[pseudostem]

1. Servers, I'm partial to openBSD because of a saner IMO /etc and works-out-of-the-box (for me). My coworker is the more freebsd kind and since he does the work, his opinion prevails.

2. I moved houses 3 days ago. Had installed MX linux prior to moving on my desktop computer. Today, no DHCP IP on my computer. Man and apropos didn't help much. Ifconfig, arp don't exist. They require an apt install. I'm clueless as to what's happening. GUI tools didn't help much. So yeah to all predictable systems including windows.

3. VSCode (which when I last checked a week ago didn't work on freebsd either) and a lot of other programs which aren't there on OpenBSD. NetBSD haven't touched, so won't comment.

4. Userland stuff. BSDs in general pitch themselves as complete OSs, but the whole getting X working is like assembling a GUI stack IMO.

5. Continuing from the previous point (yeah, I'm a hypocrite), a few hundred MBs of RAM and very little GHzs on the CPU gets you a fully functional Desktop environment. If a browser is needed, add a bit more RAM and maybe some CPU.

PS: I use really old hardware

[wkat4242]

Vscode works totally fine, I use it all the time. It's in the packages and ports.

[pseudostem]

I might be wrong, but VSCode didn't work (for me) on 13.x and I ran across a few forum posts for others who couldn't get it done either. I had very little time to figure out the right "distro", and VSCode was a requirement. Went to distrowatch, and installed the top choice (please don't roast me about it).

[wkat4242]

Hmm weird. Did you try to just do "sudo pkg install vscode" ?

Don't try to download it from the website, this won't work as freebsd is not a supported platform but it's simply in the package collection and works great as such.

[wkat4242]

Ps I wasn't trying to roast you at all. I'm happy you found a solution even if it's not FreeBSD <3

In general that's one of the things I like about the FreeBSD community. We don't really have this push to make it mainstream or to advocate it. If you like it welcome to the club. If you don't, that's fine too. We have no desire to see "the year of FreeBSD on the desktop" generally speaking.

I really like that lack of evangelism which is so common on Linux especially because of the distro wars.

[shiomiru]

> BSDs in general pitch themselves as complete OSs, but the whole getting X working is like assembling a GUI stack IMO.

FWIW, NetBSD comes with X & ctwm out of the box. (But of course it's not the same as a whole DE you get in Debian.)

[dizhn]

ifconfig (on most linuxes) has been deprecated because it doesn't support all network features anymore. You're meant to use "ip". It also does some of what used to be netstat/route. And there's 'ss' for the rest of netstat things.