What makes BSD stand out as its own system? I’ve been thinking about installing it in a new computer mainly for reading but I don’t know much about it.
It’s great for certain use-cases that don’t require a lot of hardware support. But don’t go trying to use it on your laptop.
I use FreeBSD for my website and I’m actually pretty happy with it, the simplicity is a strong selling point.
It does feel sometimes like the documentation is written with a lot of assumed knowledge though, which makes it difficult to know what terms to use to find what you’re looking for… e.g. figuring out how to do major version upgrades did not feel straightforward.
I wish I could figure that out. I’ve tried FreeBSD on my laptop, but Bluetooth wouldn’t work, I couldn’t install Signal, and basic apps I use daily are not available on FreeBSD. I’m not sure who uses it or what they use it for.
I like it, for the most part. Obviously you need to check to see if your hardware is supported, but it’s a good OS. It’s stable, has neat features like boot environments, and it with pkg and the ports tree you can have newer versions of software. Also, they don’t make changes to the OS for the sake of it, or because one person or group wants it. They make change with a clear plan in my mind. Sometimes that means features land later in FreeBSD, but they’re implemented more thoughtfully imo.
OpenBSD and NetBSD are also cool projects in their own right.
It’s worth messing around with! OpenBSD, too.
It will certainly deepen my knowledge about operating systems. Messing with alternatives to grub and all that.
Not sure about the BSDs, but for Linux you don’t actually need GRUB anymore these days. On modern (i.e. UEFI) systems, you can boot the kernel directly as an EFI binary (this is known as EFISTUB booting).
It’s too niche to be discussed in a generic asklemmy thread.
