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Comment by btw0 | Hacker News Reader

Fewer and fewer people are using FreeBSD, and it's starting to cause real problems. Bugs in ports can't get enough notice. Right now, `htop', an essential tool for me, has been malfunctioning for months:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/159728

At the moment, the built-in GPU in newer CPU (core i3/i5/i7) simply doesn't work in FreeBSD, people have to buy discrete older cards for graphics. Yes, they are paying someone to work on the part in kernel which will make it possible to support these newer CPUs, but who knows when it will come.

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This sounds like the standard "BSD is dying" canard from Slashdot and elsewhere, and without substantiation it doesn't merit a top spot in this discussion. BSD has been and remains a server-first OS, with desktop support for the latest and greatest processors trailing Linux by a substantial margin. On widely-deployed hardware, support is generally equivalent, and I'm quite pleased with recent releases for headless servers.

I certainly understand the server-first perspective. From a perspective of a guy who values having the same underlying OS as his desktop and server, its a problem. I tried using "OS X [desktop] and FreeBSD [server]" as a mix for a few years and then switched to "OS X and ubuntu server", now moved on to "mint and ubuntu server".

I don't need a desktop that does everything. Just recent versions of skype, firefox, and thunderbird. Also sometimes a simple GUI file manager is useful.

GEM/KMS has already been ported. The code in the BETAs has worked on my machines. It looks likely to be available in the next release. htop is written for Linux. It only works on FreeBSD due to Linux procfs emulation.

Maybe because it's a pain in the butt to install it? Honestly, I tried FreeBSD 8 two weeks ago, and until there's an easier to way to install it, I can't imagine many people will be interested in it.

If you're looking for a desktop install of FreeBSD, I highly recommend PC-BSD. It's more or less to FreeBSD what Ubuntu is to Debian. It's still a little rough around the edges, but it's a lot more straightforward to get set up than vanilla FreeBSD.

I was curious about BSD...found PC-BSD and it was easy enough to get going.

Thank you. I'll give it a whirl later this week.

The FreeBSD handbook [1] has an excellent guide on installing FreeBSD from start to finish, as well as explaining all the options of the installer, where to get more help, and how to get the most out of your FreeBSD experience.

[1]: http://freebsd.org/handbook/

Is this problem due to fewer people using it, or fewer people contributing? I know there's a lot of overlap in open source, but the latter could be a real problem.

htop is a tool that was written specifically for Linux, the fact that it works on FreeBSD using linprocfs at all is amazing. Using an older function still works.

BSD's legacy lives on via Mac OS X (sort of)

Or every time someone has to make a goshdarn socket syscall on any platform…

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