Why FreeBSD

also see FreeBSDᛦ

Why FreeBSD (on the Desktop)?

TLDR: It works!

I’m running FreeBSD on my laptop since about half a year. Putting a FreeBSD sticker on it made people ask if I “really run FreeBSD on a laptop” and if so “why???”? (Hint: nothing to do with init systems, I couldn’t care less about that).

I’ve been running FreeBSD on servers for 10+ years and Debian and/or Ubuntu on Desktops/Laptops and Servers for about the same time (though I mostly used Mac OS X on Laptops until about 4 years ago), so this is mostly a comparison of FreeBSD vs Debian/Ubuntu and what I like about FreeBSD I could probably get from another Linux distro.

Reasons for FreeBSD

  • ZFS: I like my data and doing backups with zxfer to a remote server works reallllly well
  • stable base system (like Debian stable) but (almost) everything that isn’t part of the (base) system is pretty new
  • ports AND packages (which work pretty well together these days)
  • no (commercial) games

Reasons against FreeBSD

  • no (commercial) games
  • no (other) commercial software, but e.g. Skype should run with the Linuxator
  • OpenCL, CUDA, Vulkan not available or limited

Will I keep running FreeBSD? Yes!

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