@libremelon
Thanks!
It's a great little OS! Only complaint is that it's a little slow to resume from S3 suspend (about 8 seconds), but it does so reliably.
Some intensive processes like opening bloated web pages incur a bit of a hiccup/delay, and I'm not sure why. I know the kernel scheduler is tunable, but I haven't found out how to go about doing that yet.
They're trying to target laptops more, so there's still some work to be done.
Of course, heavy Linux games don't run (haven't been able to get #KerbalSpaceProgram to work on #FreeBSD yet), but simpler linux executables can run (even GUI ones), and the pkg repos are quite exhaustive, about as many binary packages as Debian (around 150k), from my estimation.
No flatpak, no Steam, so binary sources are limited, but there's tons of FOSS software that just runs without trouble.
The handbook (installable as a package or available on the web, both as html and pdf) is quite good, and fairly exhaustive, and to me, the biggest feature of the #BSDs is that they just make sense as an operating system, and aren't a haphazard and ever-changing collection of FOSS parts, like Linux distros are.
FreeBSD does take some manual configuration to get a GUI going, but it's honestly pretty easy, and the handbook tells you exactly what to do. They will have a GUI install screen in the installer soon, so that will become automatic.
I've got it running with #Wayland and the #Sway compositor, almost no issues. For some reason, neither i3status nor waybar have the ability to show Wifi link name and quality, so I developed my own little front-end script for i3status to restore that (I had to do the same thing for #OpenBSD for RAM usage).
I've had to come up with my own way to make sense of memory usage (a script that mimics Linux' free utility) and wifi link quality, but those were fun problems to solve.
After a week or two of hacking around with it and getting all my own scripts and little utilities working with it, it has now become almost completely transparent and gloriously "boring." Basically the same as running Linux for most everything I do. XD
It has fewer pain points than #OpenBSD (which I honestly love as well, don't misinterpret me): a rock solid filesystem (ZFS), and full emoji support (lol priorities, amirite?).
It also has very good full-disk-encryption baked right in, which I'm missing from #NetBSD (but plan on playing with that OS later on as well, because I want to try ALL THE #BSDs! XD )