Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
Originally it was planned to be a distributed OS. The main reason for the fork from FreeBSD was disagreement about what the threading primitives and their semantics should be, IIRC. One major early goal was cache coherency between different machines, though that seems to be abandoned or indefinitely on hold. Other projects have been HammerFS(a filesystem similar to ZFS, and I believe it started before ZFS was ported to FreeBSD), moving more towards a microkernel approach, and dropping support for all platforms other than x86_64. This makes the implementation of things like threading much simpler.
In short, DragonflyBSD is Dillon's experimental OS with ideas he would never be able to get into FreeBSD. It's never really found a niche for production use as far as I can tell, but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.
Source: FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS or both. And I've dabbled with Dragonfly and love reading about obscure unices and their quirks.
> FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS
Oh, could you give a bit of an overview of the State of FreeBSD on the Desktop (or laptop)? I'm playing with the idea. Tried OpenBSD for a while but it just wasn't very consumer-ready. No bluetooth support at all, videos would have audio and video lag, and other issues. Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw
WiFi - doesn't work, you're going to run a VM with linux and pass Wi-Fi device there or deal with 802.11g speed if card even works at all.
GPU - if you're okay with Nvidia blob, then it's all good. If not, then I hope you're okay with RX580 era AMD.
Bluetooth...I don't think people in community know what it is because stack was broken for probably a decade.
Consumer NICs sometimes don't work out of the box.
It's very unfriendly for consumer, which is what I liked, but at one point I had enough and switched to Linux. Still running FreeBSD on home server, tho because i'm too lazy to switch it...
Have you tried iwlwifi?
Yes, it works exactly like I've described:
While iwlwifi supports all 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11 a/b/g modes. Support for 802.11 n/ac is to come. 802.11ax and 6Ghz support are planned.
We will get wider IPv6 adoption before 802.11n works on FreeBSD in stable way.