Distro hopping

For the past months, ever since I made the post on Fedora, I have been quite a busy distro hopper, at first it was my intention that I was supposed to be on a distro for a month and then hop to the next, and that seems to have gone well at first, as I had installed Debian. Testing pretty effectively, which at the time of writing would have it be on Debian 10.3 or something like that.

After the month of being on Debian I wanted a new distro, however I didn’t want to be satisfied with only using what I call “safe distros “, so I figured I would go on FreeBSD 12.1.

FreeBSD was quite an interesting experience, I would say it was so interesting that I hoped that I could install all the software I usually use and then get on with my life inside FreeBSD.

Now as you would imagine by now, this didn’t end up being the case, as most of the things that could go wrong went wrong and while I would want to revisit FreeBSD, I don’t think it will happen soon.

So the question of the day is... what went wrong?

So I would like to start the blame train on ports, the system which has been created to essentially port software from Linux to FreeBSD or so I have been told, it applies patches that make the software work somehow, but it didn’t work for me.

Ports often asked me what pieces of software I wanted bundled up with an application and it was probably why many of my installations of software ended up in utter failure, leaving me scarred thinking it was a bomb.

After a few hours, I had something running, a complete KDE system with AMDGPU drivers installed and everything, but there was something missing, something that hasn’t been an issue for me in the Linux world since perhaps 10 years ago, which was sound, I couldn’t hear a damn thing and I ran through the FreeBSD handbook as well as I could, thought I found something and failed once more, tried with the forums to see if there was any help to be found, but to be more disappointed, and then a lot of google results later, I found myself still without any sound.

Now, one of the main reasons I wanted to try out FreeBSD was because I have throughout the years been told that it is a gold mine filled with more packages than most Linux distros, this is not really the case anymore as it seems like some FreeBSD hype has died down and packages becoming deprecated as years go by.

Maybe if I let myself tinker with it a bit more on a virtual machine or an older piece of machinery, maybe then I might re-think it and might return to the lands of BSD licenses, but this is not the day.