Why you shouldn't run a BSD on a PC?
michal.sapka.me
michal.sapka.me
Nvidia also supports FreeBSD directly:
https://www.nvidia.de/Download/driverResults.aspx/224024/en-...
I don't really get the point of the article, around 2010 one could have said exactly the same (and still can) about vendors not supporting Linux.
Don't use BSD/Linux on "pc" except when everything work's as intended?
Is Visual Studio running on Linux? No? Oh that's why i need a Windows-VM on FreeBSD...and Linux.
Just use Windows, people....but just if everything works ;)
Every single criticism made of BSDs here was true of Linux too 20 years ago. In some cases, 10 years ago. Linux became popular on dev machines, so vendors of hardware and software started to prioritise support. It wasn't the other way around.
One of the reasons why Apple made such big waves in the late 2000s and early 2010s is you could get a decent (BSD) unix user land with unix-like network and file APIs to dev against and you didn't need to worry about graphics card, bluetooth or wifi drivers. I moved to OS X in 2010 for that specific reason, because not only was it hard work playing with FreeBSD on a laptop, but it was just as hard on Linux: you either needed one of the handful of Thinkpad or Dell models where the hard work had been done already, or give up.
And as for BSD "distributions" being different in fundamental ways that Linux distributions aren't: that's a feature, not a bug.
OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD have fundamentally different priorities baked right into the lowest layers and smallest corners of kernel and user land, on purpose.
This is a good thing, because it breeds new ideas without being encumbered by a single monolithic vision. You can choose the right OS for the right context.
Try this with Linux. Try getting something into it that Linus doesn't like. For example, try changing the kernel architecture fundamentals, or deciding that huge swathes of the kernel need re-writing to make it more portable or fundamentally more secure by design.
In BSD this happened, there was a fork, that's OK.
I'm not saying that Linux isn't portable. I'm not saying it isn't secure. I'm saying design decisions about portability and security are traded off against other factors in a way that doesn't happen in NetBSD or OpenBSD.
And this article might lead people into thinking "Well, why does it even exist? It seems like a complete waste of time". It isn't. There are good reasons for each BSD to exist, and they're worth exploring. Each of them is better than Linux in its own specific way. Is that way important to you? I don't know, because I'm not you. You need to figure that out all by yourself, so I won't write a long article without constructive help and a google fodder headline telling you about how awful some corner of the World is, and I'll just encourage you to go take a look at all the BSDs and see if any of them appeal to you. Godspeed.
Also, on the headline/title: I can't be the only person who can't stand this style that has emerged, presumably to get better search ranking, can I? It's a grammar crime that leads the reader into using a high-rising terminal to make sense of it. It would be better to make it a statement (remove the question mark: "Why you shouldn't run a BSD on a PC"), or reworded as a grammatically correct question ("Why shouldn't you run BSD on a PC?"), or even better get rid of the Google fodder ("Drawbacks to running BSDs on a PC").