So I’m about to get a new laptop (likely 13th gen intel) since my current one is breaking down. Currently I run Arch Linux on my device and is looking into FreeBSD or OpenBSD as the OS. Mainly because once I tried to look into the Linux kernel and can’t believe the amount of spaghetti in it. I’ve read a little bit of Free and OpenBSD kernels. They look a lot nicer. And I travel a bit with my laptop to visit a few infosec conferences. I hear the BSDs have a more solid kernel then Linux (I know BSDs are OSs).
I’m use my laptop to browse the internet, remote into my boxes to code and email. And I tried to use both in VM and feels ok with them.
Can experienced BSD users share some pitfalls and why or why not to use BSD?
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If you decide not to go the BSD route, you should look into Void Linux. The maintainers used to be BSD people and they have carried some of that influence into Void.
Honestly, if you want to try it to tinker, it’s awesome, but you will need to compile from source a lot, and troubleshooting is harder without the big community. This makes it a bit impractical for a daily driver
It’s very similar to using linux in the 2000’s
I use it for desktops and servers. It’s rock solid, small (compared to Linux) and performant.
I wouldn’t use it if you like to run windows games or software, and sometimes hardware support can be sketchy. I’ve been lucky.
Try it out.
I wouldn’t want it for GUI use. As a headless server it’s amazing.
Why not? OpenBSD on a Thinkpad was a very good experience until I needed bluetooth and some other things not supported at the time. Maybe not as fast as the more optimized Linux distros but good enough for me, and more things Just Worked than with most Linux distros I tried on the same machine.
I tried, I really tried with both OpenBSD and FreeBSD, on a T420 and an X201 several years ago. It was just not equivalent to a (then) modern linux distribution for GUI use. Love both distros too. Just not for GUI.
