So I’m learning about BSD at the moment, specifically FreeBSD, and I’d like to have it run on my saptop full time. I’ve gone through some distros, (ghost, dragonfly, TrueOS) and I’m trying to learn what I can actually do on it.
My goals are simple.
Firefox 57
Libreoffice + Abiword
Steam
Wine
GEdit / Some IDE
Problem is FreeBSD is way over my head at the moment and none of the distros… Work. Networking in Ghost is shit, the installer for DragonFly “works” and I can set up Xorg, but then a bunch of shit crosses over and breaks… And then TrueOS is just a pile of shit.
I’m about ready to just spend a week learning about FreeBSD and running the live CD until I’m happy enough with it to burn down my laptop and just go for it.
So am I going to be able to do all the stuff I want to in the listed apps above?
Does the linux ABI work well? (I read yesterday that in 2015 it had 2.6.4 compatibility but was shit for anything made in the last 7 years)
Am I just going to get lost?
Is there a normal desktop user community or am I going in the wrong direction for this?
Also as a last bit, how well does BSD work on servers?
My environment is very minimal, and I have most of those things (not Steam).
I did pkg install for xorg, gnome3, firefox, x11/nvidia-driver-340, libreoffice, and sublimetext. Pretty sure that was all I had to do. I tweaked /boot/loader.conf and /etc/rc.conf to start Gnome and nVidia.
I’m still getting intimate with the portsnap feature, but pkg search and pkg install does most of what I want and need.
Not from my experience. Out of the box, brand new installation of FreeBSD 11.1, I ran pkg update, pkg install sudo, and then went through the process above.
I’m still learning, too lol. But I have a 1920x1080 60hz Gnome3 environment. I also use i3 when I’m in the mood, so I’ve installed i3, i3status, i3lock, dmenu, and compton as well
You should be good with Firefox, libre Office, wine and gedit. Steam can be run using the Linux compatibility layer, see: https://github.com/SteamOnFreeBSD/SteamOnFreeBSD/blob/master/README.md though performance may be reduced.
BSD does have Wayland I believe and lumina is being developed to work with Wayland. Soon ™
The default Linux ABI is compatible with CentOS 6.9. there is a CentOS 7 compatibility available but you can’t have both at the same time and 7 isn’t compatible with the NVIDIA drivers.
As for servers, I hear Netflix uses FreeBSD on some of their servers so, take from that what you will.