# Is BSD as good as Linux in Desktop?



## MrShroomy (Nov 30, 2017)

Does BSD run as smooth as Linux and is it more stable than Linux/Windows? Does it have apps like libreoffice,steam,chrome and can it run most linux games?


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## ekingston (Nov 30, 2017)

MrShroomy said:


> Does BSD run as smooth as Linux



I'm not sure how to define "smooth" but I'm going to say in general, yes.



MrShroomy said:


> and is it more stable than Linux/



In my experience marginally but it depends a great deal on the Linux distro use choose and what they are currently changing.



MrShroomy said:


> Windows?



In my experience yes. I've only ever had a hard crash on FreeBSD once and that was my fault. I've had many hard crashes on windows XP, 7, and 10.



MrShroomy said:


> Does it have apps like libreoffice,steam,chrome



*Libreoffice*: Yes
*Steam*: No, but it might work through the Linux support tools in FreeBSD but I'm not so sure.
*Chrome*: No, but it does have Chromium and Firefox. I think some people have managed to get Chrome working through the Linux binary support tools in FreeBSD.



MrShroomy said:


> and can it run most linux games?



No. Many do work through the Linux binary support tools and many have been ported but not all.

The current release version of FreeBSD (11) does not have drivers for the most recent Intel HD Graphics. There is a DRM-Next project to fix that. In this context DRM is related to Direct Rendering (not restricting access to digital contents).


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## tankist02 (Nov 30, 2017)

FreeBSD is a DIY system - you'll have to install and configure everything by yourself. Alternatively you can try TrueOS or GhostBSD - they are based on FreeBSD and are preconfigured for desktop usage. The former is a bleeding edge system, while the latter is less drastic.

Hardware support on FreeBSD in general is less comprehensive compared to Linux, especially with the newest hardware. But if you are lucky you can expect a stable system in the sense it changes a lot less than Linux - after you've spent considerable amount of time reading and learning the system.


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## scottro (Nov 30, 2017)

No.  
Many wireless cards, and many Intel graphics cards, from Haswell on up, don't work as well. It takes more work to get synaptics working, and it may just not work  
On a vanilla desktop tower. with an NVidia graphic card and wired connection, it probably is just as good, but on most newer laptops, it isn't.  For example, to get my Haswell Intel card working on a yoga 2, I have to use CURRENT.  WIth CURRENT, the wireless may do LAN transfers of 11-12MB, whereas with 11.x it only got up to 2-3MB.  (That 12MB isn't consistent, sometimes it is only 2-3MB).  A Linux install will do LAN transfers at speeds of 20-40MB. 

It can certainly be done, and you can get very satisfactory results, depending upon how much work you want to give it. I do have two towers, with NVidia graphcs and wired connection that run FreeBSD and are quite good. There will be a few programs here and there that won't work, for example, you can't get Netflix to play, last time I tried Teamviewer and Cisco's NetExtender didn't work.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 4, 2017)

MrShroomy said:


> Does BSD run as smooth as Linux and is it more stable than Linux/Windows?


Depends on the administrator.

It can when properly set up but if you expect to get the same kind of handholding as you'd normally get on Windows then you might be in for a nasty ride. I can easily set up a Windows environment which is more stable than a Linux environment and vice versa. It's not the OS (or environment) which determines stability.

And as others have already pointed out: hardware support can become an issue.



MrShroomy said:


> Does it have apps like libreoffice,steam,chrome and can it run most linux games?


Generally speaking most software which can run on Linux will also run on FreeBSD. There are exceptions of course. I think Freshports is a good website to get a rough impression of the diversity of software which is natively available for FreeBSD.

I run FreeBSD on my laptop (which I sporadically use though, powered by X and XFCE4) and I also run an KDE4 powered desktop on my LAN server and so far that never failed me 

Of course also important is that I have become a bit biased over the years; I've become quite familiar with FreeBSD, which most certainly helps when it comes to taking on common issues.


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## vermaden (Dec 4, 2017)

> Is BSD as good as Linux in Desktop?


Its not better or worse, its just different.


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## xtremae (Dec 4, 2017)

Probably not and since you draw a comparison with windows...
If all you want is a smooth and stable system (for the most part), with most games / applications you can get on most hw configurations (you don't really mention), windows is your best bet. Do all windows applications (games included) run equally smooth on linux? Quite a few don't even exist and others that do (games), are often under-performing (!= smooth).

Don't get me wrong, given your requirements, linux / FreeBSD can be acceptable and/or good enough to make you settle, but imho not better than windows. Is this what you're after?


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## vermaden (Dec 4, 2017)

_If all you want is a smooth and stable system_ then IMHO Mac OS X / macOS seems to fulfill that role better ...


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 5, 2017)

If my FreeBSD laptops are anything, they're stable, and I have 5 running it. Granted, all of them are older machines but hardware incompatibility is not something I have to deal with.

I basically use my laptops for surfing the web, watching an occasional video on youtube or desktop, downloading and uploading files, working with text files, image manipulation, ripping CD's, burning DVD's and listening to music. In those areas it excels and is everything I'm looking for in a desktop OS.

The fact it's not Windows and encumbered with everything that goes along with it, a real Operating System and not a kernel with apps on top is a plus IMO.

Its shortcomings on gaming and such have already been pointed out.


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## PacketMan (Dec 5, 2017)

xtremae said:


> Probably not and since you draw a comparison with windows...
> If all you want is a smooth and stable system (for the most part), with most games / applications you can get on most hw configurations (you don't really mention), windows is your best bet. Do all windows applications (games included) run equally smooth on linux? Quite a few don't even exist and others that do (games), are often under-performing (!= smooth).
> 
> Don't get me wrong, given your requirements, linux / FreeBSD can be acceptable and/or good enough to make you settle, but imho not better than windows. Is this what you're after?



I respectfully disagree.  When I ran Windows in my house, the issues were never ending; my family coming to me with computers issues (not booting right, slow, crashing, something freezing or not working right), and it drove me off the wharf!  Then I migrated all my machines to FreeBSD, and one laptop is Ubuntu Linux.  In the past 3 years I have not had more than 3 complaints.


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## DiscmanDaemon (Dec 6, 2017)

MrShroomy said:


> Does BSD run as smooth as Linux and is it more stable than Linux/Windows?


In my experience, once you get a FreeBSD machine going (desktop, laptop, or server), it will be the most rock solid, stable system short of an RTOS (and I have never seen someone use any kind of RTOS as a desktop machine ) However, the setup will frequently be anything but smooth, often requiring the manual configuration of various drivers.

For "smoothness" of the user experience, I would say it really depends on the desktop environment you select. Almost every major Linux desktop environment can be installed on top of FreeBSD, although again, it may take more work to initially setup. However, I personally believe this is more than offset by the increased stability of the OS. It is my experience that Linuxes can be "panicky", and I believe this to be caused by mismatches between the kernel and the other software in the distro, which is not surprising since, unlike FreeBSD, they are developed totally separately. And get me started on Windows' stability... 

If its any help to you, myself and everyone in my office uses FreeBSD+Mate (with Firefox and LibreOffice) and we have had exactly zero non-PEBKAC issues in the past 2.5 years since we migrated from Debian Linux. However, this is an office, so there is obviously no gaming going on.


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## hitest (Dec 6, 2017)

I would say that Linux and FreeBSD have a similar level of stability.  FreeBSD is far more stable than Windows.  Linux is able to stream Netflix.  As far as I know FreeBSD is not able to play Netflix on the desktop.
Is BSD as good as Linux on the desktop?  This is too hard to quantify, the term good is a very relative term.


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## azathoth (Dec 6, 2017)

MrShroomy said:


> Does BSD run as smooth as Linux and is it more stable than Linux/Windows? Does it have apps like libreoffice,steam,chrome and can it run most linux games?



I run iceWM and freebsd 11.1 at home and use chrome. 
Netflix had a problem for me.
transmissoin-qt5 is nice torrent client.
libreoffice is good
pcmanfm is nice gui file manager
filezilla good for gui ftp or ssh connection


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## azathoth (Dec 6, 2017)

azathoth said:


> I run iceWM and freebsd 11.1 at home and use chrome.
> Netflix had a problem for me.
> transmissoin-qt5 is nice torrent client.
> libreoffice is good
> ...



ps my dad sometimes uses a freebsd laptop I setup for email.  He likes it, and wireless works fine.


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## aht0 (Dec 8, 2017)

About software available for FreeBSD, good place for checking/searching/confirming dependencies
https://www.freebsd.org/ports/searching.html


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## scottro (Dec 8, 2017)

You could always run a very light Linux desktop in a VM and play Netflix that way.   Oko would probably recommend alpine, but VoidLinux, for example, is quite lightweight (and no systemd for those who care) and has a gcc version--I think alpine uses musl. Never having used a musl system I don't know if it can be problematic on DRM type stuff.


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## Oko (Dec 8, 2017)

scottro said:


> You could always run a very light Linux desktop in a VM and play Netflix that way.   Oko would probably recommend alpine, but VoidLinux, for example, is quite lightweigh (and no systemd for those who care) and has a gcc version--I think alpine uses musl. Never having used a musl system I don't know if it can be problematic on DRM type stuff.


Alpine doesn't come with glibc so getting "standard Linux desktop stuff" to work is actually more involving than FreeBSD. Alpine's learning curve is probably even steeper than FreeBSD's. I am using it as a Xen Dom0  My desktops/laptops run vanilla OpenBSD and at work I also have bunch of Red Hat workstations for office jobs (not that OpenBSD doesn't fit the bill but people are used to Linux so why push down their throats something that are not familiar with). I have Netflix at home but for that I use Roku if somebody cares. I got one of early devices from a friend of mine who is one of their top engineers.


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## scottro (Dec 8, 2017)

Thanks for confirming, I thought so but wasn't sure.
(Debates making horrible pun about your friend at Roku rocking, but the puns aren't flowing well today) -(
I have a CentOS-7 server-cum-workstation that's my main home machine, so it's not an issue for me, either.


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## fernandel (Dec 9, 2017)

Oko said:


> Alpine doesn't come with glibc so getting "standard Linux desktop stuff" to work is actually more involving than FreeBSD. Alpine's learning curve is probably even steeper than FreeBSD's. I am using it as a Xen Dom0  My desktops/laptops run vanilla OpenBSD and at work I also have bunch of Red Hat workstations for office jobs (not that OpenBSD doesn't fit the bill but people are used to Linux so why push down their throats something that are not familiar with). I have Netflix at home but for that I use Roku if somebody cares. I got one of early devices from a friend of mine who is one of their top engineers.


I like ROKU too. There are everything what I want and we pay just Acorn and Britbox .
And I have FreeBSD as desktop long time and Blender and GIMP, LibreOffice and LyX which I am using a lot works very good. I am thinking to put on DragonFly...


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## dinsdale (Dec 15, 2017)

TrueOS is my daily driver on my PC.  TrueOS is an "out of the box" FreeBSD install with some nice goodies like ZFS and the boot manager. Geli disk encryption and all the like can be set up in the installer. The OS is a rolling release based on a "stable" snapshot of current. 

Nice things said,  the default Lumina desktop is *new* and takes some getting used to. A new installation on a laptop can be a bit hard to navigate. I haven't had much success with their themes and such on a laptop or VM, but my desktop is set up really nicely in Limuna. An awesome feature in TrueOS is you can go into the AppCafe program and download lots of (slightly older now) desktops. I've used KDE 4, mate and (I think I tried gnome???). KDE was buttery smooth on my 4th gen i7 with a 2gb NVidia card. I love wobbly windows. XD

Games are pretty sparse on TrueOS, but they have integrated the Graphics DRM subsystem from Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager (Which I think is due in FreeBSD 12?) so the graphics hardware support is better. You could check them on their forum at discourse.trueos.org for more info. 

I like TrueOS because I can get a desktop up fast and then get the kernel source and hack at arm boards.


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## azathoth (Dec 20, 2017)

I love icewm and plain freebsd amd64 11.1
woo wee
pcmanfm file mgr
libreoffice
firefox
transmission-qt5
and IM good!
zfs of course


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