February 22, 2026
FreeBSD fandom in shambles
Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic
“Magic” Linux-on-FreeBSD hack sparks civil war between purists and pragmatists
TLDR: A dev showed FreeBSD can run Linux apps so well it feels “magic,” fixing their slow, painful workflow. The community immediately split between people thrilled by the hack and purists angry that leaning on Linux tools makes FreeBSD lose its identity, reviving the old “desktop-ready or not” debate.
A developer just showed how a hidden trick in FreeBSD, a more old‑school cousin of Linux, can run most Linux apps so smoothly it “feels like magic.” They used a tool called Linuxulator to run Microsoft’s popular code editor remotely on FreeBSD, dodging painfully slow file sharing that was taking minutes just to open a single file. But while the blog was basically a feel‑good “look what I got working” story, the comments section instantly turned into a full‑blown identity crisis for the FreeBSD crowd.
One camp rolled in with the reality check: you don’t “need” ARM chips, you need fast laptops, and worshipping Apple’s M‑series hardware is a fad that could age badly. Another group slammed the whole idea of compatibility layers: if you run Linux stuff on FreeBSD, are you secretly turning FreeBSD into Linux? One commenter practically yelled, “I run FreeBSD because I don’t want Linux—stop importing Linux-isms!” Others tried to play tech therapist, suggesting better ways to run Linux apps in a sandbox or jail and admitting that, honestly, FreeBSD on the desktop still feels rough next to Windows and Linux. And then there’s the wildcard commenter who ignored the whole war and just asked, “So, what are you doing with that OpenWRT router anyway?” The vibes: half miracle, half midlife crisis for an operating system.
Key Points
- •The author prefers the open-source build of Visual Studio Code and successfully uses it on FreeBSD, but hardware constraints (need for an ARM64 laptop comparable to Apple’s M1/M2) limit adopting FreeBSD full-time.
- •Traditional remote development methods like NFS and SSHFS perform poorly for large projects with many files and active language servers, causing severe slowdowns and permission issues.
- •Visual Studio Code’s Remote SSH extension is not officially supported on OpenWRT or FreeBSD, yet it works out of the box on OpenWRT devices for direct, performant remote editing over SSH.
- •For a large FreeBSD-centric project (Sylve), VS Code Remote SSH initially fails with an “Unsupported platform: FreeBSD” error, prompting the author to seek alternative approaches.
- •By following the `vscode-server-freebsd` repository and using FreeBSD’s Linuxulator with a Rocky Linux 9 base (`linux_base-rl9`), the author sets up a Linux environment on FreeBSD and configures a dedicated PATH file, enabling VS Code Remote SSH to function on FreeBSD.