FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by mumblemumble on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @11:49AM (#26492837)

Personally, I see Linux as a major attack vector. Binary blobs are a big skeleton in Linux's closet. One reason why big business got behind Linux is their ability to have closed source, binary firmware blobs baked into device drivers. You can choose instead to use Linux-libre, of course, but your user experience will suffer about as much as it would by choosing any other *nix with poor proprietary driver support.

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by spijdar on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @12:38PM (#26493543)

FreeBSD is comparatively more friendly to proprietary blobs, as it maintains a stable kernel ABI within major releases. [0]

Even choosing to ignore any blobbed drivers, Linux will still have better software compatibility, and still generally superior hardware compatibility. Certainly not worse hardware support. Linux supports more classes of hardware like wifi adapters, while FreeBSD is stuck trying to bring up newer standards. It also requires the same firmware blobs that Linux does -- in the end, whether on Linux or FreeBSD, if you dislike binary blobs in your drivers, you just have to limit yourself to hardware that doesn't require them.

[0] https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=284199+0+/usr/...

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by pjmlp on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @04:57PM (#26496695)

Big business like Sony and Apple prefer BSD exactly because of not having to provide everything to upstream.

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by nix23 on Thursday March 18, 2021 @06:46AM (#26501352)

Google prefers linux on the servers because of not having to provide everything to upstream.

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by mumblemumble on Thursday March 18, 2021 @10:31AM (#26503092)

That's a bit of a different case, though. Google isn't distributing it to end users the way Apple is with Darwin.

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by nix23 on Friday March 19, 2021 @08:22AM (#26512427)

True, but in the end it's the same, you don't get access to the google nor the sony "magic" development.

BTW: Darwin is opensource:

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by jtdev on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @11:39AM (#26492705)

> "years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine"

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @11:42AM (#26492744)

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

And how is upstreaming things an attack?

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by spijdar on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @11:39AM (#26492702)

Based on the subtext of GP's comment, I'm guessing they're either offended by RedHat, Canonical, and/or Microsoft's various involvements, things like systemd or snapd, and think it taints the whole linux ecosystem.

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Re:FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience by selectodude on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @03:27PM (#26495769)

I'm curious how they would feel about Bell Labs. Sounds like a proprietary OS that happened to be open source wouldn't go over well either.

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