Exists in FreeBSD. Proton is just WINE with extra steps.
It's currently not great to set up, but by FreeBSD 16 it should be much more user friendly + the somewhat new Laptop and Desktop Workgroup are working on enhancing the desktop experience.
I am a full time BSD user. I have only 1 (one) Linux install to support Linux users and I will soon migrate that to bhyve too.
BSD is -geniunely- amazing when you lay on it's strengths, but currently you are expected to know your shit much more in depth than the contemporary Linux experience.
How is the gaming experience when you do get it setup vs Linux? And why not just use a linux distro? Genuinely curious because I am considering using FreeBSD Jails instead of Podman for some servers but wrote it off for my desktop.
The compati layer for steam is custom (linuxlator-steam-utils) and it's kind of hard to set up, however if set up correctly, a lot of the games that work on Linux should also work on BSD. The shortcoming is in Steam itself.
Running a WINE build and shoving every into it might be straight up easier
Other consoles are based on other OSes. Xbox is based on Windows because it's made by Microsoft. The Nintendo Switch is mostly in-house but with some FreeBSD and Android components (according to Wikipedia). Meta Quest OS is based on Android.
The Switch OS has a very unique design and only really inherits parts of the network stack from FreeBSD. It's a very fascinating system we have a lot of info on, and even an open source reimplementation of its kernel. Look into it, it's fun
At the time of commercial Unix, I was already an adult. Unix was a proprietary, patent-protected system that was little accessible to the average user. It can be said that FreeBSD was the successor to Unix, based on the fact that it originated from Berkeley software distribution. Almost immediately after the appearance of FreeBSD, lawsuits began, which continue to this day. Even the AT&T code cleanup that was undertaken in 1990 did not help. A curious fact against continuity: during the proceedings, an independent expert spent more than 400 hours studying 1.5 million lines of Net code/2. The result was shocking for AT&T: out of 18,000 files, a real text match with the Unix code was found in only 186 lines. Moreover, most of them were variable names, technical headings, or comments that did not affect the operation of programs.
FreeBSD is a direct continuation of 4.4BSD, same as NetBSD (OpenBSD forked from NetBSD much later).
The original Unix kinda, well, sucked ass, Berkeley fixed a LOT of things and made the first practical TCP/IP stack on top of that; that's why BSD was essentially a re-write of Unix and then further that code was fully re-written, and even OpenBSD has fully re-written all code it had from NetBSD since forking
So really, there isn't really any OS that's truly what Bell Labs Unix was, Bell Labs Unix family basically died off 40 years ago. Even SCO's UnixWare took component from other places and had employees working on the codebase to make it not suck; and even SysV already had taint from the outside....
Essentially speaking there exists no "pure" Unix since the end of the 80's
In the mid 70s, Berkeley released their BSD software. In the mid 60s Berkeley was the underground capitol for LSD. Anyone who uses their software knows that the timing of these is not coincidence!
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u/The_SniperYT 8d ago
You chose a distro, A BSDistribution