I wanted to like BSD: But it didn't let me

This is not a review or a howto, so it does not go along with the theme of this blog persay. I would just like to illustrate my recent experiences with BSD in a journal-like format, and present my ideas on why it will never work for a desktop system in the state it is in now.


Scowering through the internet last night, I was reading up on FreeBSD, a system I have had an interest in for years. Jails were my primary interest, since I am an avid distrohopper and security enthusiast and Jails offer to make both of those tasks easier. Last night, I worked up the nerve to download a few distros (PC-BSD, FreeBSD, and GhostBSD) to try out the next day. I was so excited that I had a long drawn-out dream about BSD where familiar things had small differences to them, which is how I feel about BSD. Linux with positive differences. If only I knew what a shark attack this would turn out to be, I would have just stuck with Gentoo Linux.

Oddly enough, the comic about BSD installation turned out to be true for BSD installation and it highlights perfectly what happened when I tried to install PC-BSD. If you read "My Thoughts on BSD" above you will see that "...the first kernel panic I ever experienced was in BSD". Five versions and a release candidate later, this holds true for its second time. There was an error with ACPI that disabled booting.

Googling time. "BSD panic ACPI" revealed a kernel option called "debug.acpi.disabled" and its value "ec" to fix the problem. When I rebooted, it was to no avail. A page fault occurred, and the forums and #freebsd on irc.freenode.net didn't know how to fix the problem.

The same thing happened on vanilla freeBSD. 

Later, on GhostBSD, a major logging error, a filesystem reading error, and eventually a kernel panic brought the system down (I will admit, I dd'd onto a FAT filesystem which may be my fault, but it is normally the standard).

This run-around was a day long process of Googling and unproductive computing, that eventually led to the death of my hope of installing it at all.

What is wrong with BSD 

Nothing and everything. That statement holds true for what is wrong with BSD. BSD has so much right, it is just everything else in the world of computing holding it back. If BSD had proper hardware and third-party support it would blow Linux out of the water in terms of its features. Jails, a sane networking stack, and the beautiful kernel are what make me jealous of those that have hardware that agree with FreeBSD.

After 40 years of providing an ecosystem on which to compute, BSD developers should consider the fact that many of the end-users goals have changed. Not everybody is a kernel developer that can make proper use of vague pointer output and undocumented debugging flags. Likewise, some people just can't afford buying a CD or downloading and trying to install an operating system that may not even install, and if it does have to worry about the nearly nonexistant third-party support.

PC-BSD has got it the rightest out of any of the BSDs, but even that doesn't nail it. If I, a technical user, cannot install the system after a day of trying, it needs work. And hardware support is an IMPORTANT aspect of an operating system. If I had the money to throw at a third party that would do the same thing with BSD that Canonical did with Linux (let's face it, the Linux ecosystem would be FAR behind where it has gotten itself recently without Canonical) I would dump my funds into their wallets ASAP, but PC-BSD isn't quite there and it just seems to be a stagnant markup.

This will be my final rant about BSD until I can install it and give it a proper review. I really wanted to enjoy BSD, enjoy ZFS, Jails, ports, ksh, all of that great Unix stuff, but BSD simply would not let me.

My opinions on *BSD

BSD, the Berkley Software Distribution, is one of the least-used variety of Operating System in the world. BSD has been around for a very long time, even before the times of Linux. It is a version of Unix, the grandfather of most Operating Systems. Technically, Mac OS X is a fork of BSD, which is what allows OS X to be POSIX compliant.

There are a few choices to choose from with your distribution of BSD. Like with GNU/Linux, hundreds of them exist. The more popular ones are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and PC-BSD. PC-BSD is the only one of the bunch that comes with a graphical desktop environment installed by default, so it is considered the "newbie" BSD. Debian is creating a variant of their OS with the BSD kernel and intends to turn it into a major project, but it is still in early development.

FreeBSD is know for its speed. Speed and performance are the two major selling points for BSD; it even claims to run more efficiently than Linux. FreeBSD is not for the feint of heart, however, because it will take some expertise to get it running properly and to install graphics if that is what you wish to do. You will also have to deal with some outdated repositories, since porting them to BSD takes time.

OpenBSD is focused on providing an extremely secure operating system. I can't vouch for its security personally because I never used it on a server, but it seems to be the choice for companies or individuals who want a secure desktop or server.

PC-BSD is the most user friendly version of BSD. It is criticized for coming with a lot of "bloat" preinstalled. Other lightweight versions of BSD do not come with a lot of features installed, usually just a compiler, a text editor, and a few other tools that can be used from the command line. PC-BSD on the other hand comes with X, a graphical desktop environment, and a few graphical tools that other versions do not have preinstalled. If you are new to BSD, I would greatly recommend PC-BSD as a starting point.

Above are my opinions on some of the various distributions of BSD, but I feel differently towards BSD as a whole. I feel that BSD is far behind Linux in terms of support, package updating, and user-friendliness. The first kernel panic I ever experienced was actually in the LiveCD of PC-BSD. Also, the BSD license allows others to edit the source and turn it into proprietary software, which I don't support morally.

In conclusion, *BSD is great for heavy server use, but for practical desktop usage you should go with another alternative, like GNU/Linux.