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by mrlemke 1556 days ago
Why do you want to run a BSD?

I am not particularly interested in the above, except power management and wifi. I am trying GhostBSD as an alternative specifically because I am not interested in Gnome, Wayland, or Steam. I don't hate them, just don't care. I may go simpler and just use CTWM and cobble together a desktop environment.

I am genuinely curious what running these things on a BSD gets you that you can't get with Linux. Using a mainstream distro (like Debian or Fedora) gets you this without hassle.

1 comments

Why BSD? Because I trust the competence of BSD developers a lot more than linux developers. Furthermore, I don't want to contribute to monoculturization of IT by stuffing the penguin into every single thing in sight.

The question rather is... why would anyone want to run linux when *BSD (and illumos) are available?

"Why BSD?" wasn't the question. I have already read a lot of the arguments about that particular question. If I were to generalize my question to ladyanita22, it would be, "Why would you want to run a BSD for Gnome, Wayland, Steam/Proton, and other generally Linux software, instead of running it directly on Linux where it is supported best?"

What does the user get out of running a BSD for Linux software that they can't get out of Linux? If you prefer BSD, then why not use software that is better tailored for BSD rather than software that requires porting and changing or removing all of the Linux specific bits?

The problem is that software used to be portable and worked well on !linux systems. Little by little majority of important FOSS development is heading towards linux-specific EEE, I feel, and that is setting a dangerous precedent...
As a follow up to add more context. Yes, the hassle of getting GNOME running on NetBSD or FreeBSD or OpenBSD has been more recent. GNOME used to be pretty portable, but then some dependencies on systemd specifics and other 'linuxisms' got injected into GNOME and now patches have to be written where patches didn't have to be written in order to run GNOME on the BSDs.