Last night, in a galaxy not that far away (namely, under my desk), I felt a sudden and powerful urge to finally install FreeBSD on my tower PC.
This idea has been haunting me for years. It creeps up on me now and then, whispering: “Ditch the Linux soup. Embrace the BSD purity.”
Roughly 10 to 15 years ago, I had already toyed around with FreeBSD. Back then it was already… let’s call it: quirky but intriguing.
There’s just something cool—maybe even exotically elegant—about FreeBSD. I mean, the entire OS and kernel come from one cohesive source. No distro drama. No franken-Linux with 14 package managers and half-broken DE configs. Pure. Zen. Unix. 🙏
The sweet siren of ZFS also sang to me. Filesystem dreams were forming. Pools. Snapshots. Compression. Arcane sysadmin wizardry.
🎯 Expectation: Hacker Glory — Reality: Endless Boot Loop of Doom™
I really thought I’d be posting a triumphant victory report here today. But instead, I rage-uninstalled FreeBSD and reinstalled Debian by the end of the night.
Why? Because I failed miserably at getting Xorg to start. Like, utterly. Painfully. Embarrassingly.
I have a semi-modern Nvidia GPU. I installed the drivers. Rebooted. Prayed. Chanted the sacred man pages. Still — nothing but an infinite boot loop. Xorg simply refused to cooperate. I suspect it had something to do with my lack of deep BSD sorcery knowledge. 🧙♂️
Also: You can’t just tick a box during install to “Enable GUI”. No no. You must manually install, configure, and align the Xorg stars yourself. Which sounds fun… if you have 6 hours and a debugger kink.
👻 Enter: GhostBSD – The Friendlier Ghost That Still Haunts You
Next I tried GhostBSD — the more desktop-friendly FreeBSD variant. And guess what? It actually launched Xorg… in glorious 1024x768 potato resolution. 🤡
Even after installing the Nvidia drivers (again), it refused to give me more pixels. My dual monitors laughed at me in low-res. So… yeah. That was that.
🧘♂️ Return of the Debian
Reinstalled Debian with GNOME. Five minutes in: Nvidia drivers installed. Dual monitors detected. Xorg purring like a satisfied daemon. I had a buttery-smooth desktop experience again. 🧈
Maybe my BSD issue was something trivial. But I couldn’t find it, and I wasn’t ready to spend 3+ hours Googling through FreeBSD forums from 2009 written in pure ASCII art.
🧠 Final Thoughts from /dev/brain
It frustrates me because I really do think combining Linux and BSD knowledge makes you a strong, versatile sysadmin or power user. They’re spiritual cousins. Yin and yang. Bash and Csh.
I might still return to BSD someday — maybe via pfSense or another practical application like firewalling. But for now, my curiosity has been sufficiently satisfied (and slapped around a bit).
FreeBSD: I respect you. But today, I choose Debian. 🙃