On the desktop, Linux is going to be challenging anyway. Many people love that challenge and make it work, and that's cool. But my point is that if you can make it work on desktop Linux you will make it work on FreeBSD as well, given some decent skill.
> Linux on the desktop is actually quite a bit better and easier to use than FreeBSD.
As someone who actually started learning *NIX on BSDs and later switched to Linux, I think "quite a bit better and easier" is an understatement. I tried the latest FreeBSD last year on a not so recent Lenovo laptop and it was a horrible experience.
A guy I know (relatively skilled) spent a whole week setting up Linux on his laptop the other day. So I don't think it's always as predictable as to say there's never a challenge involved in 2022.
Not sure what do you want to prove with that anecdotal point. I've seen coworkers spend a month or 2 with both their new and old mac or windows laptops because they weren't seeing the end of migrating their stuff from one computer to another and setting up their dev environment.
Just install Ubuntu if you quite literally cannot grasp GNU/Linux. No, your "guy" is not "relatively skilled", that's an absurd claim when it took an entire week setting up Linux on a laptop. It has never, ever taken me more than an hour or two with mainstream distros, or more than 3 days max. for more complicated distros such as Gentoo or Arch - but the system would be minimally operational within a day, always. You would literally have to one-finger press your keyboard whilst also learning how to read for the first time simultaneously, to make the install of Linux on a LAPTOP last a week.
Installation does not just mean finishing the setup from the livecd. We have to work at copying our apps, configs, etc and it can be a lot of "long tail" work to get things exactly as before.
I just installed Fedora 36 on my Thinkpad. It went pretty smoothly. Single monitor, AMD CPU/iGPU.
There are a few gripes about the discoverability of the keyboard shortcuts. Unity was good with this, holding down the Win/Meta key showed all the DE shortcuts.
Also, there is not an easy way to change certain settings (like system font!) without installing an obscure package "Tweaks" that should be built into the system settings.
Have you not ever used a Linux distro?
I haven't had an issue with monitors since before Ubuntu 8.
Seems ridiculous you're going to claim that Linux, which dominates the phone/handheld industry, would have issues in regards to using high resolution/high DPI monitors along with lower spec ones concurrently.
I think of all OS's, my bet would probably be that this is a way bigger issue on Windows than on Linux or Mac.
What you’re saying is probably valid for a desktop (especially if it doesn’t use Nvidia), but laptops (especially Nvidia ones) are still far from perfect. Personal experience with Ubuntu on a recent Thinkpad:
* When using Wayland, until VERY recently (latest nvidia drivers), the entire system would freeze when hooking up an external monitor. Okay, no problem I’ll use X.
* Hygrid graphics just completely doesn’t work, loads of glitches, glacially slow framerates on external monitors, etc. Okay, I turn off hybrid graphics in the BIOS, but that absolutely trashes battery life.
* X does not let you run different scale factors concurrently. You can’t set your laptop screen to 2x and your external monitor to 1x. Wayland does let you, but see above.
* I have two 4K monitors hooked up to my laptop. Whenever I resume from sleep, there’s a very good chance that only one or zero of the monitors is detected. They both power on, but only one (or sometimes none) of them actually has a signal. Cycling power on the monitor usually fixes the issue. My coworker has a Thinkpad from the same line but a generation earlier, and it had the exact same problem, so this has apparently been around a while and still isn’t fixed.
> Personal experience with Ubuntu on a recent Thinkpad:
Well, that's your first problem. How does FreeBSD or OSX do on it? Maybe you should buy a Linux laptop to run Linux instead of slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work correctly.
Don't Nvidia make open-source Linux drivers now?
I honestly have not had graphical driver issues since... Well since a good while before SteamOS and such. I don't doubt you guys at all, but I only have "older" laptops that might have GPU issues in terms of overall Linux compatibility.
> Don't Nvidia make open-source Linux drivers now?
Yes, but only since very recently — AFAIK, most distros are not using the open-source drivers yet, as they don’t yet have feature parity with the proprietary ones.
If that's true then there's been substantial improvements on that front recently (which is good). As I recall, that was a tricky problem since your laptop screen likely runs another resolution, different DPI, etc so connecting to an additional screen makes things go haywire.
Works on my machine, anecdotally; no Wayland, and an X window manager that hasn't been updated in a decade. Automatically resizes windows when I drag them to fit each monitor's DPI settings.
Btw, does it allow you to run different scale on the different monitors? It wouldn't really be feasible to run native 4k resolution on one monitor if everything will be tiny, so it needs to have scale. One monitor might run on 1x and the other 2x.
Ubuntu is clearly better for average people on the desktop than FreeBSD. (And I’d argue that macOS is in turn clearly better for most people than Ubuntu).
But FreeBSD is great as a desktop for tinkerers — if you want something that’s simple enough that you can actually understand how it works, and whose source code you can quite easily jump into, modify, and rebuild, it blows Linux out of the water.
I have been daily driving FreeBSD as a desktop since the last time this article was posted and I love it. It is super consistent and reliable, and after I got it set up, I don't have to worry about anything breaking. I can easily use it daily for coding and web browsing, and it feels as smooth and fast as a Linux setup on the same hardware.
That said, I still have a Linux system for things like gaming, Cuda, and containers. Though, as I never have time to game anyways, I could just use the Linux system as a server.
But, I've used Linux for 10+ years and it only started annoying me recently so I may also get frustrated with freeBSD eventually.
On the server/router maybe. For IT pros maybe.
The desktop is a whole different matter.