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Comment by eindiran | Hacker News Reader

I was considering setting up a new desktop machine with either OpenBSD or DesktopBSD (which is based on FreeBSD). Does anyone have any recommendations on which to choose? Any interesting experiences using BSD as a daily driver?

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I've been using FreeBSD on my desktop and notebook for the past 3 years and I have nothing to complain!

Granted, I do not have the habit of playing games or using large, unsupported software (say, Photoshop and friends). My daily applications consist of Emacs and Firefox, so my feedback may be limited in scope.

I'm not sure what the status is, but last I checked Electron did not work on FreeBSD. If you use something Electron-based, you might want to take a look at it.

I also am unable to access my iPhone filesystem and to watch Netflix movies. But for both cases, I blame the vendor and not FreeBSD. A VM on bhyve quickly solves the problem.

What kind of overhead does bhyve have? Is it on the order of KVM?

Overhead for the host, or the guest? Host is comparable — majority of the cost will be memory allocated to the guest.

Guest overhead will vary by workload. I know for example that virtio-net performance lags Linux, because virtio-net was designed for Linux skb's and doesn't align well with FreeBSD's mbufs. Give it a shot and see how it compares, I guess.

I'm using netbsd as my daily driver. If you got some free time to play with FOSS it can be great. I can dive into a lot of fields and it's a lot easier to edit out the sources and change out parts on the BSDs than most places. You can easily read the source code for everything you use.

While rough around the edges, it can be comfortable enough that I forget about it most of the time.

All the BSDs are better if you're not using the shiniest of hardware, they do eventually get hardware support for things, but not always at day zero.

Speaking for FreeBSD as my desktop, no, no interesting experiences to report. I ran my law office for almost 10 years on FreeBSD straying only to Windows to run accounting software. Please consider the lack of interesting experiences a positive from someone who views an interesting tool as a thing to study but probably not something to rely on day in day out.

I have had good experiences with both of them. In my fairly limited experience with both of them on the same laptop, OpenBSD worked better with the hardware. ACPI, battery, graphics, and a few other things worked much better than with FreeBSD (less tweaking for basic hardware stuff).

From a philosophy perspective, OpenBSD seems to prefer sane defaults and a complete base system. For the laptop, I needed to install no packages to get a fully functioning system (minus a web browser; that was the first and only thing I installed). I had to do more “basic” configuration on Free than on Open, but I ended up doing quite a bit on both.

OpenBSD has a somewhat strange update system, where patches to stable packages are not provided, requiring you to either build updated packages yourself, follow —current, or use a third party (M:Tier, for instance).

My recommendation is to try both and see which works better on your hardware and which philosophy makes more sense to you. They’re both great operating systems.

OpenBSD if you don't mind the performance hit. It does feel a little bit slower when browsing the web for example. I don't mind.

The installation is very quick and then it just work on my t470. Documentation is excellent. Try it.

I found OpenBSD in my brief stint to be too useless as a desktop. The installer is quite hostile and stupid (and I don't mean advanced or unix-like before someone tries to defend it; it's actually hostile and retarded. It wiped my gpt table without asking me). The performance was terrible out of the box. It couldn't saturate a standard gigabit Ethernet link on my w530 in iperf, scp etc. pkg management was really slow. pkg_add takes ages like a windows 95 machine. And it doesn't have a standard package update mechanism without relying on a third party like mtier. All in all, the impression I got from using OpenBSD was that it's best used either as an ingredient like OpenSSH in other better operating systems, or maybe for some other specific use cases where these flaws can be overlooked.

This is surprising. When did you last try it? A fresh install of 6.4 feels very lean and mean although a little sluggish when browsing the web for example. OpenBSD just feels really solid and simple, but powerful if you want it to be. The whole system feels very well integrated, nothing out of place. For my purposes I much prefer pledge to seccomp. It is much easier for me to use one of pledges' system call subsets, risking allowing a little bit more than necessary, than doing the equivalent in seccomp. Sure it might be more fine-grained, but I won't bother. I guess nothing stops developers from adding their own pledge syscall subsets to their kernel and recompile it, thus getting closer to seccomp control.

However my box doesn't feel as snappy as a lean Debian 9 install with xfce4. You have to decide if that's a dealbreaker :)

Use TrueOS https://www.trueos.org/downloads/ It's FreeBSD based and has a company behind it.

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