What makes BSD stand out as its own system? I’ve been thinking about installing it in a new computer mainly for reading but I don’t know much about it.
It’s great for certain use-cases that don’t require a lot of hardware support. But don’t go trying to use it on your laptop.
I use FreeBSD for my website and I’m actually pretty happy with it, the simplicity is a strong selling point.
It does feel sometimes like the documentation is written with a lot of assumed knowledge though, which makes it difficult to know what terms to use to find what you’re looking for… e.g. figuring out how to do major version upgrades did not feel straightforward.
It’s so old and rigid. But it’s stable and worth consideration. I put it in a similar camp as Debian. That said, I haven’t used it in years so I don’t really know the current state of things.
OpenBSD is my go to for super-security though.
Its a base layer of several other, really good operating systems but I wouldnt use it by itself. If you want something lightweight just install ubuntu or mint.
Ubuntu and Mint are relatively heavyweight Linux distros, but still much lighter than Windows.
It’s worth messing around with! OpenBSD, too.
It will certainly deepen my knowledge about operating systems. Messing with alternatives to grub and all that.
Not sure about the BSDs, but for Linux you don’t actually need GRUB anymore these days. On modern (i.e. UEFI) systems, you can boot the kernel directly as an EFI binary (this is known as EFISTUB booting).
I wish I could figure that out. I’ve tried FreeBSD on my laptop, but Bluetooth wouldn’t work, I couldn’t install Signal, and basic apps I use daily are not available on FreeBSD. I’m not sure who uses it or what they use it for.
I’ve definitely heard of it!
I like using FreeBSD, the setup feels a lot nicer and more coherent than Linux in a lot of ways. I mainly tried it for native zfs.
The only downside is that nobody knows it exists so I have to compile things myself a lot or even patch it to get it to compile.
It’s too niche to be discussed in a generic asklemmy thread.
