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I have not tried recently to use BSD as a desktop, which is likely to have problems when using many recent GPUs, due to the lack of device drivers (but NVIDIA provides FreeBSD drivers, not only Linux, so I have used FreeBSD on a signage appliance with a fanless NVIDIA GPU).

However, when using a system without a GUI, e.g. for a networking or storage server, in most cases FreeBSD is definitely much easier to use than Linux.

There are a huge number of small details that matter. Even for something as simple as seeing the status of the network interfaces. If I type "ifconfig" without arguments on FreeBSD, it shows everything that I want to know, about all network interfaces. To obtain the same information on a Linux system, I have to type a large number of "ip" commands, each with many arguments that I fail to remember even after decades of using "ip", so I may need to consult the "man" page for "ip". (The legacy ifconfig of Linux does not provide the functionality of FreeBSD ifconfig)

In general, for any network-related task, using ifconfig and ipfw on FreeBSD is much easier than using ip and iptables on Linux.

There also many more niche applications where there are big differences. For example the "mt" command for magnetic tape control sucks badly on Linux, but it is very convenient on FreeBSD. Also for SCSI devices FreeBSD has more flexible commands.

While audio seems to be improving on Linux with things like pipewire, for a long time audio was in many cases easier to configure on FreeBSD than on Linux with the dreaded ALSA or pulseaudio, if the audio hardware was supported. Also, when I had to configure once some USB surveillance cameras, that was easier on FreeBSD with webcamd, than on Linux, but like for audio, FreeBSD has a shorter list of supported devices.

Some of the differences in the user interface between FreeBSD and Linux are caused by FreeBSD being more conservative, while in Linux some older tools have been replaced with newer tools, but the newer tools have been made with worse user interfaces, like in the replacement of ifconfig with ip, or in the introduction of ALSA and pulseaudio, which both have an extremely poor user interface, especially for computers with multiple audio devices.




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