[superuser2]

OSX is very good at not having hardware compatibility issues, and you don't need to interact with it very much to open VirtualBox. While this is not the most performant option (OSX idles with a good chunk of RAM), it is probably the easiest and most reliable path to not worrying about hardware compatibility, drivers, etc.

[jrgifford]

"OS X is very good at not having hardware compatibility issues" is a really, really old (and flawed) argument.

The thing that makes OS X so darn "stable" is that they write drivers for a very limited set of hardware - the reference implementation.

On the Linux reference implementation, everything works properly (See the ThinkPad T series).

On the Windows reference implementation, everything works properly (See the Surface).

Simply because something works when it's built for a piece of hardware (think embedded systems) doesn't mean that it will work when running on something that it wasn't designed for.

[superuser2]

>Simply because something works when it's built for a piece of hardware (think embedded systems) doesn't mean that it will work when running on something that it wasn't designed for.

No one is advocating doing that. And no one gives a shit about how hard it was for the engineers.

You should buy a Macbook precisely because it is a reference implementation that works as a consumer product. Let OSX deal with laptop-y details like WiFi, screen brightness, battery/power management, suspend/resume, and device drivers. Let VirtualBox abstract away those details so FreeBSD behaves like it does on its reference implementation - server hardware.

[RexRollman]

I've been doing that with NetBSD and VMWare Fusion on my 2013 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM. It's nice but I do miss running NetBSD on bare hardware.

OS X does add a lot of overhead and I would love to run NetBSD on a dedicated hypervisor. In particular I want to try with the free Hyper-V Server because it has such great hardware/driver support but HVS doesn't support wireless networking.

[brudgers]

Running a virtualized instance of BSD does not point toward or away from any particular host OS or piece of laptop hardware. Virtualization brings all brands and Operating Systems into the mix.

[octix]

I personally hate it, but my wife loves it. We don't argue and I just don't use it.

That said, you just cannot compare an OS running natively (is that a word?) with a VM.

[biot]

The typical phrase is "on bare metal".

[pekk]

While we're changing the subject, why not Windows and VirtualBox? By the time we've proposed OS X instead of *BSD, we've proposed everything.