What makes BSD stand out as its own system? I’ve been thinking about installing it in a new computer mainly for reading but I don’t know much about it.
It’s great for certain use-cases that don’t require a lot of hardware support. But don’t go trying to use it on your laptop.
I use FreeBSD for my website and I’m actually pretty happy with it, the simplicity is a strong selling point.
It does feel sometimes like the documentation is written with a lot of assumed knowledge though, which makes it difficult to know what terms to use to find what you’re looking for… e.g. figuring out how to do major version upgrades did not feel straightforward.
It’s worth messing around with! OpenBSD, too.
It will certainly deepen my knowledge about operating systems. Messing with alternatives to grub and all that.
Not sure about the BSDs, but for Linux you don’t actually need GRUB anymore these days. On modern (i.e. UEFI) systems, you can boot the kernel directly as an EFI binary (this is known as EFISTUB booting).
I wish I could figure that out. I’ve tried FreeBSD on my laptop, but Bluetooth wouldn’t work, I couldn’t install Signal, and basic apps I use daily are not available on FreeBSD. I’m not sure who uses it or what they use it for.
Its a base layer of several other, really good operating systems but I wouldnt use it by itself. If you want something lightweight just install ubuntu or mint.
Ubuntu and Mint are relatively heavyweight Linux distros, but still much lighter than Windows.
