# Will my computer be compatible with FreeBSD?



## Kamey03 (Jul 15, 2022)

Hello everyone, I'm a linux and windows user who never tried any form of BSD before, I'd like to install BSD on my computer and try it out, possibly learn about it and its usage.
I'm wondering if my computer will be capable of running FreeBSD with a desktop environment, as I don't know if my hardware is supported.


GPU: AMD Rx 570 4GB 256Bit GDDR5
RAM: 16GB 1600 Mhz DDR3
CPU Intel I7-4790 4 Cores 8 Threads Base 3.60Ghz
Storage: 128GB Intenso SSD, 10TB WD Red Plus
Motherboard: Hewlett-Packard 1998
Display: 22" Philips 1080p


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## SirDice (Jul 15, 2022)

BSD Hardware Database
					

A database of all the hardware that works under bsd




					bsd-hardware.info
				




Not an extensive database but it still has a lot of hardware in it. That said, I don't expect any issues with this. Mainboard doesn't tell me much though but most mainboards should work fine. May have to figure out what kind of network interface the board has (if it has onboard networking). You could pick up a cheap Intel Pro/1000 network card if the onboard isn't supported.

And you can always boot the installation media and pick "live system", then you can check what's being detected (or not), without actually installing anything.


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## zirias@ (Jul 15, 2022)

The best way to find out is to test. Looks pretty standard to me.

For graphics, Linux' DRM drivers are ported to FreeBSD. By just installing graphics/drm-kmod, you get the version recommended for your FreeBSD release (for 13, it's currently based on Linux 5.4) and all the firmwares, so if this GPU works on Linux 5.4, it most likely works on FreeBSD as well. There's also the option to test newer drivers based on Linux 5.10.


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## hbsd (Jul 15, 2022)

Hello and welcome. FreeBSD hardware support is almost the same as Linux.
The main challenge is the graphics card. My graphics card is AMD Radeon R7 370 (older than your's) and it works great.


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## tuxador (Jul 15, 2022)

Kamey03 said:


> Hello everyone, I'm a linux and windows user who never tried any form of BSD before, I'd like to install BSD on my computer and try it out, possibly learn about it and its usage.
> I'm wondering if my computer will be capable of running FreeBSD with a desktop environment, as I don't know if my hardware is supported.
> 
> 
> ...


I have an almost-the-same configuration with the same graphic card, an i5 45** and a pilot ah10 (I think) and it works great with Freebsd 13.1 , my DRM driver is from the official PKG latest repos.


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## tux2bsd (Jul 15, 2022)

Kamey03 said:


> I'm wondering if my computer will be capable of running FreeBSD with a desktop environment, as I don't know if my hardware is supported.



That hardware database referenced earlier is one of the most awful websites known to man, it doesn't convey information in any useful manner.  Why go to the effort but produce a site so bad?  So strange.

GhostBSD is a livecd style BSD, try that out and if that works then FreeBSD should be fine (not guaranteed though).


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## gpw928 (Jul 16, 2022)

Kamey03 said:


> I'd like to install BSD on my computer and try it out, possibly learn about it and its usage.


Your Intel I7-4790 CPU has VT-x and VT-d, and you have a reasonable amount of memory, so can run an adequately resourced hypervisor.
If you just want to try FreeBSD, the easiest path is to use Hyper-V under Windows or KVM under Linux to run FreeBSD as a virtual machine.


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## cy@ (Jul 16, 2022)

Just to encourage you, I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop O/S since 1995 and have used everything from fvwm2, mwm, gnome2, gnome3, kde, lxde, xfce, metacity, even twm on as a windowing environment, finally settling on CDE (because I used CDE on DEC Alpha and Sun Solaris back in the day). I switched from Linux that year because Linux had a nasty habit of regularly trashing EXT (long before EXT2) filesystems. UFS was stable. And, FreeBSD's support for SCSI was superior to Linux at the time too.

Glad to see you making the switch. You won't be sorry. I was new to UNIX then, having just switched careers from IBM mainframe to UNIX (and being terribly disappointed with Linux 0.99.5). There were a lot of friendly FreeBSD people in 1995 to help me. I haven't looked back. It's been a great ride. The people here are as helpful as the folks were back then.


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## hbsd (Jul 17, 2022)

It seems after 16 minutes, OP changed his mind about using FreeBSD.


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