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I recently switched my dev machine (laptop) from Ubuntu to FreeBSD because I wanted the experience. I wrote a post about it[0]. Basically, wifi and graphics were a PITA and I brute forced my way into getting them working.

After getting past those two though, everything else just worked. The simplicity of the system compared to Debian/Ubuntu is just astounding.

I haven't yet gotten into jails or bhyve, but those are the next two things I'm very excited to work toward.

[0] http://blog.eatonphil.com/2015-11-18/two-weeks-of-freebsd---...

1 comments

I've found that OpenBSD has incredibly complete support for many laptops, going so far as to support Thinkpads with touchscreens and digitizer pens out of the box.

Overall I find FreeBSD's desktop to be more usable, even though OpenBSD has more streamlined configuration in some parts of the system.

I agree! For instance, my wifi card (Centrino 2230) is not supported on FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE but it has been available on OpenBSD for a little while. It is now supported in HEAD but won't be in STABLE until 11.0 next year.

I decided to go with FreeBSD because, from what I read, it seemed like it and 3rd-part packages are kept more up-to-date. As a server-side and front-end developer, this is somewhat more immediately important than "complete security".

Edit: Additionally, jails and bhyve are a big motivator to pick FreeBSD over OpenBSD, personally.

Don't be afraid to run -CURRENT on a laptop! Or even the graphics team's testing branch, which already has Haswell accelerated graphics support: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i9...

About 3rd party packages: FreeBSD ports are always current, binary packages are available as quarterly and current. With OpenBSD, it's all frozen on release, and you basically have to run -CURRENT to get recent packages.

The OpenBSD team is working on a hypervisor too: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132

ZFS + jails + DTrace though… :-)

Man, I definitely am scared to! I haven't quite figured out the environment though. It was such a relief just to get graphics working in the first place. I don't I have the time to put up with volatile nightly builds. But as I said, I have no clue how volatile CURRENT is. But with your suggestion, I'll have to read.

I thought I heard something about OpenBSD wanting a native bhyve replacement. But vmm sounds awesome! Thanks for pointing that out!