I don't think I've heard anybody claim BSD is new.
> Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license
I believe Netflix has upstreamed a lot to FreeBSD. They don't do it because the license compels them, they do it because upstreaming your changes makes maintenance easier.
> If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere
I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like. The workaround isn't using wired ethernet by the way..you can get a USB wifi adapter or you can buy an m.2 wifi card. On on one of my machines I got a cheap m.2 Intel ax200 (just checked, about $15 on eBay) because it runs faster on FreeBSD than the one that shipped with my laptop.
I've been using Linux and BSD in one form or another since 2003, and I definitely used wpa_supplicant on the command line to connect my Thinkpad to WiFi. And you're right, it did suck. It was not a 9/10 experience by a long shot.
FreeBSD actually has a similar thing, you can run Linux wifi drivers inside a VM and pass through the adapter. There's a port called wifibox that does this.
You can even forward the Unix domain socket for wpa-supplicant from the guest to host, so all the normal tools that talk to wifi cards via that socket work transparently.
You can run Linux in a VM and PCI passthrough your WiFi Adapter. Linux drivers will be able to connect to your wifi card and you can then supply internet to FreeBSD.
Doing this manually is complicated but the whole process has been automated on FreeBSD by "Wifibox"
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...
I tried it myself and it worked pretty well for a wifi card not supported by FreeBSD.
So, no need to get a new laptop :-)
Why would you not just replace the wifi card or use a USB one? You're greatly overemphasizing how much this matters.
I remember doing those kind of things nearly two decades ago now, I don't expect to have to do that in 2026. If people want to, that's fine, but the parent comment is right here: giving it 9/10 without working wifi is ridiculous.
The post made me actually take out the laptop again and maybe use it as a server or something like that in the future and for that I'd use ethernet anyway.
WiFi on a laptop is table stakes. I'd rather use an operating system that works without dongulation.
Or possibly because it has a good track record. If you'd like to point at actual vulnerabilities go ahead.
Also I wouldn’t make hardware support an OS quality metric. Linux get by with NDA and with direct contributions from the vendors. Which is something the BSDs don’t want/don’t benefit from.
Yes this is my opinion also. BSD seems more suited to people for whom fiddling with the OS itself is the point, rather than the OS being a tool to get other things done.
I fall firmly into the latter camp. I'd rather chew glass than manually set flags in rc.conf
A lot of current GNU/Linux complexity have no benefits for most users and may be an hindrance when they want to slightly alter their use cases.
sudo -> doas
systemd -> rcctl
nftable -> pf
iproute2|netplan -> ifconfig|route
alsa|pulseaudio|pipewire -> sndiod
cgroups|podman|lxc -> jails(freebsd)*
* Openbsd does not like containers or being a vm host