Hacker News

What is sad is that even though Linux now has hardware support that is miles ahead of Windows, we've exchanged one problem with another, because nowadays most of the hardware I see is only supported on Linux and nothing else.

Even on PCs, latest generation AMD graphics cards (already >1yr old) are not supported in _anything_ other than Linux (and Windows). This is just sad.

I am not negative about it at all. I love it.

It's not as polished as linux obviously, especially for desktop usage but the maintainers are very much on the ball (and they do a lot of work to get things to compile and work, there's a lot of linuxisms they have to work around).

>It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this

I think it's because this chart continues a trend I've noticed with BSD zealots. Namely, there's some sort of reality distortion effect at play.

Consider that there are obvious bullshit scores on TFA, like giving a laptop 9/10 when the fucking wifi doesn't work. In reality, this should be 5/10 or arguably 0/10. After all, what use is a laptop without wifi? If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere; I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.

On top of that there was a while here where every BSD thread had:

- a comment about how BSD powers the PlayStation, Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license so won't you please subsidize these giant corps by donating to BSD?

- people who argue BSD is superior because it's "more cohesive" and "feels cleaner" or similar

- OpenBSD zealots claiming it's 110% secure because trust me bro

Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing with no flaws, when reality is that it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way.

I have no problem with BSD, and I have two boxes in my basement running freeBSD right now, but I'm not delusional about BSD's limitations.

From the link: "Note: The inbuilt WiFi chip is not natively supported by FreeBSD, so you will need to (temporarily) use a USB WiFi or Ethernet dongle, or (as I will explain) copy some files from a different system to the Macbook. You could also just transplant a different chip into the system."

You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.

To be fair, Linux also has trouble with the Broadcom chip, the driver needs to be installed as a separate step on most distros.

Probably not T2 MacBooks though.

> FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic.

Which, ironically, is what Linux users have been saying for ages with respect to Windows, but the market share speaks for itself.

> Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.

This is counterbalanced by the fact there is often one straightforward solution to every problem you run into, and those have been abundantly discussed online. Written as someone who just gave it a try.

It seems like the best way to get WiFi working in FreeBSD is to run Linux in bhyve and tunnel your connections through there.

I agree that 9/10 is a bit of a strange score there, but it's not all that bad: You can get a $15 wifi dongle and use that instead. It occupies a USB port and looks a bit ugly, but it's still a fairly easy workaround.

Is there a cheap, common USB wifi dongle that works?

In the old days I kept a couple Realtek USB adapters around that would almost always work out of the box or with ndiswrapper

FreeBSD WiFi is certainly fun.

Some years ago, I was workig with FreeBSD on an old laptop. The laptop had a wireless adapter that ostensible should be supported, but was not.

After some digging, I realized the driver was just missing some PCIe device identifiers. I added them to driver and bam my WiFi is working without issue.

I tried to submit a bug report and patch, and it got positive feedback at first any changes even got committed. But then I learned why it’s better to not even try.

Apparently this was a known issue, but only in the heads of the FreeBSD wireless developers. They had their reasons for not adding the device, but the reasons did not appear to be documented in mailing lists or docs until my thread. At that point I realized it’s not worth it to try and contribute to such large projects as I just lack the decades of institutional knowledge of the system.

Anyway, I’m not sure it ever got released. I believe there’s an umbrella bug somewhere left after the version my patch supported went out of support.

This happened exactly to me also, I suspect some flexing in the motherboard or other component; right now it is complaining about the RAM and reseating hasn’t fixed it. Great laptop otherwise however!

Consider balling up some electrical tape underneath the Ram stick. This solved this very specific issue with my laptop that was flexing too much and crashing.

Yeah, compare to https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops it is.

Years ago, there was a project combining Debian with the kernel from FreeBSD. That never made sense to me and the project seems to have died meanwhile. More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel. That way one would get fairly broad and current hardware support and could still enjoy a classic Unix look&feel and stable ABI.

It’s a subset of a subset. The sets being (FreeBSD users (with laptops (who can be bothered to write about them on an obscure wiki)))

I agree. Linux has a wealth of hardware drivers and the time would be better spent on a translation layer or do it via running a VM or even using LLMs to port the drivers over to FreeBSD en masse. That way BSD team can focus on their unique strengths.

This isn't a holy war, and freeBSD does well for itself where it's good. It's definitely oriented to servers.

Not really, it's just different. Not trying to be the same, which catching up implies.

Glad to see this list, will keep an eye on it !

Now to be fair, in a few ways I think it is ahead. Now if you said "catch up to Linux in hardware support" I would fully agree.

Last I heard, its VM (swap/memory) processes is still better, but seems many Linux people avoid swap space these days. FWIW, I always have swap on any system that allows it.

And Jails, IMO nothing on Linux comes close to how good FreeBSD Jails is.