[centimeter]

As a contrast, I was recently setting up an APU2 system as a router. I tried 3 different kinds of Linux (OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Debian), and they were all horribly broken in different ways - Ubuntu wouldn’t even show comprehensible boot messages over the serial port.

I tried FreeBSD, and it booted perfectly the first time and all the hardware worked properly.

I think FreeBSD is just a lot more focused on server/infrastructure hardware.

[pstrateman]

For some reason Linux distros mostly default to not sending anything over the serial port, even when they can't find a video device.

To get everything you need to have GRUB, the kernel, and inittab configured to use the serial port.

Once you've done that it all works, but yeah annoying.