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by chespinoza 1656 days ago
FreeBSD on your desktop pc? I tried it long time ago but the graphic supports wasn't as great, interested in checking it again.
2 comments

Laptop and Desktop, though I am cheating a bit. I just use the Intel integrated graphics on FreeBSD, since I'm still dual-booting Windows for Video production and gaming. Media consumption, programming and office stuff works just as fine on the integrated graphics in my case. So I don't know how the graphics card support plays out. Let's go with half-daily driver maybe :]

My personal pain points are bluetooth support and gamepad support being a bit of a mess.

Next big stepping stone for me is a Windows VM + http://looking-glass.io , which side-steps the graphics card driver question and doesn't require two monitors, though I don't know how hard that is to setup on FreeBSD.

Yeah bluetooth on my NUC hangs the kernel while booting. It's definitely a weak spot. I turned it off in the BIOS as I didn't need it (nor do I need WiFi). But it would have been nice to have.
oh that's a shame, I don't have a bluetooth chip in my pc, but was thinking in adding one, anyone knows if docker works fine in FreeBSD?
What I gathered from trying to get a PS5 DualSense running on FreeBSD ( https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/playstation-5-dualsense-c... ) is the following: BlueTooth 2.1 has full support. BlueTooth 4.0 has support only for Audio playback, anything else is unsupported. Thus if you get a BT2.1 USB dongle, Mice and keyboards should run fine as documented here: https://www.tspi.at/2020/02/18/fbsdbtmouse.html PS3 controller works via BlueTooth problem free via btsixad, DualSense and PS4 controller lacks drivers.

Using just jails on my servers, no idea about docker.

Yeah I think it's just the particular Bluetooth controller in my NUC being difficult. I didn't spend time investigating as I didn't need it anyway.
I think docker can be made to work but it's a tech that is heavily based on Linux containerisation. I think it's currently broken, as per https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker

FreeBSD has its own mechanism for that which is jails (and which predates docker!). If you're not using docker containers you pull from docker hub, I would recommend to use jails.

I use it too, on an Intel NUC. It works just fine, no issues. I am using X however, I heard Wayland is currently broken.

One thing I like is that the team maintaining the desktop apps is very responsive. Usually new KDE versions are pushed to latest within a day or so.

>I heard Wayland is currently broken

I can vouch for the complete opposite. I use sway, an i3 like Wayland compositor (compositor = window manager in the confusing wayland lingo), and its completely problem free, only changing kern.evdev.rcpt_mask to get input working and specifying a sway socket file thingy is needed. (Something I am confused as to why package maintainers don't set by default) Maybe the wayland mode of other Window Managers is broken, which can have both X11 and Wayland modes.

Oh ok, I heard this in the IRC channel. Maybe it was just someone who was having issues. Someone mentioned about wayland and one of the maintainers was like "Yeah we know, it's broken, working on it". It was probably some specific. Sorry for the incorrect information.

I use KDE by the way, I know of sway but never used it.