The last time I tried it I dropped it because under BSD Chromium seemed to be unsandboxed (chrome://sandbox) however it appears that there is a sandbox but it is unrecognized by Chromium itself since its not one that Chromium is designed to work with by the Chromium developers. The same is likely true of Firefox. Supported desktops at least on FreeBsd were very old (at least when I last tried it) and getting support is an exercise in patience. There is a lot of attitude from BSD users that no one should ask questions at least that's my take and searching online for answers is no panacea. So I'm curious to hear other Linux users describe their BSD experiences. I'm betting a lot of distro hoppers have tried it along the way.
Most of my experience was PC-BSD in VirtualBox. Worked OK most of the time, but eventually dropped because it was mostly pointless since I have no use for it. Pure FreeBSD went over my head, and I didn't bother to learn it. And yeah, I remember their attitude: RTFM.
I am running a pfsense firewall which is based on FreeBSD. Once I had it configured there hasn't been a problem since. Just yesterday I tried OpenBSD 6.1. The basic installation is very easy and well, very basic. It takes only a few minutes. I had a problem with configuring Xfce, though. I will investigate soon but just wanted to check out if it was compatible with Libreboot. Re attitude: I am not a friend of making generalisations. I think there are all kinds of people among the Windows, Linux and BSD users. There are just fewer BSD users in general. To be fair, the man pages I read were very well written and very precise. Learning the basics by reading the man pages shouldn't be hard.
I also use pfSense, obviously And I've used FreeBSD to build packages for pfSense. But I've never bothered to learn it. I do note that *BSD VMs are useful for compartmentalization. Because they have different graphics fingerprints from the Debian family, which I mostly use. PC-BSD works well enough for that.
It's really not a generalization. It's prevalent in their forums, mailing lists etc. especially in OpenBSD. No matter how detailed documentation is there will always be questions.
My BSD experience is very much BDSM. That's the most adequate description. Lots of pain, with brief moments of pleasure and excitement. Mrk
Okay, to be honest I don't have a lot of experiences with BSD forums. I had to look up a few things in pfsense forums then and didn't notice that kind of attitude. Well, I did try OpenBSD 6.1 again today and installed the Lumina desktop. I had no problems this time and everything I had installed is working fine. I am not in the mood for tweaking the desktop and playing around much but I think I will soon. For now I am still more than satisfied with Arch/Parabola.
Lumina does work well with BSD and OpenBSD is likely the most secure desktop out there though maybe HardenedBSD gives it a run for its money.
I've tried OpenBsd for desktop use. Horrible experience. Third party software is outdated and not secured (as the system itself). So unless you just want to use openbsd as a server, it's not worth the hassle.
I have downloaded Freebsd in the past and set it up as a desktop and I did like it. I really like the concept of freebsd being a complete operating system with the applications seperate and really want to find a use for it. my main use for my pc is gaming so windows is the only platform that makes sense for that. once i have sorted other things out I will get some server grade hardware and setup a freebsd for samba and other uses to learn it.
A big waste of time is the short version. You got further with it than I did. I joined their forum to seek help in finding out which hardware components to use in my custom-build to ensure PC-BSD would run. Only help I got was a link to someplace with a crappy list of ancient (as in AGP slots) hardware. When I returned to the PC-BSD forum and complained that link was of no help, that Google was neither, and said that "the first priority of any established OS should be getting users, and for that a decent hardware-list is essential"... the shrewish mod (don't recall her name) banned me. I of course immediately rejoined long enough to brighten her day with some colorful language (years ago I actually cared about being banned). Needless to say, I never bought the PC-BSD install CD from OSDisc. Any operating system having a forum dripping with that much attitude deserves to fail...and it appears to have done so: https://forums.pcbsd.org/announcement-3.html
I tried pc-bsd back about ten years ago just for something to do - I liked the cleanness of the desktop. I couldn't get my wireless network card working so I jumped on the forums - the folks there were very helpful and worked with me til I'd pretty much exhausted all possibilities. I never could get it working so I eventually stopped working with it, other than that I did like the feel of the desktop and the people on the forums were quite helpful. I had it installed on a harddisk that also had windows, I had no problem booting between both.
The last time I tried BSD was in 1995. Back then I was still working, Unix was what I worked with, HP-UX and Sun / Solaris. Still have the disk I got from Walnut Creek CDROM. It was FreeBSD 2.0.5 "A full 4.4 BSD Lite based 32-bit Operating System" Really don't remember the experience. It probably was good but not that good. Back then Slackware Linux was my preference, still is.
You probably used some -release branch. There may be some patches for 3rd party software (I mean ports/packages) in CVS up to 6 months. It is reasonable, because community is small, and maintaining patches for too long is a waste of human resources. It's better to work on base system. Base system has longer lifespan for security patches. As a desktop user seeking for patched 3rd party software, you are welcome to use -current, which is rolling release and contains new versions of 3rd party software. I use it and don't have much stability issues. When it comes to hardware for desktop/laptop buy something 2, 3 years old with Intel GPU. Haswell, Broadwell CPUs with integrated GPU are reasonable, although even Skylake GPUs are begining to work. I like OpenBSD community attitude, because they are honest and productive. Most things people are asking is basic things found in manual pages, which can be interpreted by someone with basic computer science knowledge, which could be found on Wikipedia. There are some things that are not contained inside manual pages and these questions are welcome.
Like I said, most people who take this route end up buying a Mac. All the pleasures of BSD Unix and none of the pain.