BSD or Linux, Laptop or Server

An interesting post on hardware compatibility that popped up on my Mastodon feed

Never really had any hardware issues It’s mostly been software issues and my own comfort with BSD having used UNIX systems before Linux existed

There’s also the Desktop debate in there
GhostBSD runs great on my old Lenovo laptop Streaming with three cams to Twitch was the most intensive use so far

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I used to run FreeBSD-CURRENT and regularly build everything from source (and using synth with ports because poudriere doesn’t work as well as synth on a single system).

I gave up FreeBSD on the desktop because hardware enablement happened at a much slower pace than on Linux (e.g. drm-kmod is still based on linux kernel 5.15 tree), and I usually run my machine with fairly recent hardware. There are also some minor annoyances that contributed to the switch to Linux on the desktop, such as termcap vs terminfo (and the associated issues of ports linking to ncurses in base by default)

I’ve since switched to a BSD-like Linux distro for my desktop usage, initially Alpine Linux, then later Void Linux, and have been very happy for the past five years or so.

On the other hand, all my personal servers are running on -RELEASE and never had any real issues with it. Well, with the exception that I left one server running for 4 years without touching it, then decided to pkg update one day and broke everything due to pkg ABI changes :sweat_smile: (But it was quickly recovered with a simple and quick freebsd-update, though having a stable ABI for once would be nice)

But should we judge an OS by how it runs on our personal laptop?

If you have a laptop and no servers, I think it’s totally fair to judge an OS by how well it runs on your laptop.

I’m an OpenBSD fanboi, but this is a stupid argument. It has nothing to do with BSD or Linux.

This person has a collection of ancient Intel hardware. Likely selected because it was supported well on BSD.

That said…

My Ryzen laptops would hard freeze on Linux, but worked fine on OpenBSD. I eventually got rid of that laptop because the support for Linux was so bad in comparison.

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