSD community generally isn’t toxic. They can be, uh, weird or dismissive about what goes on in Linux for example. But there’s a lot less of the luke smith type.
Ah I’m in the UK, so old Thinkpads are a little less accessible! Thanks though :-)
I also have a personal policy of not replacing a device until it’s actually physically broken and beyond a reasonable ability to repair myself or via my local repair shop and my current machines are still quite strong and healthy! However, my partner wants a laptop soon so I might be able to wrangle repairing the keyboard on the machine I have folded up behind a monitor as a pseudo-desktop, and then grabbing some second hand parts to build a small desktop machine.
Otherwise, I am quite keen to try FreeBSD relatively soon even just to learn.
nothing wrong with having a spare machine to play around with. Any major vendor laptop that you can get used should run BSD, just have to check.
Here’s a useful site:
Like I said, any question feel free to ask.
Thanks comrade! Much appreciated.
I got FreeBSD up and running in a vm on the weekend, with i3dwm installed and started playing around. So I’m quietly confident that I’ll enjoy it.
nice check out the official handbook, it’s pretty helpful
One of the cool features of FreeBSD is ZFS boot environments, worth checking out imo.
