FreeBSD Is Slowly But Surely Trying To Catch Up With Linux Graphics Drivers

[Luke_Wolf]

Well. As predicted the other free operating systems can participate from a strong Linux position. Good parts of userland are shared anyway, but the stronger Linux becomes, the better for all the others, too. Just because HW vendors can't ignore it any longer and have to support it. Specs, drivers and stuff. And once a driver is in the free BSD folks can participate. In best case it is even MIT or BSD licensed so they can actually copy/paste it into their kernel and adjust only the kernel specific parts. Good for everybody.

Yeah, it's rather interesting particularly with FreeBSD taking the purist BSD approach, while DragonFly is hedging more on being compatible with upstream. Long term FreeBSD's approach will probably be better, but DragonFly's lower maintenance. Hopefully they'll mostly have things in place by the time of FreeBSD 11 or 11.1 .

[MartinN]

Do they have to reverse this stuff from Linux to avoid the GPL?
This makes me wonder if AMD's open source effort will be GPL based. Any thoughts on what that means for BSD?

Honestly, though... this is FreeBSD. You use that OS because you want a rock solid server platform, not because you want to game.
If I were them I would not invest in the graphics stack at all... for now. I would double down in what they are known for... improving the network stack, zfs improvements, security enhancements, and defect resolution for a more stable platform. I would wait for all this Wayland, GLNext, Open AMD stuff to fall out first.

I wouldn't mind using FreeBSD for daily desktop use. In fact, I think FreeBSD and Linux should continue to borrow from each other's successes. They both can carve out their own niches either on the desktop or the server or both. From what I understand, the network stack on bsd is rock solid and linux could borrow in that regard... I also don't know how difficult it would be to port Wayland and the massive effort of everything being ported to it, to BSD, but I would certainly welcome it. If you have Linux and BSD as a commodity on the desktop and the server, the quicker everything else, OSX, Winblowz, etc will die off and surrender to Linux and/or BSD. This is ultimately where we want the entire planet to head to. Could be just my pipe dream, but I like to dream a lot.

[profoundWHALE]

I wouldn't mind using FreeBSD for daily desktop use. In fact, I think FreeBSD and Linux should continue to borrow from each other's successes. They both can carve out their own niches either on the desktop or the server or both. From what I understand, the network stack on bsd is rock solid and linux could borrow in that regard... I also don't know how difficult it would be to port Wayland and the massive effort of everything being ported to it, to BSD, but I would certainly welcome it. If you have Linux and BSD as a commodity on the desktop and the server, the quicker everything else, OSX, Winblowz, etc will die off and surrender to Linux and/or BSD. This is ultimately where we want the entire planet to head to. Could be just my pipe dream, but I like to dream a lot.

They've already got Wayland running on FreeBSD, and the license is compatible. I believe they are just working on making it perform nice and smooth. I have no idea as to whether they will be replacing xserver or not, nor if and when they do.

[TiberiusDuval]

I wouldn't mind using FreeBSD for daily desktop use. In fact, I think FreeBSD and Linux should continue to borrow from each other's successes. They both can carve out their own niches either on the desktop or the server or both. From what I understand, the network stack on bsd is rock solid and linux could borrow in that regard... I also don't know how difficult it would be to port Wayland and the massive effort of everything being ported to it, to BSD, but I would certainly welcome it. If you have Linux and BSD as a commodity on the desktop and the server, the quicker everything else, OSX, Winblowz, etc will die off and surrender to Linux and/or BSD. This is ultimately where we want the entire planet to head to. Could be just my pipe dream, but I like to dream a lot.

I'd say easiest and most convenient way to use FreeBSD as daily desktop, is to use PC-BSD, as it is in essence FreeBSD with various scripts and additional utilities. Of course if you like to set up everything by yourself, then vanilla FreeBSD should be fine.

My experiences with PC-BSD have been mainly positive, I have used it since 9.0 and it has gotten better and better in every new version. Most of rough edges are gone.

Some caveats though: Only 64-bit version, and it comes with ZFS, so older machines won't like it. And PC-BSD like FreeBSD is somewhat picky about hardware support. Especially on GPU support. Only GPU's having really good support are Nvidia ones with closed drivers. Though they'll give you about identical performance compared to Linux.

Someone said here, something about ZFS being not usable on desktop use, I don't think so. Generally memory and resource hungriness of ZFS depends on what features are on use. Yeah, use deduplication and compression, and you'll need quite hefty hardware. But if you are somewhat more conservative, resource usage is not problem with modern hardware. For example I have about same memory and processor load with PC-BSD 10.03 running KDE as with Kubuntu 14.04 64-bit.

[drSeehas]

... use PC-BSD, ... Some caveats though: Only 64-bit version, and it comes with ZFS, so older machines won't like it. ...

Why don't you use (32-bit) GhostBSD 4.0?

[TiberiusDuval]

Why don't you use (32-bit) GhostBSD 4.0?

Because, I don't need 32-bit version. My computer is capable enough* and needs 64-bit or pae-extension.
*i5 and 8Gb memory.

[drSeehas]

Because, I don't need 32-bit version. My computer is capable enough* and needs 64-bit or pae-extension.
*i5 and 8Gb memory.

GhostBSD is of course available as 64-bit version too.
So, why don't you recommend GhostBSD 4.0, which doesn't have some caveats as 64-bit only and ZFS?

[TiberiusDuval]

Mainlybecause I have not used GhostBSD ever, I don't know if it is good os, mediocre os, or bad. Same reason I wouldn't say anything about quite many Linux distro's or for example OS X.
And 64-bit only or ZFS are problems for people who do not have reasonably modern hardware. PC-BSD with ZFS performed well enough on my previous computer setups. One had dual core Pentium 1.5 Ghz and 4 Gb ram, other Core2 Quad 2.2 Ghz 8Gb ram.

[drSeehas]

... I don't know if it is good os, mediocre os, or bad. ...

It is as good or bad as PC-BSD as it is based on FreeBSD 10 as is PC-BSD.
GhostBSD uses MATE as desktop environment.

[TiberiusDuval]

I haven't used Mate since some old version of Linux Mint. When cames to DE's I'm mostly KDE user.