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by nirvdrum 3613 days ago
It's been a long time since I gave up on FreeBSD on the desktop, but I think back in 2000 I had some bad problems with whatever SoundBlaster card I had (some Audigy thing) and ATi acceleration just wasn't going to happen. But otherwise, it was rock solid. I think from there I went to Gentoo since portage was similar to the ports system.

I did try some of the FreeBSD desktop variants over the years (DragonFly and PC-BSD). But then you're still not quite running FreeBSD. I haven't kept up, but it looks like DragonFly is its own distinct BSD flavor now.
1 comments
TylerE 3612 days ago
Yeah, the Audigy cards were always flakey (under Linux, too, as I remember). Support for the Soundblaster-series cards was much better.

The sound was really good for the time if you had a supported card, real hardware mixing, /dev/dsp (or was it /dev/audio) that multiple processes could write to and it was seamlessly mixed. Using the commercial version of OSS, as I recall. In Linux at that time you either had the open source fork of OSS (which wasn't nearly as good), or raw ALSA, which was promising but buggy.

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