Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

In the short term: I am looking at FreeBSD as an alternative for running jails/containers and VMs. I have used Linux for a long time but I am not enjoying using it as a VM host (using Proxmox at the moment) so far.

In the long term I am not happy with some aspects of where Linux is going and it looks like BSDs are simpler and lighter for servers. I am probably going to stick with Linux for desktops but am thinking of switching to a distro that does things a little differently (Void most likely, I might just try Gentoo, and NixOS has its own appeal). In the past I have mostly used Debian and Debian derived distros, although I currently have Manjaro on my desktop (and I rather like using a rolling release on PCs.
I am probably be going to be asking some questions about Bhyve and Byve management tools soon, which is why I joined the forums at this point - been lurking a while.
 
graemep said:
In the short term: I am looking at FreeBSD as an alternative for running jails/containers and VMs. I have used Linux for a long time but I am not enjoying using it as a VM host (using Proxmox at the moment) so far.

In the long term I am not happy with some aspects of where Linux is going and it looks like BSDs are simpler and lighter for servers. I am probably going to stick with Linux for desktops but am thinking of switching to a distro that does things a little differently (Void most likely, I might just try Gentoo, and NixOS has its own appeal). In the past I have mostly used Debian and Debian derived distros, although I currently have Manjaro on my desktop (and I rather like using a rolling release on PCs.
I am probably be going to be asking some questions about Bhyve and Byve management tools soon, which is why I joined the forums at this point - been lurking a while.
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FreeBSD does have very up-to-date KDE desktop and other software that makes it perfectly usable on the desktop - practically the same set as Linux.
 
astyle said:
FreeBSD does have very up-to-date KDE desktop and other software that makes it perfectly usable on the desktop - practically the same set as Linux.
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I am not closing my mind and saying I will never use FreeBSD on my desktop - just not what I am looking at right now.
 
Hi everyone!

I'm a software development student dipping his toes into FreeBSD and *nix systems in general. I've used Ubuntu before, but never for anything besides simple web surfing.

Currently in the last semester of a 2 year program where I will come out as a junior full stack developer. I grew up with computers having a father who worked for Sun Microsystems; he wanted my brothers and I to know how to use computers from a young age. Sadly I didn't stick with them, despite having a knack for technology, and abandoned my tech interests as a teenager. Now that I'm coming back to technology as an adult, I'm kicking myself not only for the lost time, but also because I am shocked how much I am enjoying it! Learning to program is fun, as is playing with hardware, but I love the problem solving aspects of it.

I got into FreeBSD through TrueNAS Core. My family wanted somewhere we could store and archive a bunch of things like family photos, important documents, etc. and I thought it would be a fun project to build a NAS out of older computer parts from a nearby recycler. From there it spiraled and grew to creating a more general home lab, doing things like using it also as a media server and learning how to host my own websites, etc. I found I wanted to go beyond just using the basic things provided in the TrueNAS webgui and decided to throw FreeBSD onto my laptops second hard drive. It has been a challenge to get it working as a desktop OS at times, I've had to update the wifi card and had a heck of a time getting the HDMI output to work, but I loved the challenge and problem solving required.

While I could have installed Ubuntu on my laptop, I think I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out FreeBSD and making it work (and to be fair there's also just plain stubbornness). Having the FreeBSD start off relatively barebones compared to Ubuntu, let alone Windows, forced me to really understand the different parts of the OS and application software that I've had to configure. In many ways stop me from just being compliant with just using an OS, and instead forced me to learn and engage with it that has been challenging, educational, and rewarding!

Plus I'm also a history nerd, so I'm also a bit carried away with the romantic idea of an operating system that can trace its lineage back to the 70s and to UNIX.
 
Some thing I managed to dig up today ... FreeBSD has taught me many good things! :cool:
 

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Plop,
I don't like to talk to people but, hey, I didn't want to come and just ask solutions for my issues, soooooo !

I liked computers for few years then I stopped.
Now, I'm trying to get back in my nerdy mood and see blondes, brunettes and redheads in the matrix. So, I decided to try FreeBSD and (OpenBSD) because I don't really like anymore the way GNU/Linux takes and the *BSD family seems interesting and the manuals look really nice to learn how things work.
I spent a long time reinstalling my OSs when I faced an issue because I became lazy and reinstalling is easier. I'm here to fix this. I want to spend nights reading documentation and configuring my OS again (and learn english).

I'll stop here because I could continue and write a complete man page on how keeplurking works but that's not the point. (Finally, talking to people is easy. Meh)

See ya'
 
I moved to FreeBSD after a long journey on Linux, I had been using Linux for nearly 3 years now (I'm somewhat new to the FOSS scene). I chose FreeBSD after reading a blog post (can't remember where or what post) but it was comparing FreeBSD and Gnu/Linux, after reading it I was intrigued and decided to spin up a FreeBSD VM. Which eventually led to me fully committing to it and using it as a daily driver! So far I love everything about it, I've really fallen in love. I love it's simplicity, how structured everything is, how minimal, and how logical the whole thing is.

P.S. Here's my Desktop:
bar.png

i3wm + polybar (custom modules for cpu, ram, updates, disk, &c)
 
Hello, I am a typical geek from the end of the 1970s in France, I discovered computing on 8-bit computers at school. My first PC was under Windows 95, I discovered free computing at the beginning of 2000. I am and remain a Linuxian, FreeBSD is the basis of my work because: reliable, stable, adaptable, but does not have the variety of tools and out-of-box APIs that a GNU/Linux Debian has
 
First tried FreeBSD in the early 7.0 days. It left a positive impression on me, despite some annoying issues.

Returned in late 2009. Forced myself to learn how to set it up properly - that took some reeducation and unlearning bad habits. I was quite amazed at how well it worked on that T61P. So I kept it.

It has been almost 15 years since then and I still use it every day. I love it. It is reliable and consistent. I hope that it always stays this way too.
 
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Hello everyone! I am 38, maths and science teacher, originally from Poland, but living in Oslo. I have been a FreeBSD desktop user for barely a week now, and I really enjoy it.

My OS story is that I was running Linux Mandrake and Ubuntu in 2004-2010, but then for a decade I switched back to Windows, partly because of gaming, partly because my job required it. Lately, however, Windows with all its fancy desktop updates lagged terribly on my not-so-new notebook, and besides I needed some tools not available on it to develop my new web page. So I installed Xubuntu.

Xubuntu worked like a breeze. But in October I discovered quite accidentally blogs of UnixSheikh and vermaden. They inspired me to try out FreeBSD. Actually, I had been toying then with an idea of trying a more advanced Linux distro, but suddenly I thought, why not go "all the way" and test the mythical Unix? :) I was afraid of experimenting on my work notebook (the only notebook I had at that point), though, so I bought myself a cheap second-hand ThinkPad T430s in very good condition... and I suspect that with FreeBSD on it it will quite soon be promoted to my primary computer.
 
LibreQuest said:
… an image of the machine I am using. …
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Wow.

juha said:
Some thing I managed to dig up today …
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R.I.P. (only partly captured in the Wayback Machine before it rudely disappeared): FreeBSD Related Publications

Angelique77 said:
… I do remember seeing a altair 8800 growing up telling how old I am. …
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I don't know the 8800, but surely you're not old enough to remember Altair IV being new :)

vidmak said:
… For a long time, I was really impressed with Mac OS X and cut my teeth in the command line using the Mac Terminal (and now understand that a lot of OS X userland is based on BSD). There was a point in the mid-2000s and early 2010s when OS X was a pretty darn solid UNIX. But recent iterations of Mac OS (starting in the mid-2010s) have become increasingly untenable propositions for me as a power-user. …
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Much the same for me. Around 2014: The GUI of OS X 10.10 Yosemite drove me away from Apple. I gradually switched from OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks to PC-BSD.

Lady Serena Kitty said:
… VirtualBox has some capabilities bhyve does not. It's best to review your needs versus the capabilities of each, and make a decision from there. …
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VirtualBox was good for a member of the Primary Release Engineering Team, it's good enough for me :)

Erichans said:
… ZFS has been transformed from a single OS supported filesystem at Sun to a multiple OS supported one*. …
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Pictured: First non-Solaris integration of ZFS (2008)
 

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I am new to FreeBSD, it has been two weeks since I started using FreeBSD for my daily tasks (mostly web browsing). I was using Gentoo GNU/Linux before switching to FreeBSD. I started to use FreeBSD because it attracted me.
Sometimes I want to play PC games but I don't because it looks impossible to me to run Windows games on FreeBSD with a custom wine version without help of apps like Bottles and Lutris.
 
nxjoseph said:
I tried building 2 electron based apps but devel/electron25 took too long ( and llvm15 built in 8 hours ) and it unfortunately interrupted by power outage. I don't like compiling for long hours, i prefer installing binary packages. My setup has a 4c8t cpu and 16 gb of ram.
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I think your setup is frankly adequate for compilations. As for compilations taking a long time - I set it as overnight jobs. Just start the compilation and go to sleep. If you know something takes a LONG time, you can plan around that. And Poudriere, BTW, is pretty resilient - you can just restart the process after an interruption, and it will pick up right where it left off, and power through to the finish.
 
nxjoseph said:
I tried building 2 electron based apps but devel/electron25 took too long ( and llvm15 built in 8 hours ) and it unfortunately interrupted by power outage. I don't like compiling for long hours, i prefer installing binary packages. My setup has a 4c8t cpu and 16 gb of ram.
Click to expand...
I realized I wasn't living until I built a computer with 12c24t and 64GB of RAM. Compilations take a fraction of the time, and most of it can be done in RAM. Its even swifter when combined with devel/ccache. I would also recommend using something like devel/synth instead of devel/poudriere if you want prefer configuration overhead.
 
astyle said:
I think your setup is frankly adequate for compilations. As for compilations taking a long time - I set it as overnight jobs. Just start the compilation and go to sleep. If you know something takes a LONG time, you can plan around that. And Poudriere, BTW, is pretty resilient - you can just restart the process after an interruption, and it will pick up right where it left off, and power through to the finish.
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It's just such a drag to wake up to a failed build, and even worse facing this multiple nights in a row. Worser is finding out each build takes a few days or more.
 
astyle said:
I think your setup is frankly adequate for compilations. As for compilations taking a long time - I set it as overnight jobs. Just start the compilation and go to sleep. If you know something takes a LONG time, you can plan around that. And Poudriere, BTW, is pretty resilient - you can just restart the process after an interruption, and it will pick up right where it left off, and power through to the finish.
Click to expand...
It has been 15 hours of compilation for devel/electron25 and when i interrupt it i ran the bulk command with -B <build name> option and it didn't resume where it left off at build. I see that it was doing fetch-depends and extract processes for electron25. Anyways, packages that i want to compile is now available in the quarterly repository.
 
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