OVERKILL
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Was bored yesterday and decided to toss FreeBSD on a notebook I had kicking around. Haven't done a FreeBSD install in many years and was wondering if modern* hardware support had improved any. I was pleasantly surprised to see UEFI support and a bunch of other improvements.
Computer has an i3, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.
Install went well, even picked up my WiFi, though 802.1x support didn't work, so I had to connect to the guest WiFi.
I'd completely lost touch with, and subsequently, appreciation for, how far Linux has come in terms of ease of installation. This was apparent as I was manually downloading Xorg, then a desktop environment, then manually editing config files, adding my user to the necessary video group, updating the rc.conf file multiple times to get video acceleration and my DE working, then setting up a graphical login manager (sddm). I originally tried gnome, but thought I'd move to KDE, as I always enjoyed it, and it was something different from my Linux box.
This is the end result:
Surprising the amount of work still necessary to get to this point, which is that of the typical OOTB experience for any major Linux distro. But then, FreeBSD has never been geared toward the average Desktop user.
I did discover, linked from the main FreeBSD page nonetheless, a very consumer-geared spin on FreeBSD, GhostBSD, which is a lot like what we've come to expect from your typical Linux distro in terms of installation and usability. I expect hardware support isn't peered to Linux however, so, unless you are feeling the nostalgia and wanting to do an *BSD spin, a Linux distro is probably still a better choice.
*This is a G2 ProBook, it's several years old at this point, so far from cutting edge.
Computer has an i3, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.
Install went well, even picked up my WiFi, though 802.1x support didn't work, so I had to connect to the guest WiFi.
I'd completely lost touch with, and subsequently, appreciation for, how far Linux has come in terms of ease of installation. This was apparent as I was manually downloading Xorg, then a desktop environment, then manually editing config files, adding my user to the necessary video group, updating the rc.conf file multiple times to get video acceleration and my DE working, then setting up a graphical login manager (sddm). I originally tried gnome, but thought I'd move to KDE, as I always enjoyed it, and it was something different from my Linux box.
This is the end result:
Surprising the amount of work still necessary to get to this point, which is that of the typical OOTB experience for any major Linux distro. But then, FreeBSD has never been geared toward the average Desktop user.
I did discover, linked from the main FreeBSD page nonetheless, a very consumer-geared spin on FreeBSD, GhostBSD, which is a lot like what we've come to expect from your typical Linux distro in terms of installation and usability. I expect hardware support isn't peered to Linux however, so, unless you are feeling the nostalgia and wanting to do an *BSD spin, a Linux distro is probably still a better choice.
*This is a G2 ProBook, it's several years old at this point, so far from cutting edge.