On 12/06/2025 11:58, Borax Man wrote:

I've installed FreeBSD in a virtual machine, and it has the simplicity
that used to be in Linux

I was running home desktops with windows, and made a server with freebsd
- it was basically the first in the list of "search for free unix os"
that came up. That was decades ago. Serendipity rules: it's been pretty reliable(*) and, as you say, remains (for the time being) fairly easy to configure.

I went with desktop linux when we ditched windows purely because the
fbsd desktop wasn't up to par at the time. That seems to have changed
though.

*But* as I noted fbsd h/w support is a little hit-and-miss. My family
server runs on a pi4 - I need the speed of a pi5 now, but fbsd doesn't
yet support it, so I'm looking at migrating that to raspbian. But
everything does seem that bit harder than on freebsd, especially in the firewall department.


(*) It was running recently for well over 400 days solid. But I needed
to turn the mains power off :-{ )


--
Mike Scott
Harlow, England

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On 6/12/25 10:37 AM, Mike Scott wrote:

On 12/06/2025 11:58, Borax Man wrote:

I've installed FreeBSD in a virtual machine, and it has the simplicity
that used to be in Linux

I was running home desktops with windows, and made a server with freebsd
- it was basically the first in the list of "search for free unix os"
that came up. That was decades ago. Serendipity rules: it's been pretty reliable(*) and, as you say, remains (for the time being) fairly easy to configure.

I went with desktop linux when we ditched windows purely because the
fbsd desktop wasn't up to par at the time. That seems to have changed
though.

*But* as I noted fbsd h/w support is a little hit-and-miss. My family
server runs on a pi4 - I need the speed of a pi5 now, but fbsd doesn't
yet support it, so I'm looking at migrating that to raspbian. But
everything does seem that bit harder than on freebsd, especially in the firewall department.

(*) It was running recently for well over 400 days solid. But I needed
to turn the mains power off :-{ )

I fully agree that FreeBSD makes for good solid servers.
It does what it needs to do without being packed full
of fluff and excess complexity. Biggest prob is that
the BSDs are slow to pick up the latest drivers.

I did try to make a 'desktop' pc out of it recently and
that remains something of a pain. There's also less info
online clearly explaining how to deal with those pains.
BSD is sort-of like Linux, but sort of NOT also.

Ultimately went with GhostBSD instead - it comes with
the desktop stuff much better set up to begin with.

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