Why I stopped using FreeBSD after 5 years?

FreeBSD journey status: halted

You may have stumbled upon my old post with first impressions about FreeBSD. Or the second one, where I complained about desktop experience. I was very close to abandoning FreeBSD at that time, but managed to stick with it after all.

Until a week ago, that is. No matter how much I like FreeBSD and how well it aligns with my principles, I simply can't justify using it as a main desktop OS anymore. I've been using it dual-booted with Linux on my old Acer Aspire since 2020, and as the sole OS on my Thinkpad T480 since 2021 - and enjoyed it a lot. Here's a list of reasons why I'm not enjoying it anymore:

• Hardware support

  I bought T480 for the sole purpose of having a FreeBSD that runs very well. It is known that thinkpads have better hardware support from the FreeBSD developers, and this one specifically was mentioned as very compatible when I did my research. And they were not wrong.

  Still, even with this level of dedication, the experience was far from ideal. The main issue was of course WiFi, or rather its drivers. It was barely able to squeeze out 12 Mbps on download out of my 150 Mbps connection. It was unstable, forcing me to service netif restart quite often, as it just disconnected and would not reconnect. It was especially volatile when under heavy load - connection speed would slow down to a crawl.

  Suspend/resume worked for the most part, except for a couple of months when it was not trustworthy on 13.0 and 13.1 versions of the system. It would not always resume, and a force-shutdown was required. I used series 12 of the system until it got later resolved on 13.2.

  Sound through HDMI was not working in the past, but it worked on Display Port when connecting the display through USB-C. So I used USB-C to HDMI cables and not regular HDMI. They may have fixed it later, but I did not check.

  These were all tolerable, however lately I've grown an appetite for a bluetooth speaker. And while bluetooth works on T480, I was not able to create a virtual_oss link that would last longer than half a second.

• Software support

  Perhaps software is even greater problem than hardware on FreeBSD.

  While the ports collection is nice and quite extensive, you are pretty much stuck with the programs available there. You will very rarely have an option of downloading a precompiled release straight from the developer like you can do for Linux. Well, maybe you could use Linux compatibility layer to run those, but I haven't used it much besides a couple rare occasions. Most notably I managed to run chromium through it, so I guess it is possible.

  Another problem is lack of or minimal support for FreeBSD from various application developers. Can't really blame them, as their FreeBSD user base most likely consists out of a handful of people. It was often the case that even if I found precompiled FreeBSD binaries for a project (showing that the developer supports it), they had bugs which were lying there unnoticed because of lack of users. This makes you feel like a beta tester all the time.

  Free Pascal Compiler has major problems compiling shared libraries on FreeBSD, which in turn causes a lot of problems like making Double Commander plugins non-functional (since those are shared libraries). It also makes it impossible to use FFI::Platypus::Lang::Pascal. I reported a FPC bug with a possible workaround a couple years ago, but it does not receive any attention. And even with my workaround, there are various bugs happening in the compiled shared library, like random bus erros.

  Blender was basically non-functional on my machine prior to FreeBSD 13. It caused random GPU hangs after a couple minutes which made me restart PC. It got stabilized later on.

  I also lately encountered some mplayer-based GUI programs which caused GPU hangs while playing music. I had no interest to investigate, just removed them from my machine.

  DBeaver is not available on FreeBSD, but you can get it as an Eclipse plugin. But then every time you update Eclipse, you have to also update DBeaver inside Eclipse, since pkg will not handle it.

  There are countless small issues with software like these which simply make the experience much worse.

• FreeBSD Development issues

  I already mentioned suspend/resume regression that happened in FreeBSD 13. It happens, and it could happen again, as I guess there are not as many people testing the releases on desktop.

  A month ago another bad thing happened: a lot of GUI programs got removed from pkg repositories due to a failure to build one of the common dependencies. They were gone for a couple of weeks. If (like me) you were unlucky enough to issue pkg upgrade at that time and not read the messages carefully, you would end up removing these programs from your machine. For me it removed thunar, gnome-screenshot and file-roller. This was quite disruptive.

  Technically not an error, but FreeBSD broke backward-compatibility for desktops when they added new backlight utility. While it is probably good to have it, it still caused a regression in my desktop environment which took an hour or two to fix.

• Future compatibility

  Now my main issue with FreeBSD. While I could tolerate most of the issues listed above, what will happen if I have to replace my T480 one day? I really doubt I will find another laptop with the same level of support. It will be a roulette, and such laptop will probably cost me more than a regular laptop I would buy for Linux. And while I don't plan on replacing T480 anytime soon, it is something that made me feel uneasy.

Linux journey status: resumed

After a long internal battle, I decided to replace FreeBSD with Slackware. I think Slackware is pretty BSD-like and manages to distance itself from a lot of things I don't like about Linux, while still benefiting from Linux kernel and the hardware support it brings. It is also rarely updated, which minimizes the time I will have to spend on tweaking the configuration. I got to add, Linux desktop experience improved a lot in the last 5 years, mainly due to Flatpak and Steam.

I am still keeping FreeBSD on my VPS (the one which generated the HTML you are looking at right now). I don't think you can get a better server OS, as long as you don't want Docker. Unlike desktop, it has zero problems (well, maybe one, the FPC shared libraries thing).

I may return to desktop FreeBSD when it gets better hardware and software support. I know there is an undergoing project to improve laptop experience, so better support is not out of realm of possibilities.

Comments? Suggestions? Send to bbrtj.pro@gmail.com
Published on 2025-05-22