I’m a big fan of the BSDs, but if you’re talking about the desktop, Proton and Steam, WiFi support, and (for me) Niri. You can get Niri working, probably, with some effort, but it comes out of the box on Fedora and Arch. The case of Niri is representative, in my limited experience, of the general case. The dev tooling I use always supports Linux as a 1st class citizen, but rarely supports the BSDs.
Well there is proton and steam on FreeBSD and i can even play Elden Ring and X4 for 2 minutes.....then my machine resets because there is no way to adjust the AMD-GPU fans, so i made a bhyve Win11-VM with passthrough to the discrete GPU and Bluetooth (PS4 controller), and now i can play everything, even my beloved Gold-Box Games with the GBC.
>WiFi support
Yeah that's really a problem, but i just use my Laptop for work so ~6 MB/s is good enough for me, otherwise i would use FreeBSDWifibox it's a hack but hey we use Unixes right? ;)
>Niri is representative
See what Niri is for you, ZFS is for me, i could say that the ZFS-module is representative (on mainstream distros) for Linux and we are both right, FreeBSD and Linux are both not perfect.
>dev tooling I use always supports Linux as a 1st class citizen, but rarely supports the BSDs.
I don't know what "1st class citizen" means, if it works it works, i often use dev-tools where Mac and Windows seam to be the "1st class citizen" but if they work they work.
So yes, there are problems like the Overheating AMD-GPU and Wifi but apart from that i am super happy with FreeBSD, and most important everyone is happy with the OS/Distro choice one made.
For WiFi you should really try bhyve with pass through to an OpenBSD guest. I get wifi speeds comparable to what I got with Alpine(wifibox), but a much nicer environment. Not particularly difficult to setup or maintain.
