Their ports to older non-x86 stuff does work well but I can't justify using it as a desktop OS. Too many compromises you have to make without a lot of benefit IME.
I find with the BSDs is that it is difficult to look up how to do something quick via a web search. Yes that is a man page that will tell you how to use whatever, but knowing where you are supposed to look to solve "why doesn't two button scroll work" isn't immediately obvious.
I was mucking around with FreeBSD on my old laptop and it works well and it isn't too bad to get stuff going if you are following the handbook, there is still that "how do I get <thing> working". I think the OS is good underneath, but I kinda want two finger scrolling to kinda work when I install cinnamon and X.
Debian is at the stage now of install, you have desktop and most stuff just works at least on a x86-64 system. If I want to install anything, it is download deb / flatpak and I am done.
> BSD documentation is great because it the systems change so little you don't find twenty out of date references on how to configure your DHCP client.
While there are a out of date tutorials in Linux land, at least I can find out how I might do something and then I can figure things out from there. I do know how to use the man page system, however simply knowing what to look for is the biggest challenge.
e.g I was trying to configure two finger scrolling. The freebsd wiki itself appeared out of date. So it looks like you use libinput X driver package (which I forgot the name of now) and do some config in X. It would be nice if this was covered in the handbook as I think a lot of people would like two finger scrolling working on their laptops.
> But as a desktop OS, yes they lack in a lot of areas, mainly hardware support/laptop support.
Actually FreeBSD appears quite well hardware wise at least on some of the hardware I have. My laptops are all boring corp business refurbs that I know work well with Linux/BSDs.
The problem is that often I require using software which does not work on FreeBSD/OpenBSD or is difficult to configure.
The other issue is that there are things that appear to be broken for quite a while that are in pkgs (at least with FreeBSD) so trying to configure a VM with a desktop resolution over something relatively low isn't possible at least with Qemu.
I find with the BSDs is that it is difficult to look up how to do something quick via a web search. Yes that is a man page that will tell you how to use whatever, but knowing where you are supposed to look to solve "why doesn't two button scroll work" isn't immediately obvious.
I was mucking around with FreeBSD on my old laptop and it works well and it isn't too bad to get stuff going if you are following the handbook, there is still that "how do I get <thing> working". I think the OS is good underneath, but I kinda want two finger scrolling to kinda work when I install cinnamon and X.
Debian is at the stage now of install, you have desktop and most stuff just works at least on a x86-64 system. If I want to install anything, it is download deb / flatpak and I am done.