I think the title tells a lot about the story I’m going to tell you.
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
Not so long ago, I was using macOS as my daily driver. The main reason why I got a macbook was the underlying BSD Unix and the nice graphics it provides. Also, I have an iPhone. But they were also the same reasons for why I left macOS.
I did not want to write this post right after the migration, I wanted to take my time, use FreeBSD daily, see if I will ever miss macOS.
Here’s a tweet of mine from 8 months ago
Every 4 months I look at my systems (servers, laptops, desktops, embedded) to see if there's anything suspicious, if anything got hacked, etc.
man, I did not realize that macOS is that complicated. Why is there a "studentd" running? I don't even use Classrooms :/
— antranigv.rss (@antranigv) March 3, 2020
Let’s look at it this way. macOS is becoming less Unix-y every year, date(1) is outdated, there are 100+ Unix processes running by the time the system is booted, most of them are useless for the general user, it has no native package manager (at least MacPorts/homebrew/pkgsrc is out there) and for a power user, there is no proper documentation. Have you ever checked the FreeBSD handbook? Everything is right there!
Okay, the nice graphics part. Have you seen the latest and greatest Big Sur? It feels like eye-candy, it’s not made for power users at all, everything seems to be a distraction now, even the icons. I’m no UI guru, but bringing iOS to the desktop is not for everyone.
So I decided to move to FreeBSD. This is where many people will tell me “Okay but not everything works outside the box”, true! but which OS works outside the box these days anyway? Windows is still a nightmare, setting up macOS took me 3 days the last time, Linux takes way more if you’re building it from scratch. Setting up FreeBSD took me 3 days, however this meant that I will NOT need to change it again for a very, very, VERY long time.
Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted.
On FreeBSD, I upgraded from 12.1-RELEASE to 12.2-RELEASE and nothing broke, and in case there were any changes, FreeBSD just asked me what to do about them.
Let’s come back for a second. Unix is outdated and Apple does not care about it, fancy graphics are too fancy now. Doing forensics is almost impossible. And the hardware is, well, not the best out there (have you ever disassembled a MacBook Pro? it’s takes 2 hours to change a battery while I can reassemble my Dell Latitudes and ThinkPads in 30 minutes).
So there was no reason to stay here anymore. I had to migrate. The question is: where?
Linux has systemd, not my favorite thing out there, Windows is privacy nightmare. That left me with 2 major options: Linuxes without systemd (Gentoo, in my case) or BSDs.
Since I run FreeBSD servers anyway, I just migrated to FreeBSD.
Here’s a short review about running FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.
- WiFi: works. not the fastest, but fast enough.
- Graphics: works.
- Touchpad: works with multiple fingers AND very configurable via
sysctl. - BT does discovery and pairs, I still have to try it with non-Apple headphones.
- COVID-19 era: Zoom, Google Hangouts, Jitsi and all other WebRTC-based video conferencing software works via web as well.
- Thanks to Linuxulator, I can watch Netflix as well: here’s a screenshot.
Most importantly, it’s Free and Open Source.
It’s been 1 month and 1 day since I last touched my MacBook Pro, so, what do I miss?
- Better BT support
- Faster WiFi
That’s it, that’s all missing on a FreeBSD laptop these days. WiFi can do 48Mbps according to ifconfig but I usually get 10-20Mbps. BT pairs with my Apple AirPods but I wish it worked till the end.
Having a nice workstation/laptop is not an easy thing, using macOS means living by Apple rules, Windows is the same for Microsoft. The BSDs gave me the power to be as free as possible π
During the next weeks I’ll try to blog about the actual setup.
P.S. dear Apple employee, in case you’re reading this, please tell your management to update their BSD Unix layer. Some of us still care, some of us are not just Docker people, some of us are not just “modern” web developers. Thanks in advance.
That’s all folks! π