I tried it recently, but eventually gave up. It had so many little and not-so-little issues on my laptop, which I solved one by one over 2 weeks, reading and learning a lot. Even recompiled the kernel with a custom patch to get energy management to work.
Then I did a speed test on Wi-Fi, and it capped out at 6MBit (I have a Gigabit connection). The solution apparently is to install a Wi-Fi network adapter inside a Linux VM and connect to that on boot.
That's when I went back to Debian where everything just works out of the box on my PC.
Yeah, I've had the same issues with BSD distros over the decades, always giving those devs the benefit of the doubt that they would get around to fixing various driver bullshit for older hardware eventually, and they never do.
Meanwhile a bleeding edge distro like my Arch setup runs on a piece of shit Celeron two-threaded dual-core with 3Gb RAM old as fuck Chromebook just fine.
That reminds me of the oldschool Realtek WiFi cards which required you to run drivers through WINE just to have WiFi on Linux. It really is excellent to see how far it’s come. I have a cheap Chinese laptop with a celeron chip (jasper lake) that I use as essentially a thin client. Installing windows fresh: trackpad doesn’t work, audio doesn’t work, WiFi 6 card driver is a generic MS one that caps at 5mb a sec until I install the right Realtek drivers, graphics aren’t accelerated until I install intel’s drivers. Installing Linux: everything works out of the box, just need to install the right graphics drivers for accelerated graphics to work. Only sad spot is the fingerprint reader is just flat out not supported in Linux. Lol if I tried hard I guess I could hook up WINE to run it like the old days
I see little reason to use any of the BSDs. Neither for desktops nor for servers. The only benefit I see is that you can take the BSD licensed code and use it to create a closed source product like the PlayStation without having to contribute anything back. I dislike that benefit with quite some intensity.
I ran FreeBSD on my home server for a while since the old TrueNAS versions use it. The supposed simplicity of BSD rings hollow to me as it is just another thing I'd have to learn. I also don't care much about the Unix philosophy or any other clerical reasons that distinguish the various BSDs. Computers and their OSes are a tool to me not a religion. Admittedly TrueNAS worked well for me, but reading up on the differences from Linux got old rather quickly. I migrated to the newer Debian Linux based TrueNAS Scale a couple of months ago because I feel more confident that if anything goes wrong I'd be able to fix it.
openbsd seems interesting to me, it's entire existence seems to be "secure OS" and i think that's rather respectable. I'll get around to messing with it some day.
From my little experience with working on BSD Servers, BSD is very reliable and for my use cases fast enough. But the slower updates and lack of most Wi-Fi support and sometimes spotty hardware support combined with the need for porting a lot of Linux software that dose not natively run on BSD is a deal breaker for using BSD on my Main Desktop Computer.
TLDR: For me BSD is a powerful tool that has a very specific job that is not being a Desktop Computer.
In juniper networking hardware. And many others. If you have the capability to create what's missing (drivers etc) it will work well. If you do not, well, there's shit tons of drivers for Linux.
I've been using FreeBSD for 20 years on my desktop. I've been also mainly using it because I was literally afraid of using Linux filesystems for data storage, when I learned how ZFS works.
Now with bcachefs the situation is different. It's nice to see an advanced filesystem on Linux, even it's still beta. I migrated my desktop to Linux, but will keep FreeBSD on my servers for a while, because it's less hassle for me.
Actually I stopped liking the FreeBSD community. They made a lot of drama in the past years and I stopped being active there. I haven't reported bugs anymore and fixed them privately or reported directly to upstream. I have many nice things running on servers, but I'm thinking about moving to Debian entirely.
I used OpenBSD on servers for years. I don't think it's suited as a daily driver, especially not with a desktop. I absolutely love pf and miss it dearly, though. iptables and nftables are utter shit compared to the glory that is pf. Yes, there is some hyperbole in that statement, but only some.
I personally have tried FreeBSD and some FreeBSD "distros" on the desktop, and have used *BSD-based stuff as servers/single-purpose machines.
As a desktop system (user-centric use case), you notice how hardware support is sometimes problematic, especially on laptops. I personally had problems with NVIDIA GPUs, already a problem on Linux, being a big problem here as well, and don't mention WiFi (FreeBSD doesn't support 802.11ac and up currently) or Bluetooth. Software-wise, if your applications do not have a *BSD version, well, then you are relying on Linux ports, which for desktop use isn't exactly great.
But, in servers/headless setups, *BSDs are shining, with the most important things running rock-solid, stable and resource-friendly.
For the sake of her "they've hacked me" paranoia, my crazy sister made me install OpenBSD on her crappy PC three-four years ago (Intel i3 and a mechanical disk). She stopped using the PC altogether like 6 months after that. It wasn't really bad, everything seemed to work, taking in account the limitations of the hardware. The upgrade procedure irked me, though - mostly, realizing that you have to be reading documentation constantly even for a freaking minor version upgrade.
Still this made me try FreeBSD on my PC, only to realize after a couple days that pkg/pkgsrc are utter shit compared to Portage. Alas Gentoo/BSD is long gone, otherwise I'd love to try it.
