How Does FreeBSD Compare to Linux on a Raspberry Pi? (0x.no) 71
Klaus Zimmermann (a self-described "friendly hacker") recently posted a "State of the Distro" post, choosing his favorite distributions for things like portable installation from a USB drive (Alpine Linux) and for a desktop OS (Debian Linux or Devuan).
But when it comes to a distro for the Raspberry Pi, (at least until the 4), Zimmerman argues that FreeBSD's performance is "unlike any other Linux distribution I've ever seen, even with cpupower activated and overclocking." Nope, no match — FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking. You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it! And if you overclock it a little (2GHz) you can even make it run that gargantua MS Teams.
But what about all that lackluster driver support? WiFi drivers still on the 802.11g standard and all? Surely you can't be serious about it when Linux offers all that support out of the box, right? Wrong, actually. For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best.
So yes, I will keep using FreeBSD on the Pi. As a desktop. With USB WiFi and audio adapters for those services, because the existing hardware is sort of moot even otherwise. And with those USB adapters — and FreeBSD — the Pi works really well, truly desktop-like.
I'd be curious to hear from Slashdot's readers about their own experiments with Linux (and FreeBSD) on a Raspberry Pi. Zimmerman's final winner, for the "Server" category, was Debian — though of his two servers, one is just an XMPP server set up on a Raspberry Pi. "I found that using Debian on the Pi is a real joy. Easy and simple to set up, familiar environment and all. So I'm keeping it.
"This concept is about to be overshadowed, however, by my growing like of FreeBSD lately..."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the article.
But when it comes to a distro for the Raspberry Pi, (at least until the 4), Zimmerman argues that FreeBSD's performance is "unlike any other Linux distribution I've ever seen, even with cpupower activated and overclocking." Nope, no match — FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking. You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it! And if you overclock it a little (2GHz) you can even make it run that gargantua MS Teams.
But what about all that lackluster driver support? WiFi drivers still on the 802.11g standard and all? Surely you can't be serious about it when Linux offers all that support out of the box, right? Wrong, actually. For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best.
So yes, I will keep using FreeBSD on the Pi. As a desktop. With USB WiFi and audio adapters for those services, because the existing hardware is sort of moot even otherwise. And with those USB adapters — and FreeBSD — the Pi works really well, truly desktop-like.
I'd be curious to hear from Slashdot's readers about their own experiments with Linux (and FreeBSD) on a Raspberry Pi. Zimmerman's final winner, for the "Server" category, was Debian — though of his two servers, one is just an XMPP server set up on a Raspberry Pi. "I found that using Debian on the Pi is a real joy. Easy and simple to set up, familiar environment and all. So I'm keeping it.
"This concept is about to be overshadowed, however, by my growing like of FreeBSD lately..."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the article.
well ... (Score:2, Funny)
FreeBSD has hotter chicks [team23.org] at least.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:well ... (Score:5, Informative)
This photo has to be 25 years old. The chick has to be 25 years older.
The photo was taken in 1999. Ceren was 19 at the time and is now 43.
She knows more about programming and sysadmin than 90% of Slashdotters.
Re: well ... (Score:5, Funny)
So do 90% of Slashdotters.
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Which pretty much sums up BSD at this point. Apple aside, the Unix world has moved on from BSD to Linux, and the second place is SysV.
Speaking of, does Apple really use the BSD part of Mac OS for anything any more? Or is it basically just there from their perspective to serve as a boot loader and program launcher until you get the rest of the system up? I don't have a recent Mac OS system and don't want to screw with setting up a virtual one just to answer this one question. My last OS X was like 10.4 or so
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Courtesy of Apple, BSD is by a large margin the most successful desktop Unix ever. That's not nothing. And there's nothing stopping the Unix world from taking a second look, if current solutions aren't satisfactory.
Re:well ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Courtesy of Apple, BSD is by a large margin the most successful desktop Unix ever. That's not nothing.
I don't get the impression that most Mac OS users are in any way benefiting from the Unix part of Mac OS. That's why I asked the question that I asked in my comment.
And there's nothing stopping the Unix world from taking a second look, if current solutions aren't satisfactory.
Sure, but BSD is years behind Linux now, and also that's because Linux is better in that it has features more people need, and it has those feature more people need because it has a superior license. The license is specifically superior in that most corporations don't want to make contributions to something that others can then profit from without also having to give back, because they are in competition with those others. That's what makes the GPL so brilliant; it is powered by capitalism and greed. The same strong copyright law promoted by capitalism for the purpose of profit powers copyleft.
I've run a number of BSDs, including SunOS 4.x and OpenBSD, and even pure 4.4-BSD-lite on ROMP. Oh yeah, and netbsd on Macintosh IIci. And I don't have anything bad to say about those implementations, either, in their respective times. In particular, SunOS4 was arguably the best commercial UNIX of its day, whether considered purely as software or looking at the whole system. But Linux won out for real and legitimate reasons, and there's no obvious path for BSD to regain dominance. Apple doesn't want to do the hard, quality-related work to maintain a server operating system. They just want to do the shiny parts.
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I overheard some people at work discussing the advantages of Apple laptops and why "everyone has one" in their particular department. Apparently it's easier to use terminal windows, because the Apple machines have a taller screen than the HP laptops.
I haven't measured them, but it's got to be a marginal difference. I do hope Apple lets them move the menu bar and the application dock, because that's going to eat up any extra vertical space they get compared to Windows with the task bar moved to the left side
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I almost tried using powershell recently but my work prohibits scripting.
I was going to make a nice searchable manual for some software we use to replace some fairly terrible documentation we have for it, but I ran into a roadblock at every turn.
It's an all Microsoft shop and we have 365 of course so the first thing I thought to do was to use Access. There's a database connector for text files. Nope, we don't have the license for everyone to use that.
So then I thought, OK I'll write a processing tool in Pow
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At work (a university) I'm still running Windows 10. I'm allowed to run Win 11, but I much prefer for various reasons, the task bar being a biggie.
Re:well ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I second this: the macbook has more vertical screenspace than most laptops I've come across. Also the choice of terminal emulators (native, iterm, Alacritty...), and then various interpreters (bash, zsh, whatever else you install) is nice to have.
There is no menubar on MacOS, only the global menu, which takes up the save vertical place as the system tray. On laptop displays, this is the height of the camera notch, which makes the space unusable for normal programs anyway. On external screens the global menu is hiding by default.
The dock can be placed where you want, and autohide.
Personal thoughts: MacOS is a horrible system to multitask on. Window management sucks. The lack of a proper taskbar amplifies this.
Development tools are tied to XCode, which is a giant PITA if you need to not use the appstore provided one. Also guessing which version of Clang is included in which version of XCode is a fun game. Oh, and some parts of the system you can't develop against unless enrolled in an apple dev program.
Font rendering is better than I ever managed on Linux. In general a really pleasant system to look at. I hate working on it.
Can't compare with Windows, haven't touched that since Win7.
So: macbooks are IMO awesome, when Asahi Linux is installed.
Personally, I'll be getting a Framework 16 though...
There are options (Score:2)
I do hope Apple lets them move the menu bar and the application dock, because that's going to eat up any extra vertical space they get compared to Windows with the task bar moved to the left side.
Menu bar isn't moveable, but it can be set to hide when not in use. If hidden it will drop down when the mouse pointer is moved to the top edge of the screen.
Dock is moveable, besides bottom it can be set to left, right. Dock can also be set to hide like the menu bar, and will slide on-screen when the mouse pointer is moved to the appropriate edge.
The menu bar and dock will also hide when an application is switched to full-screen mode; and yes, Terminal can be switched to full-screen mode.
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Sure, but BSD is years behind Linux now, and also that's because Linux is better in that it has features more people need
I'm sure that's debatable on the desktop, but on the server and appliances it's no contest.
I manage hundreds of FreeBSD routers. And no, not Routers for Windows Retards (pfSense, OpnSense, SonicWALL, FortiGate, etc...), but straight BSD with pf for a firewall and a bunch of ancillary services like dnsdist for DNS routing, tinc, OpenVPN or WireGuard for mesh networking, DHCP, RADIUS services wireless WPA3-Enterprise authentication, IDS, IPS, centralized logging, anycast IPs, etc... All without having to p
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Nothing beats ZFS encryption and ZFS snapshots
Yes, I have those on Linux.
I was talking about how Linux is ahead of BSD, you chose to explore how BSD is ahead of Windows.
Re:well ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Courtesy of Apple, BSD is by a large margin the most successful desktop Unix ever.
Sorry but comparing OSX to BSD is like saying Linux is the most successful OS in the world because of Android. The two are nothing alike. Actually I'd argue this is worse as Apple has diverged from Darwin to the point of not even mentioning it anymore, and no longer publishes complete source for their OS.
The only thing it has in common with BSD now is that it can run BSD binaries, but then so can Linux.
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Sorry but comparing OSX to BSD is like saying Linux is the most successful OS in the world because of Android.
What would be wrong with that statement? Is Android built on Linux or isn't it? Although it might be technically more correct to say Linux is the most successful kernel in the world, which would be hard to dispute. But it's moot, as we're specifically discussing desktop OS's here.
The two are nothing alike. Actually I'd argue this is worse as Apple has diverged from Darwin to the point of not even mentioning it anymore, and no longer publishes complete source for their OS.
The only thing it has in common with BSD now is that it can run BSD binaries, but then so can Linux.
With one substantial difference. Android doesn't present a shell environment, unix utilities and services, compilers and other development tools. OS X provides a complete BSD environment with all the trimmings where the user can in
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With one substantial difference. Android doesn't present a shell environment, unix utilities and services, compilers and other development tools. OS X provides a complete BSD environment with all the trimmings where the user can interact with it.
But every Android system has a shell and a number of Unix utilities and services, albeit hidden from plain view. You can install any terminal emulator to run a shell where you can interact with system utilities. The shell is also available remotely via "adb shell" if you enable development mode and plug your Android system into a PC.
Compilers and development tools are not available, but that's completely understandable as storage is a precious resource on a phone.
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What would be wrong with that statement?
That statement is technically correct, but in no way helpful or meaningful to any reasonable discussion about the use of Linux. That's my point. OSX isn't BSD, and Android is not Linux. Not in any meaningful way we talk about these systems.
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The only thing it has in common with BSD now is that it can run BSD binaries, but then so can Linux.
With one substantial difference. Android doesn't present a shell environment, unix utilities and services, compilers and other development tools. OS X provides a complete BSD environment with all the trimmings where the user can interact with it.
Back in the day, MOST Unix systems didn't come with the development system. You had to pay extra for it on SunOS, AIX, IRIX... Even though SunOS 4 was basically just BSD ported to SPARC plus a package manager and openlook, it still didn't come with the compiler suite. It came with the linker, though, because you needed it to reconfigure the system. On my 68k Sun system (3/260, which I later upgraded to SPARC-based 4/260) which had SunOS 4.1.1 I actually had to relink to get DNS support! Out of the box, the
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Students of mine did exercises on Mac BSD-level command line that were intended for Linux/AMD64, including some low-level stuff with gcc and GDB. Some things behave a bit differently, but overall this works.
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Well, the question isn't does it work, I've used it and I know it works. Not for a few versions now, but I don't expect they've broken it.
The question is, does APPLE use it for anything notable, besides booting? Or is everything really done by some systemd-esque services these days, which are all running on Mach?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding is that the OSX kernel is a hybrid of Mach and the FreeBSD kernel. Your question may hence not make much sense. But I am not an OSX kernel expert, so YMMV.
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I've poked around a recent MacOS. The GUI is a veneer on top of what is very much a Unix system.
Quake? Are you serious? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quake? Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. A Raspberry Pi should have no problem with the tasks listed. Raspberries have trouble with I/O bound tasks, not CPU bound.
But either way, O/S overhead is not significant. It is all userspace, so there won't be a measurable difference between Linux and FreeBSD.
TFA is just fanboyism.
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yeah, i can do all the stuff he spoke about on raspbian. retropie for christs sake does a lot more than just play quake on the pi 4
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I originally played Quake on a 486DX25. It ran OK at up to about 512x384 resolution, though ISTR I used an even lower res to get the FPS up. That game was twitchy enough that it was worth sacrificing some pixels for frame rate.
But with that said, playing it at 1080p with transparent water can't be done on a 66MHz PC...
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They are probably not running the original binaries but the modern ports that require modern hardware.
For example DOOM was out in 1993 but the modern equivalents (freedoom) provide resolution, refresh rate, responsiveness that were not possible a the time. In 1995 I was unable to finish DOOM II because my DX33 made it impossibly slow in the final episode.
Re: Quake? Are you serious? (Score:2)
And? The games still run.
You could play quake on the first pi in linux just fine.
Hell you can play emulated n64 quake in linux on a pi. The choice of wording of saying it can play even quake is just pretty strange indicating an author who has no context for quake.. On any hw/os.
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I agree with you. It's the original AC comment that said (I rephrase) that Quake was a poor choice to evaluate the pi because this game had to be working on very old machines. I am defending the use of Quake (or Doom) to evaluate the use of the pi, because we are talking of the modern Quake or Doom, which are desktop games that need a modern machine, so testing on the pi is reasonable (in particular assuming it does not have a graphic chip and needs to use software rendering).
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It's not that the modern ports need a modern machine as such, but the limit removing ports and up allow levels of vastly greater size than the old machines could cope with. I don't know how well PRboom+ would do on all old machine on an old WAD (excluding nuts of course), but vast the modern slaughter maps can stress my laptop (which is old but still am i7).
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I would hit you over the head with my opnSense router, but you're obviously already suffering from insufficient resources in the cranial department.
Benchmarks on desktop say linux wins (Score:5, Informative)
There was a *BSD vs linux benchamrk from phoronix in 2021 https://www.phoronix.com/revie... [phoronix.com] In the final averaged results, the *BSD scored 37-39, the linux scored 64-75 (higher is better). However, the results are very disperse, for example openBSD was the fastest at Zstd compressing, but the slowest at decompressing. Any *linux and *BSD are probably going to be equivalent for desktop use. It's not a new scheduler or some improved memory allocation method that will make Firefox feel faster browsing slashdot.
Re: Benchmarks on desktop say linux wins (Score:1)
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NSA. Get your TLA conspiracies right.
BSD lacks drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeBSD's only real drawback is the lack of drivers.
In fact, they keep CUTTING drivers because of a lack of maintainers.
So the amount of hardware FreeBSD runs on keeps shrinking.
Re:BSD lacks drivers (Score:4)
If you buy hardware today you can only expect it to be supported for (at most) by Windows, Mac, Linux, unless it is one of the types of hardware which can conceivably be covered by a generic driver. And even then, there's only a chance, not a guarantee. And this is a basically unsolvable problem facing all operating systems that are not one of the most popular options; as the hardware becomes more complicated, the cost of implementing a driver rises. If your platform can't benefit from the OSS driver work done primarily in Linux, you're facing a difficult battle.
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So, you're saying my Ryzen 5700G based system with a B550 chipset, amdgpu, 2.5G realtek / intel NIC's, various modern USB, PCIe and NVMe devices won't work?
Hrm. Seems to be working just fine.
I *am* missing the SMBus chipset driver for the 5700G, though.
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I'm talking about expectations, not your specific system. What I mean is that these days unless your hardware is very goofy or very new and at least slightly goofy, you can expect Linux to work with it. You can't have the same expectation for any of the BSDs, because of the smaller number of users. Most of them don't want you if you're not contributing your own drivers.
It's not all that unusual to be missing some kind of minor driver on Linux, either, at least for some kernel versions. And I've had some wif
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If the will was there we could have a generic API for drivers. We already do for some things like USB devices, but I'm thinking about the software side of things.
It's binary blobs, but still far better than having no support at all.
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Didn't you mean to say, FreeBSD's real drawback is lack of developers?
No WiFi for Pi 4 and 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm looking at their wiki;
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/R... [freebsd.org]
The Pi 4 came out 5 years ago (and completely blows away the Pi 3) but apparently they have no WiFi, camera, or audio support for it. The Pi 5 (which completely blows away the 4) came out a few months ago and I expect FreeBSD won't run on it.
Re:No WiFi for Pi 4 and 5 (Score:4, Insightful)
From the original article:
"Believe me, when it comes to the Pi (at least until the 4), FreeBSD is better than Linux."
So this article discusses an old version of the Raspberry Pi. Where's the button to mod down the article?
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Yeah, it's a Broadcom box; no one is explicitly buying an RPi to run FreeBSD over wifi - more likely a headless server connected by Cat6.
Their workaround is to use USB dongles, well um, why wouldn't you just buy a comparable Amlogic, Rockchip or Allwinner SBC for which FreeBSD might better support?
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For most RPi tasks, you're not going to use Wifi, camera, or audio. I have not tested any of these on my RPi 4 with FreeBSD because they're not features I use, so I can't confirm whether they work or not. I can say that compared to Raspbian, FreeBSD seems to be faster, so I would definitely recommend it if you want a very minimal install on your Pi.
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I expect many people won't be using the camera but internet connectivity is a biggie. WiFi is an awful lot more convenient than stringing ethernet cable or fooling with a dongle.
For most purposes FreeBSD seems like too much trouble with little gain, but I guess there could be a niche.
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I guess it just really depends on what you're doing. For server-type functions, it makes sense to just stick it next to your router and connect via ssh. For non-server functions, whether I chose FreeBSD or Linux would really just depend on what I'm doing.
For those using the Pi as a cheap way to learn *nix, I would recommend FreeBSD. Linux has gotten more and more complicated and FreeBSD makes it easier to get your feet wet. The BSD init is much easier to grok than systemd, jails are easier than any of the v
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I don't have anything against FreeBSD but it has very little presence in the IT server space. You will find few job requirements that mention it, Linux dominates by far. Much better for 'learners' to learn about what is most commonly used, and that has vast community support.
Meanwhile, I work with Pi's every day and I develop machine vision and IoT applications with them. I don't really care what OS they run as long as the drivers and software packages work, and I find that they do.
Bad drivers? (Score:3)
For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best.
This sounds like it's saying that FreeBSD's drivers suck, but that's okay because Linux's drivers suck. Except... I run Fedora Linux on some Pi 4Bs, and I don't have any problem with drivers (and they're not "half-assed proprietary blobs" either, Fedora uses what's in the upstream kernel). Some things didn't work in Fedora at first because the necessary drivers weren't upstreamed yet, but I think that's all past now.
I haven't tried FreeBSD in ages (been running Linux since before FreeBSD existed), so I don't know how good or bad the hardware drivers really are.
FreeBSD usually out-performs Linux in my book (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been a FreeBSD evangelist since 1997 or 1998. Back then it REALLY out-performed Linux in security and its network stack. A certain website I helped shepherd took 850 Million discreet hits per month on FreeBSD which was impossible on NT, Apple's AIX, HP-UX, or even Slackware at the time. I've ran a FreeBSD desktop on and off several times but I kept getting sucked back into the Windows ecosystem because of my damnable day jobs. With Windows 11 and beyond finally hurtling towards becoming a giant sh*t sandwich in favor of Microsoft making even more money, I still use FreeBSD religiously as a server, occasionally as a desktop, and am starting to land on using Ubuntu Cinnamon as an experimental desktop environment for the really stupid people (ie: my users) in my life. Both Linux and FreeBSD can provide an excellent foundation for virtualization (unlike Hyper-V, which gives you a whole stack of unstable NT kernels to fight with almost daily) and both are generally very secure. That said, FreeBSD has also seen more than its fair share of challenges over the years, perhaps more so than Linux, and yes, much of it self-inflicted.... But I can tell you that when a large corporation or a government defense contractor wants security and stability they reach for FreeBSD most often and occasionally Linux when it solves a specific problem relatively easily. And the driver situation also hasn't changed much over 20+ years but it is finally getting better, not because the individual OSes are getting better, but because the notion of FOSS or "Open Source" is becoming generally much more accepted. Now, all of that said, I HAVE to leave a foot-note here to also state that I very much loved SGI's Irix back in the 90s before they imploded in a fit of ignorance, arrogance, and hubris, but FreeBSD was even better than Irix back then. No question. I can't count the number of would-be switch gear and router vendors that started a project using FreeBSD because it was just a "better all around" operating system to base a product on. To this day I still contribute resources to The FreeBSD Foundation just because I want to give back to an OS that has given so much to me.
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This has been my experience as well. I am presently using RHEL 8.5, and I find FreeBSD faster, and easier administration. My hardware is, at least, 5 years old, and I have no problem with drivers. I have never been a great fan of systemd. My favorite linux distro is Devuan. I use RHEL because I think I should be more proficient on something that is more widely used.
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I have also been a BSD fan since the early 1990s but the reality is Linux has just taken over, there's just no contest these days :-(. Even the switch gear and router vendors you talk about have moved to Linux now because of lack of support for drivers (including chip vendor SDKs). Take for example, Juniper has JUNOS based on BSD but their "next gen" Evo is based on Linux.
My Experience Differed (Score:4)
With that said, that was a number of years ago and FreeBSD may have better support on a Pi since the hardware is more consistent than a home-built desktop. FreeBSD did seem to work well as a server, but it's lack of good support for Docker at the time (I don't know if that's changed) prevented me from sticking with it. I also think they have the best documentation of any usable open source operating system I've used. It's good to have options and I hope FreeBSD continues to improve to keep healthy competition among open source operating systems.
This is a complete load of crap (Score:3)
None of the things listed where BSD is "superior" are in any way a problem on Linux. Browse the modern internet smoothly? Yeah works fine in Linux. Play games? Yeah works fine in Linux. What videos? ... are they serious ... one of the first use cases that came out for the original Pi was a streaming box, and openelec was my home entertainment system for many years.
As for drivers, the guy seems to be off his rails. 100% of Pi's functionality works out of the box on the Pi Linux distro. No one except for Stallman gives a shit that some of it is in a binary blob. Linux is the most widely used and supported platform for the Pi by far, and there remain several things as complex and edge-case as basic WiFi on the current gen Pis that still doesn't work properly in BSD.
Look I'm all for a good masturbation of a few performance figures. But I'll save that for overclocking championships and praising the top 500 supercomputers. There's right now zero, nada, zilch reason to preference BSD over Linux for "performance" on the Pi. Sure you may have a general preference for BSD, then more power to you.
But this is asinine. We should be celebrating the ability to run all things rather than pretending dubiously that something is better than another.
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And he is remarkably wrong / incompetent. But at least he was able to communicate like a normal person rather than being a toxic arsehole like you. Go take your attitude to 4chan, this is a site where adults talk like normal people.
No Sound on the Pi 5 (Score:2)
Why is BSD faster? (Score:2)
Why is BSD faster than Linux?
I do not see any detail info there - is it a subjective statement?
And if so, why 'at least until 4' which would suggest again it is a human-level difference that is no longer essential with faster CPU?
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Why is BSD faster than Linux?
From TFS: "For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best."
Apparently, some of the non-binary drivers in BSD are better.
But since these drivers are non-binary, couldn't they be re-compiled for Linux?
I'm not sure I understand (Score:3)
Is this a 'just to show we can do it' thing, or is there another reason not to use the custom Pi Linux?
NTP servers (Score:2)
For NTP servers, FreeBSD is much cleaner than Debian. It turns out that all the extras that are built into current Linux distros tend to screw up the timekeeping. That is my experience based on RPi 3 & 4 using 1 PPS GPS hats.
My primary issue with FreeBSD is there isn't a good way to remove unneeded parts of the base install such as compilers that might not be needed but that isn't limited to just that OS. I tend to use FreeBSD for nearly every project these days.
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It turns out that all the extras that are built into current Linux distros tend to screw up the timekeeping
Technically, I'm going to have to just go ahead and call your post a content-free post.
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Perhaps someone should acquaint you to the concept of using a low pass filter on NTP statistics data. All the stuff that is run periodically does cause problems if the goal is a high precision, high accuracy NTP clock.
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So you point is, BSD can keep time like a champ provided it doesn't do anything else.
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I've heard of an effort called package base that will make installing the base system like installing packages. I think this will also give more granularity in what parts of the base to install.
Interesting (Score:2)
I've been meaning to try FreeBSD so I'll look at it on the PI.
I dont use Linux on the Pi's, I usually use Risc OS Open
Devuan Pi (Score:1)
For those who run Desktops on Raspberry Pi models, take a look at Devuan Pi. Nightly builds can be found here https://arm-files.devuan.org/R... [devuan.org] (with RPi5 builds coming soon).
Devuan Pi images are optimised & tuned for Desktop use of each hardware variant of the Raspberry Pi family and shipped by default with drivers and hardware-specific user tools (for video, bluetooth, etc).
Whi