Earlier in this year, I tried using FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Things didn't turn out so great for me. Why?

Here are the problems I came across during my stay on FreeBSD/OpenBSD:

Software compatibility

You cannot run Linux binaries on BSD systems. If you are a true computer nerd, most likely you will be fine as you probably won't need anything fancy running on your system. But for the general users, they wouldn't have a very good time after realizing that Flatpak, Nix, Homebrew, Guix... are not available on BSD and figuring out how to setup Docker/Podman (seems to be possible on OpenBSD).

FreeBSD has something called "Linux Binary Compatibility", which claims to allow FreeBSD to install and run unmodified Linux binaries straight away. I never got it to work on my computer, so, LOL.

Performance

BSD systems tends to not perform very well compared to Linux systems. Check out the benchmark done by Phoronix here.

Personally, I think FreeBSD's performance is OK on my potato PC - it can pass. It is not the case for OpenBSD though. OpenBSD is notorious for being extremely slow, even on high-spec machines. I wouldn't touch it again until I can afford for a better machine.

Wayland support

I had been using Wayland since my discovery of labwc, a stacking Wayland compositor inspired by Openbox, during my switch to Alpine Linux. I later on fell in love with it and probably won't have any intentions to switch away from labwc. This means I most likely will not return to X11 again, so the system I use must support the Wayland ecosystem to some extent.

Most BSD distributions have very limited support for Wayland, with the exception of FreeBSD. Wayland on OpenBSD is still very experimental, and for NetBSD it is almost non-existant, though the devs are working on it but with little progress.

Small community

This means a lot of things. You won't have too much materials to start with, it's harder to get support, and community-driven projects (BSD ports collections,...) may not be sustainable.

I do remember a promise of mine that I would somehow, in some way, contribute to the BSD community when I made a switch, which I did fulfill by creating a port of senpai the IRC client for FreeBSD. At the time of writing, the port hasn't been merged and there was zero activity since my last comment. I don't know what happened.

And so, I had to end my short-lived journey to BSD. One month later, I got my thoughts composed and wrote this post. It is uncertain if I will ever try using BSD again, since I had already stucked with Alpine Linux, and with all of my intentions to distrohop gone.

At the end of the day, the year of Linux desktops hasn't even come yet. And until that wonderful year, one may consider MacOS a "good choice" for a BSD desktop experience.

P.S: I didn't review this post after writing. If there is a typo, feel free to give me a heads up.