For *BSD fans, I wish to understand something that truly bothers me.
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Great question. My daily driver is my work-provided machine, which runs macOS.
My "personal" daily driver is a ThinkPad with FreeBSD, and a writing machine with NetBSD.
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@darth OpenBSD on my main notebook
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@darth The fact that the #opensource #BSD desktop is somehow less far along than the #Linux is one of the observations in my post about #genai is killing copyleft: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2026/04/08/ai-code-is-hollowing-out-open-source-and-maintainers-are-looking-the-other-way.html
Some of the BSD enthusiasts may enjoy the post, even if they prefer permissive licenses.
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@darth In my constellation of systems, NetBSD is overwhelmingly predominate.
There is one Linux machine, purely because of audio driver support; currently Debian but I'm looking into ditching that in favor of bare metal Alpine.
There's also a Solaris machine that's critical. Actual real Solaris, properly licensed under the fan license Sun created, that Oracle promptly shut down.
Also OpenBSD on a firewall. Out of habit at the time it was deployed. NetBSD's npf has caught up; I'll be installing Net soon. -
@darth FreeBSD is my daily driver on the desktop for over 15 years.
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@darth I daily drive FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64 on my T430. I currently play Battlefield Vietnam on it
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@darth FreeBSD is my primary OS
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@darth OpenBSD is my primary OS. With shockingly little pain doing so.
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#openbsd on laptop and servers (no desktop)
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@darth Main browsing box is FreeBSD. Main workstation is trying to move to FreeBSD.
For gaming, I'm going to have to use Linux or Windows in a VM with GPU passthrough, FreeBSD is not up to snuff/far too much hassle.
The BSD I most prefer is OpenBSD, but that's generally more suitable for firewalls. Using it as a desktop involves too much pain, so FreeBSD is a compromise.
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@darth FreeBSD was my server distro, but has been my daily driver for the past week.
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@darth OpenBSD daily driver
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My main workstation mostly runs FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE. That's what I use for most of my work on Valgrind. I mainly use
Qt Creator for my IDE.
Firefox and Thunderbird. They work fine on FreeBSD.
VirtualBox
konsole and ssh
toolchain stuff (mostly LLVM toolchain but also GNU toolchain a bit)
gdb (and lldb a bit)
git, gitk, meldI need access to a as many systems as possible (ideally the OS running on real hardware, VMs when necessary).
I also have a laptop and RPi 4b both running FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE, an old workstation running OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10, a mac mini M4 running macOS 26.4 and and old MacBook Pro Intel running macOS 13.6.
I've been using FeeeBSD on and off since 2.1 in 1997 (mostly off to start with, for a long time Solaris was my main OS).
Two things put me off Linux. Firstly the toxic arrogance of the technical leaders. Torvalds sets a terrible example as a leader, not having an ounce of decency or humility. I'm not saying that the BSD world isn't free of a*seholes.
The other thing is the lack of stability. The Linux distros that I've used the most at home are OpenSuSE and Fedora. OpenSUSE is OK, occasional problems a bit like FreeBSD. Fedora is simply junk in my anecdotal experience. I've had way more kernel panics (100x or more) from Fedora than everything else put together, despite the fact that I only use it for a tiny fraction of the amount that I use FreeBSD/macOS/illumos. If the kernel doesn't panic then there is a high probability that you will get a black screen or window manager crashes because the NVIDIA drivers are almost permanently broken.
Linux in the corporate world seems better. At work it's Windows 11 and RH/CeontOS/Rocky via NoMachine. I have had more kernel panics than with other OSes but it is acceptably rare.
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OpenBSD with CWM for a number of years.
I had more full featured DEs, but then I asked myself, "How often do I *really* move my windows around? Aren't they in the same place and shapes 90% of the time?"
Also, launching ssh sessions is dead easy.
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Additional responses in BSD Cafe Billboard and Reddit:
<https://billboard.bsd.cafe/post/235>
<https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1smrjm3/daily_driver_macos_bsd_linux_or_windows/>
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@grahamperrin @stefano I might have met that guy once https://youtu.be/EJBNrHInaQg?list=PL3KVgwMTWoO0WCec7t7-oHHLZY4fktTRr
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@rl_dane @darth Seriously, I think there is a different mindset between the two.
BSD flavours spin Unix in some ways, but they want stay Unix.
Linux is an Unix variant more "for accident", than by intention. There isn't strong emphasis in the Linux world to stick around Unix. I have impression that some distros even dislike it.
In place you end with countless clashing ideas how "is supposed to work better". It has its high and end, one is reinvent the wheel even where isn't useful at all. -
@rl_dane @darth Seriously, I think there is a different mindset between the two.
BSD flavours spin Unix in some ways, but they want stay Unix.
Linux is an Unix variant more "for accident", than by intention. There isn't strong emphasis in the Linux world to stick around Unix. I have impression that some distros even dislike it.
In place you end with countless clashing ideas how "is supposed to work better". It has its high and end, one is reinvent the wheel even where isn't useful at all.@rl_dane @darth I think one reason BSD don't get much attention is right about this mindset, and the impression that a chunk devs don't really like it very much.
Surely not the people in Red Hat.There isn't much heat for desktop BSD branches as far I see, beside because rarely succeded, and in part because "desktop" became synonymous of "linux mess", things that is very far from what BSD try to stay.
I cannot blame the feeling. Some decisions in the linux space makes me facepalm.
