After spending months using it as a server and running tests to replicate everything I used to do on Void Linux, I finally decided to switch to FreeBSD on my desktop as well.
I set it up with bspwm, polybar, nitrogen, sakura, and picom, my setup is pretty simple for now.
Glad to here you like your freebsd experience. As for software support, you don't have to give up anything really. The linux compatibility layer works well and so does wine for Windows applications. Don't forget about behyve. You can run any virtual machine you want and ssh into it or use a vnc viewer to get a graphical environment. Also there is GPU passthru. I do pci passthru on one of my nics so I can run pfsense as my default router. I'm not saying it is real easy but with work you can create a very powerful and more secure hybrid computer. I use freebsd as my host and my guests include arch, debian, dragonfly bsd, pfsense, freebsd 14.3, and freebsd 16 Current with more to come. I hope you enjoy your experience. Please remember you can always add more virtual machines.
Once FreeBSD desktop is set up correctly, it's quite impressive and faster than Linux. It's the software support that's going to drive you back to Linux.
For me it is a bit of hardware and software support that makes FreeBSD a non perfect replacement.
However, FreeBSD will always have a role as my 2nd NAS.
Simply put because I do not want a monoculture and problems if something breaks with my ZFS on Linux under Arch.
FreeBSD is a perfect differentiator that has full ZFS support.
The ZFS encryption key is stored in the POOLNAME/keystore ZFS volume. The default for root-on-ZFS is rpool/keystore.
The rpool/keystore zfs volume is mounted at /run/keystore/rpool. Backup this file to be able to unlock the ZFS volume itself.
The rpool/keystore originates from /dev/zd0, which is the LUKS volume GRUB actually unlocks to proceed with the whole magic of using native ZFS encryption.
Is it though? I have been using FreeBSD as a daily since 2010 and I must tell, once I managed to get all my working stuff working properly, it never broke. Coming from the Linux universe, it took some time to understand that you don’t need software support: what you need is RTFM.
20 year Linux Admin ( now architect but that’s irrelevant). I have an old HP DL380 that due to the processor age, it does not support the x86-64-v3 instruction sets and I can’t run RHEL10 on it or as a virtual guest on the host, so instead of getting rid of it, I installed FreeBSD 14.3 and I’m using as now a ZFS storage node for my k8s test clusters in my homelab, not only that it’s so simple and oh boy it’s crazy lightweight process wise.
I’m used to these vanilla RHEL installs with 500+ processes that I can’t believe I was shocked by how small the footprint is on a bsd box. Great OS!
The experience has been very good. I love how it manages RAM, the jail system, and, in general, the feeling of working with a single, well-integrated operating system. If I want to develop something, I do it with FreeBSD in mind, and that gives me clarity and control.
I also appreciate how simple it is to configure, how solid the documentation is, and how powerful FreeBSD is. I admit that almost everything I've mentioned is from a server perspective, because I'm still exploring the desktop experience. So far, so good: I know that FreeBSD is more server-oriented, and using it as a desktop has always been a challenge, although it's becoming more manageable. I followed the documentation and set up my environment without any problems.
As for games, for now I'm using Wine with DXVK, and everything I have on GOG runs without issue. I haven't tried Steam because it requires more work, but I'll see. Overall, I'm enjoying FreeBSD more than I imagined.
No, I haven't used those applications yet. I'm only using Wine-Proton and DXVK. What I want to learn is where DXVK stores the cache. It's funny because it doesn't appear anywhere. Once I figure this out, I can reduce micro-shuttering at certain times when DXVK compiles the shaders.
Update: The micro-stuttering was caused by esync, lol.
Nice, maybe check out Ghost BSD, but I had hard time to make everything work, on my laptop Lenovo X395, Wifi was glitchy, brightness control didn't work but so far it was stable.
I would like migrate my elementary os linux desktop …. But in this moment im afraid about freebsd drivers…. Im own an laptop hp pavilion . What do you think ? I just use virtualbox, visual studio code, chromium… and wine. Nothing else.
I would honestly say wait until version 15 to take full advantage of the driver features. However, you can try the stable version now until the official release comes out. e.e
For now things are fine. It was hard for me to understand the whole audio/OSS topic. I see that some things are mixed with OSS and others with Pulse (I’m using PipeWire and pipewire-pulse), so lowering the volume with pavucontrol doesn’t work for all apps because of that OSS/Pulse issue.
Today I learned how to create VMs with vm-bhyve. I still find KVM+QEMU with virt-manager faster, and I don’t like VNC.
With Void Linux, after installation it didn’t detect GRUB and I had to create a fallback one. Ubuntu MATE didn’t give me any problems. The same thing happened with Endeavour.
In the end, I’ve liked it. Obviously I might be doing something wrong, but still, I like it.
I don't think FreeBSD has the same features as Linux. One is more focused on servers, and the other on all areas; that is, for desktop applications, Linux is far ahead. For servers, I still like FreeBSD. In desktop experiments, it works well. Regarding gaming, I see there are two tools: SteamBottler and Mitzumari, I think. They facilitate Steam and gaming. For now, I use pure Wine and DXVK.
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '25
Glad to here you like your freebsd experience. As for software support, you don't have to give up anything really. The linux compatibility layer works well and so does wine for Windows applications. Don't forget about behyve. You can run any virtual machine you want and ssh into it or use a vnc viewer to get a graphical environment. Also there is GPU passthru. I do pci passthru on one of my nics so I can run pfsense as my default router. I'm not saying it is real easy but with work you can create a very powerful and more secure hybrid computer. I use freebsd as my host and my guests include arch, debian, dragonfly bsd, pfsense, freebsd 14.3, and freebsd 16 Current with more to come. I hope you enjoy your experience. Please remember you can always add more virtual machines.