FreeBSD

Anyone here daily drive FreeBSD? I'm just about done with linux and looking to find something that I can learn once and maintain myself without having to consult any resources. It looks very attractive. My questions are: >any annoyances you've encountered? >what do you like most about it? >tell also what kind of activities you use it for

I used to use FreeBSD and it's pretty good. It has good stuff from Solaris like ZFS and it's boot environments are a pretty nice way to revert back to a working snapshot once you mess something up. My favourite thing about it is the ports tree which allows you to easily build software from source with specific options that you like. Upgrading the system to the next version is a pain in the ass though but you won't have to do that for a good amount of time because the lifecycle of versions is pretty long.

On the server it's great. I ran freeBSDs on a pi for many years and that was my first selfhosting solution. It feels like a classical UNIX experience (read the manual, everything is in the base system, can't look soykaf up online) Soon they'll release a proxmox-like UI. On a laptop it's unusable and it will eat up all your battery while you try to run wifi in a linux container. Highlights: the base system having jails, zfs, pf. I recommend bastille for jails management.

Billions must free the bsd. the RealTek wifi card (allegedly supported by the rtw89 driver) gave me a lot of trouble at first, I swapped it out for an intel wifi chip that's well-supported and that fixed it. I mostly use this computer for web browsing and some gaming (NO STEAM!!!) and I find myself using Winblows less and less. As for what's good about freebsd, the configuration and documentation are legendary, way better than any linux distros, except maybe on par with arch linux. For software that's in the Ports, management is very easy. Xorg, Xlibre, Wayland are all supported great, I've used all three and they were all extremely easy to get working and worked very well. problem point: GPUs. The multi-GPU support definitely needs a lot more work. I can get either the iGPU or the dGPU to work, but not concurrently. This may be a limitation with the computer or with the bios but it seemingly worked alright on winblows (although in fairness the computer was MUCH slower, so the switch was well worth it in my opinion) freebsd sort of occupies the same niche as a minimal/configurable linux distrobution, so if you liked old debian or arch you'll probably like freebsd fine. Before installing I have to recommend looking into whether your hardware is supported. If your wi-fi chip isn't, that's not really a big deal since you can pick up one that is well-supported for like $15. the gpu could be more troublesome depending on what you want to do with it/what gpu it is. It would help a lot if I knew what kind of computer it was.