# Is FreeBSD good for me?



## userfan7 (Dec 13, 2013)

I want to make a distribution for home users. This means that will be a distribution easy to use, light and fast. Users will use this to surf the web, watch movies, play some games and the classic activities. The problem is: *I* read that Freebsd FreeBSD has driver problems, and some of the most popular (Intel/ATI) are incompatible. So what you suggest? Can this be good or not?


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 13, 2013)

There's PC-BSD, GhostBSD. Why reinvent the wheel and fragment FreeBSD further? Join the PC-BSD pool and work with them. And what is your background? It doesn't sound like you have ever developed anything using FreeBSD if you have to ask this question.


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## userfan7 (Dec 13, 2013)

I'm just the "brain" of a project. There are developers and more nice staff. I hope that my project will be good and that you will see it. *I* just liked Freebsd FreeBSD benchmarks and some other stuff. That's why *I* want to inform myself. So your suggestion is to start from PC-BSD or GhostBSD?


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 13, 2013)

Not 'start with': _work with_, i.e. contribute to already existing efforts. Nobody cares about an even further fragmentation of FreeBSD. We're not 'the distro OS'.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 13, 2013)

I'm not getting into the "project topic", I basically agree with @DutchDaemon on that one. However, I also think you're making a wrong assumption here.



			
				userfan7 said:
			
		

> The problem is: *I* read that Freebsd FreeBSD has driver problems, and some of the most popular (Intel/ATI) are incompatible. So what you suggest? Can this be good or not?


What drivers?

Keep in mind that in the end FreeBSD is basically a commandline based Unix-like operating system. It doesn't have to support specific graphic cards to work. Now, I can imagine where that remark might be coming from, considering that it has become quite common to spout comments such as: "Linux distribution X now supports even more graphic cards". Which is of course partially true; most of the work isn't so much done by Linux (the kernel) but the X Window System ("X11") running on top of it.

In that aspect FreeBSD isn't that much different. If X11 supports it, then so can FreeBSD (because it doesn't have to; it lets X11 do most of the work).

As for those drivers, well...


```
smtp2:/usr/ports/x11-drivers $ ls -dx xf86-video* | head -5
xf86-video-apm                  xf86-video-ark
xf86-video-ati                  xf86-video-chips
xf86-video-cirrus               xf86-video-cyrix
xf86-video-dummy                xf86-video-fbdev
xf86-video-glint                xf86-video-i128
smtp2:/usr/ports/x11-drivers $ ls -d xf86-video* | wc -l
      41
```
I don't think there's much to worry about here when it comes to providing a good graphical environment.

Edit: Replaced all mentioning of X.org with the officially requested names / terms as requested in X(7).


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## userfan7 (Dec 13, 2013)

Thank you all for suggestions, now *I* have a better idea about it all. Thank you again!


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