A lot of your points are valid, however... some are taking some liberties. Are you actually running into usecases where FreeBSD is easier or faster to install than current release Fedora Server?

> The wifi thing is no problem with...

You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?

A lot of wishful thinking in this thread about FreeBSD on workstations.

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sunshine-o 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> A lot of your points are valid, however... some are taking some liberties. Are you actually running into usecases where FreeBSD is easier or faster to install than current release Fedora Server?

It is just that the Fedora installer is more complex... and also will fail often at partitioning or during install. I've done it hundreds of time and it failed dozens on time.

I would still recommend Fedora to Linux users but the FreeBSD installer much more simple and straightforward.

> You're seriously proposing end users run Linux VMs with PCIe Passthrough to get modern networking cards to work?

It is an Alpine running on the hypervisor you won't even notice it. It consumes less than web browser tab...

Plus it has benefits from a security point of view.

I would rather FreeBSD devs focus on other things than porting all wifi drivers.

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0x1ch 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the most complex part of a desktop linux install is the partitioning, but sane defaults are handed to you on most installers, so I'm curious about the failures and what induced them.

As for the whole wifi thing... Yeah man, FreeBSD isn't ready for vast majority of people, even linux veterans. I know getting the manpower to write those drivers isn't always possible, but we're talking years of this being ignored. Which has led to solutions like yours.

Something trivial to us, is not for others. It's pretty insane to even think that is a supported solution to that problem.

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sunshine-o 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It's just `pkg install wifibox` ... The only dependencies are bhyve and socat.

It is actually a very simple and elegant solution to an horrible problem.

	▲	Lammy 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And it won't even be necessary for many people since a lot of work has gone into FreeBSD's Wi-Fi support recently: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/improving-and-debugging-f... Personally even as a FreeBSD fanperson I wouldn't want to rely on wifibox no matter how elegant it is to use. It would forever irritate the “omg ugly hack” part of my brain lol I installed FreeBSD 14.3 on my Framework Laptop 12 and the stock Intel AX211 Wi-Fi card Just Worked™ out of the box in FreeBSD 14.3 after a `fwget` to download the proprietary firmware blobs (removed from base between 14.2 and 14.3, FYI) while USB-tethered to my Android with a simple `dhclient ue0`: - https://i.imgur.com/vulqdvc.jpeg - https://i.imgur.com/S6OcWMA.jpeg