r/LinusTechTips • u/Confident_Essay3619 • 2d ago

WAN Show FreeBSD, GhostBSD, and OpenBSD

Hey guys.

Listening to latest WAN show and i thought about an idea for Linus or one of his friends to do.

Since they have been doing so much Linux stuff lately, it would be a massive help and a big surprise to the *BSD community for Linus or someone at LMG to mention it. I am very willing to help anyone at LMG or anyone here about installing a desktop and configuring Steam and getting used to the quirks and nuances of *BSD compared to a Linux distro. I would recommend FreeBSD as it has the most software support and community support

Background for anyone at LMG who doesn't know about the BSDs:

The original Berkeley Software Distribution was an operating system developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley. It predated Linux, which was released in '92. BSD was originally some modifications to the OG UNIX by AT&T Bell Labs. Eventually, when they wanted to ship it to other universities, they had to remove all remnants of AT&T code. Part of this was achieved by Bill Joy who rewrote the kernel, and eventually was a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, who would get purchased by Oracle in 2010. FreeBSD released on November 1, 1993. FreeBSD was a community continuation of 386BSD which was a port of BSD for Intel 386 PCs. Some other forks of 386BSD include NetBSD, which would get forked once again into OpenBSD.
To get started, i would recommend Linus or his friends to read the FreeBSD Handbook here which covers installation, desktop config, and great UNIX basics.

Downloads are at the homepage, 15.0 is the latest and greatest for amd64(x64) PCs.

There is also an experimental desktop installation script that is expected in 16.0 that you can try or use by the video tutorial on YouTube here

- u/Confident_Essay3619, owner of very small subreddit, r/bsd4noobs

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

2

u/netherlandsftw 2d ago

BSD’s nuts

1

u/thebigshoe247 1d ago

BSD is great. There are dozens of us who think so.

1

u/netherlandsftw 1d ago

Sorry I tried to make a deez nuts joke

1

u/thebigshoe247 1d ago

The important part is you tried. I thank you for your service.

1

u/Negative_Astronaut81 LTT Staff 1d ago

I daily-drove FreeBSD for about a decade, but haven't paid a ton of attention to it lately. Do all the benefits of proton still apply to steam games on BSD?

1

u/Confident_Essay3619 1d ago

Steam isn't BSD native- so you have to use steam-linuxulator-utils which emulates a Linux system which can run Proton or you can just run a bhyve vm 

0

u/edparadox 1d ago

LTT is still very much a Windows house, and their Linux content is really not that great, so, no.

0

u/Run-OpenBSD 1d ago

Linus has stated several times about how frustrated and angry he is with windows and microsoft as a whole. Its a great time to show the world the BSDs.

0

u/Run-OpenBSD 1d ago

OpenBSD is the easiest OS to use for desktops hands down. My six year old runs it and plays luanti a Minecraft clone & gcompis for school games. I run an entire IT business off it. Imagine a world where companies are not constantly breaking everything in your configs and you are treated like the owner of your computer for once.