Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Why you shouldn't run a BSD on a PC (michal.sapka.me)
4 points by d-s 791 days ago
2 comments

<grin>

Over the weekend I tried to install FreeBSD on my everyday Linux machine. OK, I should probably have gone with 13.x but chose instead to go with 14.0.

I ran into the case where I need an intel graphics driver to run X, but when I load that driver the whole machine just hangs. Seemingly, there's no solution out of that 'either/or' at all.

Just to prove I am a masochist, I will try to install FreeBSD 14.0 on my laptop which is about 12 months older than my desktop.

"Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result."

Oh my, what a load of incoherent drivel.
I found it to be a coherent argument that is aptly summed up in the end:

You can think of the problems as something one may have had trying to run RedHat on a computer with a winmodem back in 1999. It’s not an OS that gets out of the way allowing you to get stuff done. You need to enjoy making it work for you. Otherwise, all you will find is annoyance and a swift OS change.

Far from it, matches my personal experience. I have a maxim saying "no BSD on my machine" coming from days when no Linux/Unix was really ready for the out-of-the box experience; it was all a lot of fumbling and guessing and tweaking before you got a running system. Even then BSDs stood out as being always the one that got that extra remark in how to compile a given piece of software.

I actually lifted the ban for a number of Hack- and real Mcintoshes, only to, of course, discover that a bajillion of tools are ever-so-slightly different in their behaviors from the resto of the world, a.k.a. Linux.

BSD on your home machine means you can say hello to a seemingly endless series of special-casing and make-do solutions. Nope, not me.

Anyone is free to tell me why FreeBSD at all when we have Debian, Mint, whatever; it is extremely unlikely any of those arguments will make me try this thing again tho.