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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Can you go a bit more in detail why Net vs Free? I would LOVE to replace Linux (Fedora) with one of the BSD's. It's philosophy and everything basically suits me far more than anything else, but I need CUDA, I need Nvidia drivers, I like to play with ML, I need few more things like that which makes it a no go as far as I'm aware.

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You probably have a herculean challenge ahead with the Nvidia / CUDA stuff. A couple years ago I got an R stack up and going on OpenBSD, and that took some deep dives to get all my packages working. It was rewarding and worked well, but it wasn’t something I’d do under deadline.

NVidia on the other hand seems like a far harder problem than needing to patch some C code here and there. NVidia make the drivers that they make. AMD has been more open source friendly these days, which is good if you want 3D graphics, but doesn’t solve the CUDA issue.

nvidia makes official drivers for FreeBSD, but last time I checked they did not include CUDA.

Is it possible to work with a CUDA with GPU passthrough?

Forgive me if you've already heard this a lot, but Slackware is often described as being a very "BSD-like" Linux and might be another way to get some of the philosophy you're seeking.

Another option is Void Linux, which is explicitly inspired by NetBSD.

Now, that's a name I haven't heard of in years, decades even! I'll check them out!

I've been using Slackware as my main desktop OS for a few years now (on my main personal and work laptops, plus my primary desktop; most of my other machines run OpenBSD, with the notable exceptions of one running Haiku and one currently running 9front). So far I've been overwhelmingly happy with it.

Indeed, Slackware, Void, or Arch. Or since the parent poster seems to be somewhat into scientific computing, NixOS could also be interesting. NixOS is like having virtualenvs for everything.

I'm in creative, but do a lot of graphics and video programming and research for fun and profit, as well as programming for the fun of it! One of these days I'm going to try Qubes OS and try playing with different OS' at the same time!

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