this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
4 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43898 readers
1451 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Redscare867@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] ciagovv@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Atarian@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] lhx@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wouldn’t want it for GUI use. As a headless server it’s amazing.

[–] bunjix@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.