Justine Smithies (nprofile鈥4wz)
Heya! I've been daily-driving it for nearly a month on my main at-home laptop (Thinkpad X260).
It's pretty great! ZFS is darn near bulletproof, and after some initial challenges of getting wifi and GUI configured, it was pretty "boring"... until I tried upgrading to 15.0, lol
Figured out how to roll back to 14.3, and I'm now waiting for 15.1 before I try again (although I believe the issues I had have now been resolved, but I'm still going to wait ;)
Package availability is amazing (better than Debian in some cases!), and most things compile without any issues, although some things that don't have very well-written Makefiles are iffy and I got stuck.
Been having fun with Dosbox-X, playing games I loved 20-30 years ago. I couldn't get the Linux version of Kerbal Space Program to run under compat_linux, but I didn't really expect it to.
#OpenBSD definitely gets my vote for noob-friendly #BSD, since it has X11 in the base install, and it configures itself, but I now have sway (Wayland) running under #FreeBSD just as if I were still on Linux, so as long as someone is willing to skim through the pertinent parts of the handbook, it's a great OS.
The only downsides to #FreeBSD vs. Linux is that S3 resume takes a little longer (8 seconds instead of 1-3 seconds), and I have occasional hiccups, which I'm sometimes not able to recover from. Loading some websites in Firefox will make everything hang for several seconds at times (even though I'm launching Firefox via nice (1)), and there are some times that sway never quite recovers from S3 suspend, although that's rare. The good thing is that sometimes it will catch the power button and shut down cleanly, and even when it doesn't, #ZFS is so bulletproof that it just takes it all in stride.
There are occasional Linuxisms that feel a bit odd, like some of my packages (the swaync notification system and the duckstation console emulator are notable examples) require #pulseaudio of all things, which sometimes eats up my CPU. That's... really weird to me. I liked how minimal sndio on OpenBSD is.
Both major BSDs have very sane syntax for the config file that governs Wifi access points, and that's very refreshing to me after using a TUI to join networks on #Debian (although it's definitely possible to uninstall #NetworkManager on Debian and use the native interface config files, but they're not as nice/simple as the BSDs').
One really fun (if a bit cartoonish) way of comparing the BSD philosophy to the Linux philosophy is to look at doas vs sudo, specifically man doas.conf, then man sudoers.
The manpage for the sudoers file is pretty long and convoluted, as is the syntax for the file itself. doas.conf is super brief and to-the-point, and its manpage is pretty concise.
I think once they add the GUI setup tool to the FreeBSD setup wizard, that will be a real game-changer.
P.S., I haven't really daily-driven OpenBSD in a while, but I'm planning on getting an adapter so I can power my OpenBSD Thinkpad X200t off of a power bank, instead of the very dodgy OEM battery, so I can experiment with OpenBSD some more. I know the latest version has fixed the problems I was having with Emoji support, so I think that OS deserves another look. With the little bit of experimentation I've done in the last week, I've been pleasantly surprised with even Firefox' performance on that little Core 2 Duo. The only bummer about OpenBSD to me is the lack of ZFS or any other modern filesystem, so the occasional power losses or hang-ups become much more dangerous.
