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Comment by 😺 gemalaya

Re: "Abandoning FreeBSD; back to Linux"

In: u/stack

Back to hell then. How does it feel ? Like using an old dirty sponge ?

😺 gemalaya

2023-12-15 · 8 months ago

6 Later Comments ↓

🐉 gyaradong · 2023-12-15 at 03:11:

I too prefer a POSIX blend as opposed to a single malt.

🖥️ zetamacs · 2023-12-15 at 15:29:

Don't feel bad. Even among highly technically competent people, I've known far more who want a "ready to go" operating system than something they have to fine-tune in every detail, even if the benefits of the latter are legion.

Me, I love to tinker, and *nix flows through my veins. These days it's "normal" GNU/Linux distros when I must, GuixSD and OpenBSD because I want to.

And I still can get tired of configuring things, once in awhile.

Hopefully you learned a lot and have begun to appreciate what sets the BSDs apart.

🐐 uyasga · 2023-12-15 at 18:20:

Installed GhostBSD on a couple machines and really happy.

Had to try a couple of different usb wifi dongles on a few laptops.

🚀 stack [OP] · 2023-12-15 at 18:37:

I think my mistake was committing my ThinkPad to FreeBSD, an impedance mismatch. A stationary desktop with an ethernet cable would have been more appropriated for FreeBSD; a notebook that moves around to different networks and is often used to juggle drives just got too hard to keep up. Mind you, I don't used much of a desktop OS - dwm is enough for me...

🦋 yvonne · 2023-12-19 at 01:54:

have you looked at Void?

runit seems to really push it towards that svelt BSD feeling.

i have a T560 i run it on; htop shows 92 tasks & 880 meg memory in an xfce session w/ a few firefox tabs. to those ends i've been very satisfied, after maybe a year of use.

grain of salt, not my main machine, so no critical duties (just a spare/kickabout lappy), but i've had notably few issues with it, esp for a rolling release. wifi works just fine. selection in repos is pretty good, and i like xbps quite a lot (far and above apt for instance.)

could be worth a peek at anyway.

😺 gemalaya · 2023-12-19 at 14:42:

@stack I agree with @yvonne, if you want a Linux OS that feels BSDish but isn't too painful to manage and maintain, Void is one of the best out there and it's really performant. i still use it on one machine and xbps and runit are awesome. Despite being a rolling release type of distro, things rarely break.

Original Post

🚀 stack

Abandoning FreeBSD; back to Linux — I give up. I gave it a good try, and kind of liked it. But it's just too painful, and I was beginning to feel like may hands were tied behind my back. I especiallly liked the minimalism. Only a handful of processes running (as opposed to hundreds on my xubuntu machine). Fast and clean. But I did not like the constant struggle for simple things. Mounting drives. Editing wpa_supplicant file to connect to wifis, like it's 1999. Everything is like pulling...

💬 7 comments · 2023-12-15 · 8 months ago