I don't run it right now (and won't anytime soon) as a desktop. Once I switched to using laptops exclusively, the driver story became too bad to work comfortably. But, I used FreeBSD on a desktop for 5 years, from 2005 to 2010.
I really enjoyed using it. The reasons for that are what others already mentioned: simplicity, well-thought-out organization of the system vs. userland vs. 3rd party packages (man hier), excellent documentation always available locally, ports, jails, pf, etc. It was all nice, but the killer feature, for me, was stability. The system simply refused to die, no matter what I threw at it or how I misconfigured it. At the time, Linux was a lot less stable than it is today - it could hang forever, corrupt the filesystem, or restart in the middle of doing something. Especially with proprietary, binary blobs and apps, rare as they were, Linux had a hard time accumulating uptime. On the other hand, FreeBSD worked, always. Well, it had no other choice, given that ACPI wasn't fully implemented and it couldn't suspend/sleep - it was a desktop but also a server for some private stuff, so that was ok.
Linux got much better over the years, both in kernel and userland. I have been using Fedora for close to 15 years now, and it works. I won't be going back to FreeBSD on the desktop, unfortunately. However, I'm tempted to try it again on an older laptop that plays the role of a NAS: no GUI, always connected to the router with a cable, always connected to power. I have Fedora running there, but I already use ZFS - it's great - so the switch shouldn't be hard.
Same, I used to run it a lot, but I went back to it recently and have not really managed to make it work. I'm using sway, and I have hit a whole bunch of issues:
* Have to use 14-CURRENT to support my RDNA2 graphics card at all. This was not simple.
* Systemd sucks, but on Linux when I start a sway session it co-ordinates all the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr / pipewire / pipewire-media-session (I think). There doesn't seem to be a freebsd equivalent for user level services. Although dbus / consolekit seems to be doing something, I don't understand why or how.
* Sound is just broken. My usb headset gives constant loud feedback, by bluetooth dongle spams the dmesg until it eventually gives up and my hda card seems to work in all the mixers but no sound is forthcoming.
* Firefox with wayland on just loses the compositor connection almost instantly. Alacratty seems fine though, as is xwayland.
* My webcam doesn't work, in firefox it's blank, in chrome the video is corrupted.
* I have no idea how to configure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to get created a login with the right permissions etc on tmpfs. I could leave it on zfs of course but apparently that's problematic.
Comments
I don't run it right now (and won't anytime soon) as a desktop. Once I switched to using laptops exclusively, the driver story became too bad to work comfortably. But, I used FreeBSD on a desktop for 5 years, from 2005 to 2010.
I really enjoyed using it. The reasons for that are what others already mentioned: simplicity, well-thought-out organization of the system vs. userland vs. 3rd party packages (man hier), excellent documentation always available locally, ports, jails, pf, etc. It was all nice, but the killer feature, for me, was stability. The system simply refused to die, no matter what I threw at it or how I misconfigured it. At the time, Linux was a lot less stable than it is today - it could hang forever, corrupt the filesystem, or restart in the middle of doing something. Especially with proprietary, binary blobs and apps, rare as they were, Linux had a hard time accumulating uptime. On the other hand, FreeBSD worked, always. Well, it had no other choice, given that ACPI wasn't fully implemented and it couldn't suspend/sleep - it was a desktop but also a server for some private stuff, so that was ok.
Linux got much better over the years, both in kernel and userland. I have been using Fedora for close to 15 years now, and it works. I won't be going back to FreeBSD on the desktop, unfortunately. However, I'm tempted to try it again on an older laptop that plays the role of a NAS: no GUI, always connected to the router with a cable, always connected to power. I have Fedora running there, but I already use ZFS - it's great - so the switch shouldn't be hard.
Same, I used to run it a lot, but I went back to it recently and have not really managed to make it work. I'm using sway, and I have hit a whole bunch of issues:
* Have to use 14-CURRENT to support my RDNA2 graphics card at all. This was not simple.
* Systemd sucks, but on Linux when I start a sway session it co-ordinates all the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr / pipewire / pipewire-media-session (I think). There doesn't seem to be a freebsd equivalent for user level services. Although dbus / consolekit seems to be doing something, I don't understand why or how.
* Sound is just broken. My usb headset gives constant loud feedback, by bluetooth dongle spams the dmesg until it eventually gives up and my hda card seems to work in all the mixers but no sound is forthcoming.
* Firefox with wayland on just loses the compositor connection almost instantly. Alacratty seems fine though, as is xwayland.
* My webcam doesn't work, in firefox it's blank, in chrome the video is corrupted.
* I have no idea how to configure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to get created a login with the right permissions etc on tmpfs. I could leave it on zfs of course but apparently that's problematic.