I've kept hearing about BSD recently, how hard is it to actually switch to? I'm ...

brewmarche · 2026-05-08T14:41:02 1778251262

My experiences from dabbling with it a few months ago:

In general everything needs to be compiled for FreeBSD, but the ports collection is quite extensive. For example you will find Firefox, wayland, GNOME, KDE, xfce, … even dotnet was on there.

Problems arise with properietary stuff like Spotify, Widevine DRM etc. However, FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (providing syscalls), dubbed ‘Linuxulator’. I managed to run the Spotify Linux desktop client but the Spotify website wouldn’t let me log in, didn’t research further. AFAIK the emulator is limited though, not implementing all syscalls.

There is also podman for FreeBSD and in addition to running FreeBSD containers (using Jails under the hood I guess?) it can run Linux containers as well (using the Linuxulator in addition then?).

It also comes with a hypervisor called bhyve if you want to run VMs

There is a handbook on their website describing how to set up a system (including desktop environment) if you want to give it a go.

wolvoleo · 2026-05-09T22:18:45 1778365125

For spotify, just use spotify-qt :)

I don't think docker works in the linuxulator though. That's the one thing I miss sometimes.

Melatonic · 2026-05-08T20:23:34 1778271814

I could be wrong but I think Jails are separate from containers on BSD?

brewmarche · 2026-05-08T21:15:02 1778274902

I thought that podman uses jails under the hood on FreeBSD, but it is a guess. The podman code seems to reference jails: <https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Acontainers%2Fpodman%20fre...>

But jails of course are older and can be used on their own, I didn’t want to imply they’re the same thing

wolvoleo · 2026-05-09T22:17:43 1778365063

Yes they do but there's a team of maintainers that do just that. There's even ports of software which isn't officially supported on FreeBSD.

SV_BubbleTime · 2026-05-08T14:23:44 1778250224

If you are asking, it’s not for you.