On hold atm. Will start playing with FreeBSD in VM sooner or later.
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OK. Laptop’s dead. Anything but command line crashes the machine.
I suppose the Radeon graphics is toast.
Had windows 7 on it, crashes on desktop.
Put ubuntu minimal, crashes on gnome display manager.
Wont bother with BSD on this machine.
been running FreeBSD in my edge network for DNS and mail relay since… 2003.
Would there be any practical use for BSD on my Lenovo T420, or should I just keep using it to run TAILS?
Practical use case: test things, contribute
The BSD hype kinda gets me interested as well.
I’m pretty curious about trying this out, to figure out the differences,
between BSD and Linux, and what the actual benefits and negatives are,
between the two systems.
I forgot to come on this post when I finished my 1 year challenge with pfSense (not that I used it that much, outside VPN home and RDP on my desktop).
Does my Netgate ID even matter? I won’t buy support for this anyway. I always censored it, but I forgot before I uploaded the picture, so… whatever. I had to reboot it in order to finally update the system, the update wouldn’t work from the web interface (nothing a SSH connection couldn’t do). After a restart, I updated from the console, then restarted again, looked through the settings and finally enabled AES-NI encryption and here’s a screenshot done right now:
Well here’s something interesting.
OpenBSD has been my favorite OS because of its superior documentation and simplicity for some time now. But I haven’t had the chance to really try it because of its somewhat lacking hardware (read graphics) support compared to Linux. But guess what. THEY HAVE AMDGPU NOW!!! Though it’s in -current. So naturally, I went ahead and downloaded a -current snapshot and booted. Turns out amdgpu is disabled in the default kernel conf. After reading FAQ, I compiled my own kernel with amdgpu enabled and BOOM! R9 Fury working right here 
Just to be sure, I’m compiling X11 from current as well. Hopefully it will get me a newer Mesa, otherwise I would have to compile that too.
Next stop, GNOME3 and Mesa testing.
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Another challenge. Apparently the automatic partitioning doesn’t allocate enough free space to /usr and /usr/src so one will eventually run out of space in the middle of compiling. So I just have to tar-backup /usr/src and /usr/obj and reinstall the system with better partition sizes.
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That’s pretty impressive. Good job. Welcome to the challenge thread!
OpenBSD has a pretty cool (and weird lol) community.
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In general BSD is
- a lot more lightweight
- a lot more driven by shell scripts, makefiles, etc. more “the unix way”
- easier to administer with a text editor
- splits the OS into “base” and “packages” you can easily run the latest version whatever package without having to run bleeding edge core OS.
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You had me at
You lost me at
That said now I wanna try it with R9 270X. 
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That actually sounds pretty interesting.
Yeah it works pretty well.
That’s my major gripe with Linux actually. You want bleeding edge package X? You need to run a bleeding edge distro… or compile from source.
Compiling from source via ports is braindead simple in FreeBSD, and even without doing that the packages tree is updated independently of the OS.
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It’s like an extreme version of Arch forumes. If you don’t RTFM or read the FAQ and the answer to your question is there, your question will at best be ignored. At worst, you would never dare to ask a question on the mailing list again 
I know, don’t judge lol. It’ll take some time before I learn xmonad
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Challenges challenges. GDM doesn’t seem to be able to load gnome-session. It seems to be a driver problem, because vesa driver works fine. I removed GNOME and installed Xfce and started it with xenodm. It comes up, accelerated and all, but the mouse is weird. It’s got the cross icon all the time and doesn’t seem to change. Gotta hit the mailing lists and see what’s going on. Until then, here’s a screenshot!
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Cursor issue solved. It’s amazing what one can achieve by modifying xorg.conf.
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And just like that, you have my attention again.
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I been using Pfsence and Freenas for over a year now, its been pretty rock solid.
Never used it for the desktop. I like what has been said about it for the desktop, but it seems its really limiting like gaming and windows gaming with Passthrough. at least i have not seen anything about it
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