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Is there anyone here who uses BSD on their desktop? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I tried it recently, but eventually gave up. It had so many little and not-so-little issues on my laptop, which I solved one by one over 2 weeks, reading and learning a lot. Even recompiled the kernel with a custom patch to get energy management to work.

Then I did a speed test on Wi-Fi, and it capped out at 6MBit (I have a Gigabit connection). The solution apparently is to install a Wi-Fi network adapter inside a Linux VM and connect to that on boot.
That's when I went back to Debian where everything just works out of the box on my PC.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've had the same issues with BSD distros over the decades, always giving those devs the benefit of the doubt that they would get around to fixing various driver bullshit for older hardware eventually, and they never do.

Meanwhile a bleeding edge distro like my Arch setup runs on a piece of shit Celeron two-threaded dual-core with 3Gb RAM old as fuck Chromebook just fine.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, 99% of BSD's probably run in a VM.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh, that's an interesting point. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's something I definitely hadn't considered.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

If most BSDs are running on the likes of AWS and azure (which wouldn't surprise me) then it could well be true

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

That reminds me of the oldschool Realtek WiFi cards which required you to run drivers through WINE just to have WiFi on Linux. It really is excellent to see how far it’s come. I have a cheap Chinese laptop with a celeron chip (jasper lake) that I use as essentially a thin client. Installing windows fresh: trackpad doesn’t work, audio doesn’t work, WiFi 6 card driver is a generic MS one that caps at 5mb a sec until I install the right Realtek drivers, graphics aren’t accelerated until I install intel’s drivers. Installing Linux: everything works out of the box, just need to install the right graphics drivers for accelerated graphics to work. Only sad spot is the fingerprint reader is just flat out not supported in Linux. Lol if I tried hard I guess I could hook up WINE to run it like the old days

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I cant figure out why windows is still popular!

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

BSD isn't really a competitor to Windows, try installing Windows 11 on your router and report back.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

Windows CE skeletal hand shoots out of the ground in a cemetery somewhere

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Instructions unclear, router stuck in pooper.