# FreeBSD for desktop use?



## crashd (May 6, 2015)

I read an article about FreeBSD for desktop use: the result is that is most expensive of RAM than Linux. I have been trying *BSD some years ago but I don't remember his performances! Is it really worse than Linux? I use Debian stable. My use is only desktop, I have used Linux since 2003 and I'm looking for the best OS for speed and stability. Thank you.


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## drhowarddrfine (May 6, 2015)

Netflix uses FreeBSD for performance. Netflix traffic is about 50% of all internet traffic. Performance of FreeBSD should not be a concern.


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## ANOKNUSA (May 6, 2015)

Suppose for a moment FreeBSD really does use more RAM. Does that really matter? Does RAM usage have any bearing on the desktop nowadays? Does RAM usage have any bearing on "stability?" For what it's worth, I run the exact same applications on FreeBSD that I did on my previous Linux setup, and it uses roughly the same amount of RAM (less than half). Both use less RAM than Windows. So my four-year-old laptop has a constant surplus of RAM.


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## SirDice (May 6, 2015)

If the desktop was using ZFS then I would imagine FreeBSD using more memory than some other OS. ZFS likes memory, lots of it.


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## crashd (May 6, 2015)

getopt said:


> And where is the link to the article?


I apologize because I have documented while travelling by train and the article spoke of pc-bsdPC-BSD and not of freebsdFreeBSD.
http://italiaunix.com/blog/pc-bsd-vs-linux.html



> 9) PC - BSD is extremely heavier regarding the ram,  just started to clean system takes up 750 MB of RAM and passes smoothly 1.5 gb with 2 tables firefox and the file manager active , compared to 500 mb just started Chakra ( dirty , coming down a lot with other distributions.)



I know that things change a lot from a distribution and the other (Ubuntu is a pachyderm compared to Debian).

... And the other article is very old (2010)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=debian_kfreebsd_h210&num=1

The RAM is important because I want to install this OS on eeepc with 1GB of RAM.
Right now Debian stable (with Xfce) runs perfectly on all my PC but I would like something more.


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## taz (May 6, 2015)

It's not FreeBSD you need to worry about but rather the DE you use and the applications. For an eeepc I would go with LXDE, Xfce or MATE as a DE but still FireFox and Chrome for example are memory hungry applications.
Also it depends on which eeepc are we talking about and how much power dose your CPU have. You can't expect to turn an eeepc into a ultra-book just because you have a "memory efficient OS".


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## PacketMan (May 6, 2015)

eeepc? What's that mean?

My household is free of Windows, and I have never been happier. While one machine is Linux Ubuntu, it will eventually be assimilated by FreeBSD. My older machine with less resources uses FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE with XFCE4. Another not-so-older machine is running FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE GNOME3. I don't care if they use a bit more or a bit less resources than say other BSDs, or Linux; they run faster, and are more stable than when I ran Windows. I have not seen a "uh oh something has gone wrong with me" message since I got rid of Windows.  Taz is bang on; its the DE and applications you layer on that eat RAM.

If you're trying to decide whether to use FreeBSD or Linux, I don't think RAM usage is what you want to use as a criteria in a DE.


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## wblock@ (May 6, 2015)

FreeBSD and Linux use RAM differently.  FreeBSD takes the view that unused RAM is wasted.  If it is used for file cache, it can easily be reused for something else with no performance hit.  And if a file read hits cache, it is a huge performance improvement.

So the first step in reading one of these sort-of-benchmark articles is to ask whether the people writing it are familiar with the concepts they think they are analyzing.


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## cuq (May 6, 2015)

I use FreeBSD as my only desktop since 2005 (I use it as  server since 2000) and I can't be more happy... the performance and the stability are outstanding. Nothing to complain about. Besides the documentation is excellent and here you can ask the things you don't know.


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## scottro (May 6, 2015)

PC-BSD uses ZFS by default if I'm not mistaken, and that will use a lot of RAM. 

It probably takes more work to get FreeBSD working as a desktop than it does many versions of Linux.  Some programs, such as Skype, TeamViewer and VMware's VCloud console viewer, to name three that I've needed, don't work on FreeBSD, (though Skype has worked in the past for others as well as myself.)  Though Netflix uses FreeBSD as a backend, ironically, as far as I know, Google Chrome (as opposed to chromium) isn't available for FreeBSD, so you can't watch Netflix on it, while you can on Linux. 

It often lags behind Linux in hardware support as well, which might mean that a laptop with a wireless that works with Linux may not work with FreeBSD.

All that being said, I use it as a desktop at work--though I need Linux for VCloud consoles.  I don't know of any compelling reason to use it as a desktop, but, unless you need a few specific proprietary programs, I can't see any reason not to do so either.

TL;DR
Linux is probably easier to use as a desktop but FreeBSD can make a nice desktop too.


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## kpa (May 7, 2015)

wblock@ said:


> FreeBSD takes the view that unused RAM is wasted.



Linux takes the same exact view but the internal implementations and some of the semantics of the VM system are quite different. I urge everyone not to fall into the trap of thinking that this "unused RAM is wasted RAM" thinking is something that originated from the BSD family of UNIX OSes. Even MS Windows does that in a limited fashion by reserving memory for buffer cache when possible but in less aggressive fashion.


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## shepper (May 7, 2015)

I would suggest that you not try to shoe horn your desktop needs into a particular Operating system but rather decide what you want in a desktop  and choose the operating system that best supports your needs and the hardware you have.  For example, I have something similar to an eeePC (Acer Aspire A150) that came with an atheros AR5007 wireless card.  It is not supported in either FreeBSD or OpenBSD.  I would have to change out the card and I'm not that idealistic - it runs Debian 8.0.  Likewise, if you have a cutting edge video card (Radeon R7, some newer Intel HD video chips, hybrid video) your life would be easier with Linux.


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## drhowarddrfine (May 7, 2015)

shepper said:


> choose the operating system that best supports your needs and the hardware you have.


Even better, choose your hardware to run FreeBSD. Then you have the best of all worlds. That's what I do. It's not hard.


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## crashd (May 7, 2015)

I downloaded the latest ISO of GhostBSD. So I try the hardware detection!

My clean system, just start:


```
root@debian:/home/crashd# free
      total  used  free  shared  buffers  cached
Mem: 1023360  342160  681200  30836  26432  173696
-/+ buffers/cache:  142032  881328
Swap:  2076668  0  2076668
```
My system with Iceweasel and 1 tab open:


```
root@debian:/home/crashd# free
      total  used  free  shared  buffers  cached
Mem: 1023360  540608  482752  45516  28296  265328
-/+ buffers/cache:  246984  776376
Swap:  2076668  0  2076668
```
It is true that the problem are the programs they use so much RAM.


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## crashd (May 12, 2015)

I tried GhostBSD but does not detect the wireless card and the maximum screen resolution is 800x600 which supports. Now I'm downloading FreeBSD-10.1-GNOME-3.15-20150323.iso


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## Beastie7 (May 12, 2015)

Instead of fiddling around with ISOs and different hardware configurations, make your life easier and get a Mac. It's a good UNIX desktop. If you really want (for whatever reason) an open source desktop, then FreeBSD/GNOME.


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## Deleted member 9563 (May 12, 2015)

I've been using FreeBSD for desktop use since about 8.1 and find it more to my liking than Linux has been over the years. I use KDE, though I find XFCE and Fluxbox OK too. For some reason, Gnome is incomprehensible to me.

There are some irritations which I could probably fix, but they are from KDE or applications, not from the OS. I now have 8GB RAM and have never seen more than about half of that used. In that regard, I should say that I usually leave a bunch of things open and use 10 desktops. It seems that Firefox, as it grows, takes up to about 3.5GB and then can't keep itself together any more. So in that case it would appear that the application is not made to scale and there's no point in adding more memory. Also, it seems that Xterm sometimes locks up if there is a network problem like a crashed SSH session. I live with that. No system is ever perfect and when I see what my MS-Windows friends put up with, I think I have more stuff working well than they have. Plus, I have the freedom which I absolutely demand.

I encourage you to use FreeBSD as a desktop system, but keep in mind that the real advantage is the stability of the underlying OS and not the, often flaky, applications. /mytwocents


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## crashd (May 12, 2015)

Beastie7 said:


> Instead of fiddling around with ISOs and different hardware configurations, make your life easier and get a Mac. It's a good UNIX desktop. If you really want (for whatever reason) an open source desktop, then FreeBSD/GNOME.


It is the only livecd that I found with FreeBSD and I need to detect hardware. I do not like to use Gnome, I use Xfce.


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## NewGuy (May 12, 2015)

wblock@ said:


> FreeBSD and Linux use RAM differently.  FreeBSD takes the view that unused RAM is wasted.  If it is used for file cache, it can easily be reused for something else with no performance hit.  And if a file read hits cache, it is a huge performance improvement.



That is actually the exact same approach to using RAM Linux uses. FreeBSD and Linux are the same in this aspect.

I switch back and forth between running FreeBSD and Linux a lot and I've found they are about the same in performance and RAM usage. Assuming you're running the same desktop and the same applications you are going to end up with roughly the same performance and memory usage. With two important restrictions:
1. Drivers may be different on the two operating systems. Having the proper video driver, for example, can make a big performance different on a desktop machine.
2. Boot times on FreeBSD are usually quite a bit slower than on Linux. That rarely matters since most people do not reboot frequently.

Someone mentioned further up that ZFS is likely to use a lot more memory if it's run on FreeBSD and that'll skew the memory benchmarks. This is simply not true. I'm running ZFS on several of my machines. When logged in none of them use as much as 1GB of RAM. in fact, when running ZFS on a desktop machine on FreeBSD it results in about the same amount of memory being consumed as Linux running on the same machine with the ext4 file system.


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## BachiloDmitry (May 14, 2015)

I was used to my Windows machine at home which has Core i7 and 16GB RAM, so when I once forgot my laptop and needed a workstation at work, I had to get anything I could get to reach server by RDP. I have found old AMD64 Athlon 3000+ and 2 GB of ram for it. I also had a FreeBSD 8.2 installation CD which was damaged and could boot but could not read kernel.tgz and base.tgs. So I made it install from the internet and thet I freebsd-update'ed it to 10.1. I installed pkgng, xorg, lxpanel, slim, openbox and rdesktop. So I had a working computer made from garbage in about 25 minutes, which could access Windows Server 2008 via rdp, problem was solved. Then I wanted to browse the internet, I installed Google Chromium and, as expected, it worked slower than on my Windows PC at home, but I replaced motherboard with Athlon 3000+ with another found board with Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5700  @ 3.00GHz. It had diferent RAM type, and now I have only 1,5 GB of it. Can't say how surprised I was when this machine started working just like my home PC, browser doesn't swap anything, works like a charm. I can't say I am having any kind of performance issues, this machine still suffice my needs. So yes, FreeBSD with only important stuff installed works fast as hell.


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