How Does FreeBSD Compare to Linux on a Raspberry Pi?

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.