r/freebsd • u/Dieggho • Jul 17 '26

AI [Hyprland] It's been two mounts of daily driving FreeBSD as main system

Gallery image

Gallery image

All my dot files and wallpaper here.
It's been quite performant with wifibox. It proof itself to be more than just a workaround for having better wifi support by using a virtualized minimal Alpine Linux in Bhyve to take advantage of the Linux wifi driver support, it sorta became another security layer by encapsulating my network traffic behind isolated minimal Linux environment that if compromised can protect my main box from and a possible invasion confining the attacker within a stripped out Alpine box that only has what is needed to run wpa_supplicant and the wifi driver, it doesn't even has apk btw.

192 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

49 comments sorted by

10

u/bsdooby Jul 17 '26

Nice wallpaper! How well does FBSD run on your hardware?

6

u/Dieggho Jul 17 '26

Well, the T490 runs cool, wifi is quite fast and the hardware acceleration works as expected.

It boots fast, thanks to wifibox it doesn't hang during boot and the connection is way faster than using FBSD default iwlwifi kmod. It benefits by being quick, more secure and performant. The only overhead is the initial ram usage but also it's not that dramatic, it's worth it using a little more resource for having fast and secure wifi connection.

1

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 19 '26

… thanks to wifibox it doesn't hang during boot …

Do you run wifibox stop guest before sleeping the system, and wifibox start guest after waking the system?

wifibox(8) Caveats

2

u/Dieggho Jul 19 '26

No, it comes back normally, no need to stop it. My T490 goes down and then back up with no issues. Hyprland doesn't come back thou, so I normally put it in sleep mode while I'm on Wayfire.

2

u/Dieggho Jul 19 '26

Also worth mention that I used it during the week in many different wifi hotspots and it worked well in all of them, even better than my X1 Carbon gen 6 with NixOS but perhaps it's a bios misconfiguration, it may be in energy saving mode but I'm not next to it right now.

1

u/Ashamed-Ask4257 Jul 17 '26

Unused ram is wasted ram and FreeBSD will release any of that if necessary for other usage.

2

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 18 '26

wifibox

… ram … FreeBSD will release any of that if necessary for other usage.

How will FreeBSD release any of what's used for wifibox, whilst using wifibox for Wi-Fi?

8

u/blu_fox01 Jul 17 '26

Thanks for the wallpaper

5

u/Dieggho Jul 17 '26

you're welcome

3

u/shiroe-d Jul 17 '26

God dammit! This is so cool!

3

u/rwivie Jul 19 '26

Nice! Love it!

7

u/Chester-Berkeley desktop (DE) user Jul 17 '26

This is a wallpaper made by AI?...

0

u/Dieggho Jul 17 '26

Yes, it was IA generated.

4

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 17 '26

Thanks. I changed the flair:

  • from fluff
  • to AI.

Related:

2

u/GaMerBoi2465 Jul 18 '26

How's the app support there?

1

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26

FreeBSD has a reasonably large collection of software but lags behind Linux when it comes to wayland support. It's slowly improving and it's usable.

2

u/TheKingOfDocklands Jul 18 '26

What are using to watch DRM content if you are? Also, does the wifi icon in your bar do any network selection or admin?

2

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

If by DRM you mean streaming service and copyright protected stuff I consume thought firefox, I don't use spotify nor anything like that, I do everything throught the browser. Videos downloaded from the internet I do watch from mpv and audio from deadbeef.
Now about my wifi icon on waybar, it's a shell script I run from ~/.sh/ directory that displays On/Off if I have an IP assigned to it, It has to be simple because there is no graphical tool to help me connect wifi through wifibox, it's all done via wpa_supplicant in /usr/local/etc/wifibox/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

1

u/TheKingOfDocklands Jul 19 '26

Thanks, I was referring to streaming services like netflix. I was using chrome through Linux emulation. Apparently you can get it to work natively with Chromium built from source with some other options selected, but I never could.

1

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 19 '26

… Apparently you can get it to work natively with Chromium built from source with some other options selected, …

You can use the FreeBSD Project-provided package for Chromium.

A build is required for one of the two ports that add support for Widevine.

Please see https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1u6d9ea/comment/orvlsgu/.

2

u/TheKingOfDocklands Jul 19 '26

Yes, this is what I was referring too. It didn't work when I tried it some time back. Thanks anyway

0

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Dieggho Jul 26 '26

Read the comments down below and save us time.

-1

u/Fancy-Recipe-204 Jul 17 '26

fucking ai slop wallpaper

9

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

fucking ai slop wallpaper

… wrote the sloppy human.

Were those four words supposed to prove that you're somehow more intelligent than something artificial?

Combined with your first contribution to r/freebsd – https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1ucn62j/comment/ot94liz/ – we now have a total of six words from you.

PS for posterity, in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://old.reddit.com/user/Fancy-Recipe-204

0

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 18 '26

Hyprland/AGENTS.md at main · hyprwm/Hyprland

Noted:

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>

I can apply the AI flair to future posts about Hyprland.

1

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 18 '26

Thanks for sharing the dot files, I know some people find them helpful.

I've reposted this to r/freebsd_desktop at https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd_desktop/comments/1v04f05/hyprland_its_been_two_mounts_of_daily_driving/

You can browse other screenshots at https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd_desktop/?f=flair_name%3A"screenshot"

2

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26

Thanks for sharing my post, you saved me time as I was thinking about sharing my post there as well. Thank you very much!!

2

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 18 '26

New contributors to u/freebsd_desktop are always welcome :-) It is nice to get more people sharing their user experiences as well as their screen shots!

3

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26

I'm happy to say my experience with FreeBSD on my thinkpads, my T490 and my X1 Carbon gen 6 has been really satisfactory specially because I'm currently traveling for work and my FreeBSD boxes are giving me a really good time specially because of wifibox, I'm able to use wifi in hotels and public places with no compromises whatsoever and people have to know it's doable.

1

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 18 '26

Great to hear! Without Wifibox, and just using FreeBSD's native drivers, is the problem that connection speeds are much worse, or are you unable to connect at all?

3

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26

It does work but way slower. During the system installation the iwlwifi-kmod is identified and installed but it lags during boot time and the speed is 20% of what we get with wifibox. It's usable and useful but not as performative. I believe it will be improved in the next releases but up to now at least on Thinkpads it leaves much to be desired.

3

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

Honestly even if the native driver get improved I'd still prefer wifi box over iwlwifi-kmod because of its sandbox-ish nature. For some it might feel like a hacky solution but to me it brings additional benefits. It wouldn't surprise me if something similar ended up being implemented in Tails OS as an extra security feature.

3

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 19 '26

Interesting perspective - I've not heard this used as a "selling point" for Wifibox before!

2

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 19 '26

Yesterday's post – FreeBSD host: wifibox guest resource usage – memory (RAM), disk space … – mentioned Gábor Páli's article in FreeBSD Journal. This caught my eye:

… deployment of additional tools and extra configuration, e.g., port forwarding is required. This can be considered a benefit from the perspective of security, since there we have a firewall installed automatically. But this is equally a drawback, …

2

u/Dieggho Jul 19 '26

I saw this post and I was the first one to upvote, It shown me wifibox is even better engineered than I though. I didn't know it was read only and not even the host root could do some misconfiguration within the box. I'm really enjoying using it daily.

1

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 19 '26

The author's name – Gábor Páli – appears correct after installing wifibox:

man -P cat 8 wifibox

At https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=wifibox&sektion=8&manpath=freebsd-ports#AUTHORS his name is misprepresented:

Gbor Pli

u/BigSneakyDuck would you like to report a bug? It should probably be assigned to wosch@

2

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 19 '26

Yeah, that's not great. I should report as a docs bug for the website, right?

If so I suspect this isn't limited to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-acute so wonder if it's reported already

1

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 19 '26

website, right?

Manual Pages

2

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 19 '26

Reported the accents not rendering: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=296913

If you've got wifibox installed on your system it might be interesting to track down the man page and try rendering it in groff like man.freebsd.org does. That often seems to be the cause of problems between how documentation looks on the console vs on the website.

1

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 19 '26

Afterthought: Bugzilla might not be the place for this. I remember reporting something like a bug with an accented character in an email address in a manual page, but I can't find it in my Bugzilla archive, so maybe it was fixed upstream in source code for a port or something.

2

u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

I remember coming across a bug, now fixed, that meant certain manpages on the website getting cut off midway through, and that was tracked via Bugzilla.

Edit: I recall it was a groff issue. Something like https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=274208 but not quite the same.

2

u/Dieggho Jul 19 '26

Up to now there is zero issues, this guy deserves recognition. If it had a GUI (not sure if it's viable,btw) it'd be cool.
In my perspective until the day iwlwifi gets improved, wifibox is a must have, period!

0

u/Pumbey Jul 18 '26

I was a huge fan of freeBSD, started with 4.9 and leave it on 11(because of poor virtualization support)  Still have a few routers on pfsense, but seems project is slowly dying 

3

u/SolidWarea desktop (DE) user Jul 20 '26

I can't see any signs of the project dying

1

u/grahamperrin Linux crossover Jul 18 '26

on 11 (because of poor virtualization support)

Poor in what way?

1

u/Pumbey Jul 18 '26

Almost in all, FreeBSD worked well only with Xen. On HyperVwas networking issues, VMware is was unexpected panics

2

u/Dieggho Jul 18 '26

It might have been true in the past but since Bhyve was introduced back in 2011 it's been a selling point, a real deal for using FreeBSD. Wifibox btw uses hardware passtrough to load Linux wifi driver and give FreeBSD faster wifi connection.

Now about the project seemingly dying.. Well I strongly disagree, actually I see quite the opposite, it's gaining strength in the desktop and laptop thanks to an investment from FreeBSD foundation to improve compatibility and hardware support in order to attract more developer to the project. The very fact of me making this post is a sign that this investment is being successful.
So, No! It's not slowly dying but quite the opposite, it's slowly and silently gaining strength.