Horrible is an over-statement. Support may not be as good as Linux, but it is almost as good. Most of the hardware not yet supported is the newest, but that is also an issue with Linux. Generally, but not always, drivers for new hardware are created for Linux a little sooner than the BSDs. With smaller user bases and without commercial agreements with manufacturers, that situation will not change for open source systems. People who choose an alternative will need to endure hardships that users of Windows do not. It just means not being able to buy anything, which is not a problem since there is so much that does work.

I don't think that's entirely accurate. OpenBSD has made the decision to not support devices for which the source code is not open for the developers to look at. I can live with that. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD all support a wide variety of architectures.
However, it is indeed a requirement to buy hardware that is BSD compliant. A bit of homework will save you anguish down the line.

From Broadcom you mean? I agree.

Some vendors actually make the firmware available and this is included with the OS (or in the case of Linux with the kernel). Broadcom do not, in most cases, make firmware available. They provide proprietary drivers for Windows and Linux, and for the free drivers to work, the proprietary driver must be downloaded, extracted and the firmware pulled out for use by the free driver (usually bwi/bwn).

The firmware is not a Linux binary of any kind, it is the native firmware which is loaded onto the device itself. The Linux driver is only used for firmware extraction because Broadcom do not provide a driver for any *BSD.

What's truly horrible is hardware vendors and OEMs only write drivers mainly for Windows with UNIX and UNIX-like systems as mere afterthoughts. Many vendors will provide whitepapers and either sample code, proprietary drivers, or an initial public offering to open source, but still there are some that do not.

Case in point, PowerVR. Ask anyone who has an Intel Atom GMA3600 GPU. Support is terminally dead for the PowerVR SGX545 that normally is paired with that setup. Initially, a few drivers were offered, but were proprietary and limited to a few systems. PowerVR didn't provide any whitepapers or code samples, nor even attributed any code to Linux or BSD that could be used in other systems at some level. Afterwards they simply refused to cooperate with the open source community.

So, please do not blame the operating systems for the lack of support, blame the vendors of hardware who refuse to contribute to open source.

Yup. I vote with my wallet. The hardware vendors who are not BSD friendly don't get my cash.

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Yep, I limit my hardware down too anymore due to FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, and have only to a few vendors like AMD, Nvidia, Realtek, and C-Media.

Granted I do end up with other vendors like Broadcom, Intel, Atheros, and a few others like VIA and SiS, but I've been able to pair and match my BSD and Linux HCLs for quite some time to those vendors with good results.

I've only had one instance where I couldn't get a driver working, and that was for an old Aureal 8830 SQ2500 audio card, but oddly, both 4Front and ALSA both started providing drivers for it with decent results not long after.

There is only one vendor I refuse to use and that's Creative. I have my reasons. i don't care how good they support stuff. They can rot for all I care.

I like it ...

I have a printer from the same family as yours, and on OpenBSD I can print by sending data directly to /dev/ulpt0 (or whatever dmesg suggests), after converting them from PostScript. The results are very nice. I use Ghostscript and tools from the foo2zjs project by Rick Richardson. No CUPS or HPLIP are needed.

It wasn't that difficult here. I installed OpenBSD with its own boot loader on a primary partition, then I set lilo on Slackware to chainload it:
That's it. This worked some time ago with FreeBSD, and now it works with OpenBSD. I guess you can do it with GRUB as well. After all, that's how dual-booting with winder$ used to be done.

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When I read the instructions, if I remember correctly, it was stated that the other system had to be installed first. Since my idea of dual-booting is having a primary system and occasionally testing other systems, it was not appealing to me. At the time I was thinking of dual-booting OpenBSD and Slackware. Since I was hoping to give up Linux, I abandoned the idea as not worth the trouble.

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from: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...rub2-boot-menu

Been busy with MX-15 Beta 1 so not yet tested by me. My BSD Box is currently a testing box so BSD was wiped before I found this.

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I dual boot (multi-boot) Slackware and FreeBSD. When I first began to use FreeBSD it looked as if dual booting might be difficult, but it really isn't. And you can run FreeBSD as the primary OS and install it first, too, so long as the FreeBSD partition remains intact. You can repartition the rest of the drive and rewrite the MBR freely.

But since FreeBSD does not (to my knowledge) provide any kind of boot loader like Lilo or grub, those must be provided and the MBR managed by the other OS - but without another OS you can still boot to FreeBSD by making the partition bootable and clearing the MBR.

(Applies to MBR partition schemes only, I have no EFI knowledge).

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Great tips about printing and dual booting! Thanks for that, guys.
I did dual boot Slackware64-current and OpenBSD before. These days I select one of my units as a dedicated OpenBSD box.

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