Berkeley Software Distribution

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This community is for people to discuss and share anything BSD/Unix related.

While it's not intended to be a "unixporn" clone, screenshots of cool setup's are welcome.

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FreeBSD Runs Perfectly on 16 Years Old Laptop (infosec.pub)

submitted 4 days ago by kiri@ani.social to c/bsd@lemmy.sdf.org

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Small History.

1 year ago I wanted to replace Windows 7 with some Linux on my parents' old laptop (they don't use it anymore), but failed. I tried Linux Mint, Debian KDE, Manjaro i3, etc., but only Arch Linux and TUI Debian (and custom Windows 11 installer btw) were able to boot.

In September I started using FreeBSD as main OS on my machine, so I decided to try it also on an old laptop yesterday. Except missing kitty terminal in packages, it works really well: no WIFI issues, no video drivers issues, for an old HDD it boots in 1min 30sec for xfce and 1 min for i3wm (for comparason, it takes 1 min to boot light custom Windows 7), I even can dual boot with Windows 7 on MBR disk and finally it can be l up-to-date working machine (in some extent).

P.S. cute community avatar btw. It's hard to find anime+BSD pics.

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[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yoo that's cool, always a fan of seeing BSDs on older laptops. Maybe make some follow up posts sometime to keep us updated on any quirks/issues you have or discoveries you make from using it.

[–] defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 days ago

NetBSD is magic when it comes to running on even more ancient hardware.

[–] kiri@ani.social 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Well, most issues are related to laptop or XFCE itself, not to FreeBSD. For example I discovered that Helix and Ranger are really heavy programs and it takes about 2-4 seconds to open them, unlike vi. As I mentioned, requirement to build Kitty from ports is the most significant problem for me, cz it would take an eternity.

It may seem that I'm overstating the FreeBSD in post, so I will try OpenBSD or NetBSD later. If I encounter anything with FreeBSD I will share it next time I suppose. Initially, I was concerned that posts about experiences (or setups or smth) might not be well received, as there weren't any.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago

Ive used OpenBSD on my ThinkPad 380XD. It's slow, but usable in tty mode (original hard drive).

[–] pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 3 days ago

try lf instead of ranger. much lighter, looks the same