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by ofalkaed·3y ago·view on hn ↗
The BSDs are largely not caught up in the battle for becoming a widely used consumer desktop which makes them remarkably consistent from the user/admin standpoint. I have played with FreeBSD on and off for the past 20 years or so and install it every couple years to see where it is, installation, setup, and administration has not changed much in those 20 years. I can not recall a single major change to install, setup or administration in all those years, I never installed it and discovered something like system-d popping up or OSS suddenly being replaced.

The only real problem with BSD as a desktop is it tends to be a couple years behind Linux for drivers and the like but is only really an issue if you are the sort who must always have the latest and greatest hardware. It is much like running Linux 20 years ago in that regard, if you want to run BSD you need to buy your hardware accordingly. Most of the Linux software ecosystem has been ported to the BSDs so it is perfectly usable as a desktop system.

1 comments
> I can not recall a single major change to install,

In 2011, bsdinstall(8) [1] was merged into HEAD as a replacement for sysinstall(8) [2] and allowed, among others, easy setup of ZFS on Root. It was a CLI-based process with sysinstall.

Granted, both installers look fairly similar and the change may not have been that visible to someone installing FreeBSD once every few years.

[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bsdinstall(8)

[2] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysinstall&apropos...

>the change may not have been that visible to someone installing FreeBSD once every few years.

Which was my point that the rest of that sentence was meant to highlight. What I learned about installing, setting up and using a FreeBSD all those years ago when I first installed it has remained largely applicable over all these years.