My apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this.
I’ve been reading around online about keeping software secure, and I’ve been puzzled by something for a while now. I’m not sure if this is a stupid question or not.
Generally, when I see online conversation about Linux vulnerabilities, I often see people detailing the how big the attack surface of the Linux kernel itself is due to its’ monolithic kernel; I saw a blog post about this very thing linked somewhere here on Lemmy recently. I also see folks glamoring about how the BSD ‘spinoffs’ (?) all have much better fundamental approaches to security, and they get compared to Linux quite often as ‘the superior platform’ due to things like the non-monolithic kernel and BSD Jails. Hell, one of the main self-touted benefits of the BSDs is that there is significant effort placed on discovering vulnerabilities.
Could someone knowledgeable tell me why desktop Linux has seemed to be ‘chosen’ in comparison to something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD? I don’t see any open-source forks of a BSD spinoff (only proprietary ones like what runs on the PS5), nor do I see anyone talking about using them for desktop computing purposes. Is there a fundamental challenge too great to overcome right now with using something like FreeBSD as a desktop OS, or has there simply not been enough volunteer manpower to throw at it, and Linux already has that problem, in comparison, solved? It shocks me that the adoption is so low, especially considering the reportedly amazing binary compatibility with most existing Linux software.
TL;DR: I don’t daily drive (Free)BSD because it doesn’t work with some hardware and software that I use.
I’m not an expert in the BSD’s. But I’ve tried to daily drive FreeBSD a couple of times and can speak to it for myself from that viewpoint. Most recent attempt was about a year ago.
The issues I had:
Poor WiFi support. I understand that wireless driver support is iffy and even if it does work, it has poor speeds. I tried this on my laptop and could not get WiFi to work. There was a workaround in passing wireless card through to an alpine Linux guest VM and connecting there then creating a bridge. I did get this to work, but I found it impractical.
Games (via Wine/Proton) aren’t really an option. I understand you can install steam via a Linux compatibility layer and it’s somewhat functional with workarounds. I did not try this.
Those were dealbreakers for me. But the desktop experience itself was good. I ran KDE, and it felt the same to me. if I was running it on a wired machine that wasn’t used for gaming, I think I’d be happy to use it.