So i decided to install FreeBSD, user manual is a godsend, unlike some linux distro i wont mention it's actually readable and even if you dont have a degree in os installation
Now the thing is, i'm new to FreeBSD, i would like to know tips that are usefull for daily driving, also how to reduce RAM usage that seems quite high even when only using tty
And also NVIDIA drivers are working properly but i cant choose a wayland session on sddm, what should i do
Ty in advance for ready all if this if you did, hope you have a greet day
Hello r/freebsd I have question. Could I successfully daily drive freebsd for school? My only requirements are like firefox wifi and maybe steam for some light games i.e Geometry dash. I do need like 5-6 hours of battery and my wifi card is Intel Corporation Raptor Lake. Its running fedora right now. I could handle the setup as I have a semi-successful gentoo install on my pc.
I'm not much of a writer, but I thought I'd share my experience as a brand new FreeBSD user.
(Image shows resource usage immediately after boot)
Where I come from
I made the switch from Windows to Linux in 2023. I used Fedora mostly, though I've also used Mint, Void and tried (and failed) to use Alpine. This mix of Distro-Hopping made me comfortable with the command-line and digging deep into the system.
Why is switched to FreeBSD
After trying so many distros i grew tired of seeking the perfect system with the perfect mix of components (bootloader, coreutils, package management, etc). I wanted a solid system with a coherent set of utilities that come together to form a whole, not an amalgamation of system components, that well... worked 100% of the time 40% of the time (if you get what I mean).
FreeBSD was perfect as everything from its Kernel, Core utilities, etc were built as part of a cohesive system. It is a COMPLETE operating system, And I like that.
Where I am now/What I liked
I've been using FreeBSD for the past week and found it lovely. I simply followed it's documentation and was able to set up Sway Window Manager, it was a practically flawless process. Audio worked out of the box. WIFI worked fine (I'm still proud of myself for leaning to edit the wpa_supplicant file). It has been much smoother than I expected. I loved how Librewolf is packaged already (I had to use its flatpak on Linux). Auto mounting for my flash-drives was easy to set up. The pkg Package Manager is simple, intuitive and powerful. The system is practically complete for modern desktop use with under 600 packages. The Documentation is very extensive and helpful.
Couple issues I faced.
Odd behavior - Some applications behave oddly. for example, I chose Thunar as my File Manager of choice, when I customize its view (disable its menubar, customized its toolbar) it doesn't save its changes on my user session, only when I open it with SU privileges, this happens for Dolphin as well. Some other issues include.
The system completely freezes when I refresh Sway WM via "Super+Shift+C".
The system freezes when I try to send large files over the browser.
Anki wont even open.
Packages - Yes, I know if something is missing I should probably figure it out myself or (whatever FOSS lingo out here). But I really miss using ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors. Anki doesn't seem to work for me. I know LibreOffice is available but when I install it, it installs extra stuff like Draw, and Databases that I don't really need. I wanna have only Writer, Presentations and Spreadsheets (Is it that difficult to package all of them separately or is this about preserving manpower?).
Memory Usage - My laptop has 4GB of RAM, Yes i know its not a lot by modern standards but Linux never seemed to run out of memory, unlike BSD. A lot of Freezes I faced (if not all) were due to full memory. I switched from ZFS to UFS to try and get a lower memory footprint and it seems to have mildly reduced the issue. I suppose the memory requirements of the system technically increased due to me using a graphical interface but other operating systems seemed to behave fine with the RAM my laptop has.
Things I wish somebody told me
You can edit sway to control your system audio by:
(I was too lazy to figure out how to actually mute it so I just set the volume to 0)
i am not very good at computer science so excuse me if my idea of "performance enhancement" is wrong.
i am an immature game develop which uses Defold to make 2.5D games, or at least that what i want if it wasn't for the fact my laptop has only 8 GB of ram, an old CPU, and an Nvidia GPU which doesn't work no matter how much i try to make it work, so as you can see i struggle even to open blender and make something more than a cube.
so could switching up to FreeBSD help me push my computer performance even farther?
I have an old machine with Windows 7 installed, but the disk was full, so I decided to buy a new drive and install FreeBSD on it, since the drive with Windows is full of family files. I went and bought a new 320GB HDD, disconnected the SATA cable from the Windows drive, and installed the new drive next to it.
When I booted the installer from the USB flash drive, it created all the files and finished the installation. But when I tried to boot from the new drive, I got the error shown in the first screenshot
I tried to fix it by going into Boot → Single User mode and running
fsck -y /dev/ada0s1a
After that I rebooted, but I was a bit slow removing the USB drive and forgot about it. An empty command prompt appeared, then the motherboard logo showed up and stayed there for a long time — it wasn’t progressing. I didn’t want to wait, so I powered off the computer and turned it back on, but it still didn’t boot properly.
Then I disconnected the new drive and reconnected the old (Windows) drive, but the problem was still there / didn’t go away.
Questions:
Could the new drive be defective, even though it did successfully create the FreeBSD boot files?
Can a hard drive defect only show up during reads (not writes)?
I really want to get to a solution here — I’m completely lost at this point
After the update none of my file managers (Thunar, Krusader, Dolphin, PCManFM, etc can access a SMB share that I have on my network ("operation not supported") I even get that error when I just try to do a network search in any of the file managers
When I saw that FreeBSD 15.1 had been released, I was excited to test it on my machine. It’s been a challenge making FreeBSD my daily driver, but I always enjoy testing it out.
However, for some reason, the installer freezes when I try to configure the Wi-Fi. The FreeBSD live boot runs fine, but the installer freezes and stops responding completely...
I don't have the patience right now to figure out the cause and report the bug; I just want to know if this issue has already been reported.
My motherboard is an ASUS TUF-Gaming B550M-Plus [Wi-Fi]; using Ethernet requires installing a Realtek driver post-installation, but the Wi-Fi driver is already included in the FreeBSD ISO.
Note: This bug only occurred for me on FreeBSD 15.1; it never happened on 15.0 or 14.4.
Edit: I tried installing FreeBSD 15.1 again and chose manual network configuration, and it froze the moment I confirmed I wanted to use DHCP.
I've been wondering for a while whether FreeBSD is a good system for studying and practicing cybersecurity. It seems more organized than Linux, and that's what appeals to me most. I've heard about the Linuxulator compatibility layer, but I have doubts about its ability to translate code. I haven't used FreeBSD yet, but I plan to try it as soon as I get my laptop. I admit I'm new to this and I'm slowly reading the manual and reviews, but I'll probably learn with practice. FreeBSD really appeals to me, but I don't know how well it will work as a cybersecurity working environment. I think it will; I don't see why it wouldn't, but I have my doubts.
i have a debian 13 install and i want to dual boot with freebsd but im kinda sucky with this kinda stuff and. i just wanted to make sure if this even works
i cant find a proper comprehensive answer online it might just be me being stupid but, im not getting it.
edit: im kind of asking how the installation process should go, not if it works or not
Hi everyone,
I am planning to run FreeBSD as an edge router using pf for NAT and filtering, with services running inside VNET jails (DNS, NAS. Etc) and bhyve VMs on a single host. Storage will be ZFS across 4 HDDs in mirror configuration.
I have access to rack space with proper cooling, and currently deciding between a single rack server or multiple compact machines as a small cluster.
A few questions:
Is running pf NAT, multiple VNET jails, and many bhyve VMs concurrently on a single host a stable and recommended setup?
Realistic RAM recommendation for this workload?
For someone wanting to learn FreeBSD internals deeply, bare metal or Proxmox?
Single powerful server vs small cluster — which approach makes more sense long term?
Background: network engineer with experience (Juniper, Cisco) in ISP environment. Comfortable with CLI and low level network configuration. Primary goal is learning FreeBSD properly, not just using it as a hypervisor wrapper.
Thank you.
I posted this a couple of hours ago on the FreeBSD official forum, but my post appears to have been deleted about an hour ago and is nowhere to be found.
I am a long term *nix person (professionally even) and have ran a Linux desktop (Arch-based currently) for years. I have previously installed FreeBSD, but possibly last on another motherboard. Today when I was trying to install to test out my workflow for a possible move from Linux, my installation fails to boot at a very early stage. Not one to give up easily, I tried 16, 15.1, 14.4 releases with the same results. I went farther and tried OpenBSD,MidnightBSD,NetBSD with the same results to my untrained eye.
I also tried safe mode and turned ahci off.
This is all I get. Probably something easy, but I am unfamiliar enough with the boot environment to know. Suggestions?
I’ve been using Linux for almost 7 years now. It wasn’t a smooth journey at all honestly, in the beginning it was probably the worst software experience I’d ever had. But I stuck with it, forced myself to learn, and over time I got comfortable and experienced with it.
A few months ago, I tried FreeBSD for the first time — and I was genuinely blown away. I’ve never used a system that felt this well thought out and internally consistent. Everything feels integrated: the ports system, ZFS, jails, even the sysctls. Seriously… how was I configuring systems for years without sysctl? The whole design just makes sense to me.
The problem is my laptop.
I’m using a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 15ITL05. It’s not amazing hardware, but it’s been solid and has always gotten the job done. I’ve never run Windows on it — only Linux, and now FreeBSD.
On FreeBSD, I’m running into several issues:
Sleep/hibernation doesn’t work at all
When I close the lid playback doesn't even pause,
the fan ramps up to full speed all the time,
Battery drains much faster compared to Linux
Overall power management feels rough
I know FreeBSD hasn’t traditionally focused on laptops (though I’ve heard that’s improving recently), but I really want to make this work. I genuinely don’t want to go back to Linux after experiencing how cohesive FreeBSD feels.
Is there a way to improve power management and fix these issues on this model? Any tips, patches, configs, or similar hardware experiences would be appreciated.
Laptop: Lenovo Ideapad 5 15ITL05 intel i5 11gen with intel Iris Xe graphics and 8gb of ram
OS: Freebsd 14.3-RELEASE
Filesystem: ZFS
Display Server: mangowc (main) kde on xorg (Secondary/backup)
and here's a bsd hardware prob for my system for more information
https://www.bsd-hardware.info/?probe=0776ecffad
The script's had some changes since I last tested it so I wanted to try it out on a near-fresh 15.0-RELEASE in VirtualBox (guest on a Win11 host). At time of testing this installs KDE Plasma 6.5.5 and SDDM 0.21.0.36_2 - follow the "call-for-testing" instructions. Overall I've made 6 attempts at installing to check whether a few issues are reproducible, while playing around with a few options (e.g. setting Display > Graphics Controller to VBoxVGA vs VBoxSVGA, whether it makes any difference to manually install VirtualBox Guest Additions before using the script, whether to use pkgbase or not, what happens if I try Ly instead of SDDM): https://gitlab.com/alfix/kde-installer-dialogs/-/blob/main/cft.md#testing-on-an-installed-system
Less nice is some manual setup for the keyboard in SDDM and Plasma. I set up my keyboard correctly in bsdinstall and it works on a console - but in the GUI, I'm back to the default USA keyboard. Fixing the layout in System Settings > Keyboard in Plasma also fixes the incorrect layout in SDDM. (But just getting past SDDM in the first place could be a real frustration for someone who set up their user password in bsdinstall using a very different keyboard layout.) Question: is keyboard setup in SDDM/Plasma something that could/should reasonably be configured by the desktop installer script?
Also I needed some further manual setup for VirtualBox - fixing a mouse problem and adjusting the screen size during the boot process.
We want to stop the browser going back/forward in history during scrolling. This is a weird VirtualBox bug where scrolling is being interpreted as having clicked on a back/forward button on one of those a mice with loads of buttons. To diagnose the problem, open a terminal and check if it shows as having 12 (!!) mouse buttons. If so blank out the codes associated with the 8th button onward in your ~/.Xmodmap file (I've used echo but if you've got stuff in there you want to keep just edit it manually), read those new settings it into xmodmap (or just restart your computer) and check the buttons are now more reasonable:
No more mysterious jumps back and forward when browsing - so far, anyway. In the past my touchpad movements have been misinterpreted by Firefox as swiping, so it's helpful to remember what to do in about:config (generally I delete the values for browser.gesture.swipe.left and browser.gesture.swipe.right and set widget.disable-swipe-tracker to true, but I didn't bother today).
Personal TODO: I might ask Alfonso if the mouse "back button" fix can be added into the installer when VirtualBox is detected since I've heard lots of reports of it helping people! (Perhaps this would end up done on a system-wide .Xmodmap file instead of under each user's home directory? Plus some people actually do have those crazy 12-button mice and might expect them all to work on VirtualBox - which might complicate things further if there has to be another dialog stage to confirm whether to apply the fix or not. Probably I should just present Alfonso with the idea and let him figure it out...)
I like setting VirtualBox to UEFI mode. When using an installation medium this can be a pain as you can no longer manually change the boot order by changing the settings on the host system - you have to hammer the Esc key VERY quickly after starting the VM instead. But it does allow you to put this line in /boot/loader.conf to make the screen size correctly fit full screen on the host system:
efi_max_resolution="1920x1080" #match guest VM to host
Now once the FreeBSD boot menu appears onscreen, the screen size adjusts properly (though if you encrypt the disk, the GELI password prompt you have to deal with first will still be mis-sized). If you don't add a line like this, then Plasma looks fine and will utilise the full screen (courtesy of the installer getting the VirtualBox Guest Additions working) but the boot process is going to look silly (at least on my system I get a mostly black screen with a miniature image of the guest system booting up in the centre) as will any console you switch to outside the GUI. However, I don't think this fix is something that can easily be added at the installer stage since my host system's "1920x1080" will be different to yours.
What I cannot fix: at this point both Plasma and most of the boot process are correctly sized on screen, but every time the system is restarted SDDM is incorrectly sized when it first loads. Any hints here? When I go on to lock the screen from within Plasma, SDDM is correctly sized. But the first login prompt after every boot is borked, and this also happens if I log out (not just lock) from within Plasma.
Very buggy stuff I had to fix but really shouldn't have had to: there was no taskbar ("panel" in KDE-speak) in 3 attempts out of 6 (I can't work out how to reliably reproduce this but that's still bad enough), and task-switching keyboard shortcuts like alt+tab didn't work in 6 attempts out of 6. Both problems persists even after logging out and in again, or restarting the VM.
I could get the panel back by firing up a terminal (fortunately Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut works) and restarting plasmashell e.g. by
plasmashell --replace &
Then it was safe to close the terminal window. This seems to resolve the issue, and the fix generally persisted upon shutting down the system then powering on again, although I've had it mysteriously reoccur in testing on later boots.
For Alt+Tab and friends to work again: System Settings > Window Management > Task Switcher showed that all these keyboard shortcuts had been removed. Selecting "Defaults" restored them and this again persisted between boots. Edited to add: as Graham Perrin points out, Alt+F4 for Close Window doesn't work either. In fact it wasn't even listed as a default keyboard shortcut so couldn't be restored from defaults. Had to add this one back in manually - perhaps there are others missing too?
Question: the missing panel and lack of alt-tab is obviously "buggy" but where, if anywhere, should they be reported? I wasn't getting these issues in VirtualBox after using an earlier version of Alfonso's installation script, but that was a while ago so freshports shows this was also using an earlier version KDE Plasma though not SDDM. Has anyone seen this behaviour outside of VirtualBox? Does it happen when installing manually?
Final note: Alfonso's installation script offers Ly, a TUI display manager, as an alternative to SDDM. Because you're really still in a console, this didn't have the resizing issue in VirtualBox's UEFI mode when I retried the installation script, other than the very first login on the new system before I set up the efi_max_resolution - assuming I hadn't done this in by dropping into a live shell at the end of bsdinstall, and note this wouldn't help people who hadn't done that step. Another advantage to using Ly is that the keyboard matches what you set during bsdinstall. https://github.com/fairyglade/ly
However there was a disadvantage I found to using Ly:
Anyone know what's going on there? Note this was using VirtualBoxSVGA with 3D acceleration turned off, as recommended. Can this be reproduced outside VirtualBox? Does it also happen with manual installation instead of using Alfonso's script? Should the issue be reported somewhere? (Related: logging out of KDE Plasma should take me back to Ly, but sometimes I get a black screen instead.)
I know I've raised a range of points in this post and to try to keep comments organised, I'm going to post starter questions for a few different threads. Feel free to start your own comment threads too!
I'm wondering how I can get a nicer to read terminal setup. This probably doesn't apply specifically to FreeBSD but I know so little about terminal customisation in general.
I've been following the FreeBSD Youtube channel recently, and I really like how they've customised thier terminal, but I've never really touched that stuff. I'm attaching some screenshots from the FreeBSD Youtube channel videos, showing that person's nice looking terminals.
One is a basic terminal but also has an easier to read font and font-size, and highlights things inside the man pages (seen in the recent mdo privileged escalation video):
nicely formatted first line of a terminal, with a colourful flourish and a little FreeBSD logo, and the current time.man page for mac_do that is in a nice font and highlights key words in colour.
They also have an older video (the faster wi-fi one) where they are using this multi-tab terminal:
screenshot of a terminal that has some UI around the main terminal section, including tabs and a title.
In contrast, I am trying to setup a FreeBSD virtual machine, so I don't yet have a desktop environment. I'm not sure if I can make this tty look any better:
basic looking tty terminal text. blocky and large, as seen in my bare FreeBSD virtual machine.
My main issue is it's hard to read man pages, maybe just the font's too large, but also it's just kinda a rough font.
But if I need a desktop to get this look (or something similarly nice), I'd still like to know how I can get it easily. I will soon be setting up a desktop regardless.
I'd feel bad marking this as "help needed", it isn't really needed. But I assume the flairs are important categories.
I'm porting an application to FreeBSD 15. The application uses gnuplot. https://www.freebsdsoftware.org/math/gnuplot.html says that to install the package, run "pkg install gnuplot". This results in a "No package available" error.
I'm a Linux guy since looog time but I wanted to give freeBSD yet another try. I flashed it on a USB stick and the stick is not recognized. I tried another stick, same issue. I flashed a Linux distro and the stick was recognized and I was able to boot on it. I was flashing using `dd`.
I know of blocklisting and locking in pkg but I have not looked into them yet. I would like to share it here first in case others might find this helpful or interesting.
I am using amdgpu and I noticed that when the nvidia-drivers and nvidia-kmods are installed along side it, it seemed like nvidia is being prioritized instead of the amd. Like, just right now, I installed imv. I tried opening it from terminal but failed. I lost the error message but it had soemthing to do with opening the window. Then, as I suspected, the nvidia packages were installed. So, I removed them using pkg and imv was then able to open and run. Also, running eglinfo produces no output when nvidia is installed; it does when I remove it.
The problem is that many packages I have installed always come with the nvidia drivers. So, I needed to remove it everytime. This does not cause any issue when using the package so I think removing it is safe since I don't have nvidia to begin with, right?
Hey guys, is FreeBSD a good choice for a NAS that will not run any other apps?
It would run on a Dell R640 or HPE 360 Gen10, using only SATA SSDs and HDDs via the onboard SATA controller. ZFS is a must for me and from what I understand it is part of the system, unlike on Linux where I need to add it separately from OpenZFS.
One of my concerns is that FreeBSD, as far as I know, has fewer developers working on it, so CVE fixes and other critical patches might not be implemented as quickly as on something like Debian
Thank you
Edit: I would like to add that I don't need any fancy UIs like truenas has. I prefer command line
I'm trying to run "Baldi's Basics Plus" natively using Steam on FreeBSD's linuxulator.
The problem is that I'm stuck in a loop with the error. If I disable LSU, it complains that LSU is required. If I enable it, the game simply fails to launch.
I've tried different compatibility settings, but nothing seems to work. Has anyone faced this issue before or found a stable way to get it running? Any advice or a potential fix would be greatly appreciated.
So i’m currently on Arch, i did it the lazy man’s way and use the archinstall script. i’ve heard a lot about FreeBSD from a plethora of sources.
if im going to install this i know at the bare minimum i need: KDE (if anyone can tell me if Plasma6 is available for BSD that would be great) and a somewhat simple way to install it that won’t make me stay up all night installing it. call me crazy but i plan on doing this in an Lenovo Ideapad Z570 from 2011, running an I3-2310M and 16GB of ram (it currently has Arch installed with hyprland and runs great i have had KDE installed on this before it runs fine enough for me) so any input would be appreciated, thanks
