FreeBSD 13.1 - HP ProBook 450

[OVERKILL]

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.

 

[blufeb95]

Of the BSDs the one I have the most appreciation for is OpenBSD, simply because they offer a netinstall floppy, so you can get it installed on an older system, as I have a number of Pentium III-Pentium M era machines I play with that may not support USB or network booting, so with one single floppy disc you can get an OS on them, even older linux distros weren't as simple to install from floppy there was usually at least two floppies needed, although you couldn't highly compress everything back then since CPUs were slow and RAM was limited, but I don't think you could even get a modern linux kernel with a networking support to fit on a single floppy, it's quite amazing that OpenBSD manages to do that.

 

[OVERKILL]

Of the BSDs the one I have the most appreciation for is OpenBSD, simply because they offer a netinstall floppy, so you can get it installed on an older system, as I have a number of Pentium III-Pentium M era machines I play with that may not support USB or network booting, so with one single floppy disc you can get an OS on them, even older linux distros weren't as simple to install from floppy there was usually at least two floppies needed, although you couldn't highly compress everything back then since CPUs were slow and RAM was limited, but I don't think you could even get a modern linux kernel with a networking support to fit on a single floppy, it's quite amazing that OpenBSD manages to do that.

That was how I first installed FreeBSD on my 486SX/25, lol. And then I downloaded the rest over dial-up!

 

[spackard]

The man pages for FreeBSD are a lot better than a Linux distribution, if that matters.

 

[OVERKILL]

The man pages for FreeBSD are a lot better than a Linux distribution, if that matters.

Yes, I think the history with Berkeley and what set the stage for the BSD derivatives influenced that. That said, you end up needing the man pages with these old school BSD unix's, whilst you don't with most major Linux distros at this juncture. Though, as I noted, there are a few forks that are aimed at being for "Average Joe" and behave a lot like a linux distro in terms of installation and not needing to know much about it to get to a functional system.