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

Greetings from Indonesia. Sorry, it took me so long to introduce myself here.

I am just a low-life webdev, got myself a taste of UNIX-like OS back in around '99 when I played around with Slackware on my Pentium machine. Have to switch to Windows later, but after that went back to Mandrake, and then ended up with Debian up until now. In the last couple of years, I feel like I started to take everything for granted when using this piece of technology and all of its waste. I just want to be able to really use the OS again. So in the last 2 years I have been researching the BSD family for my next shelter and eventually rest my choice on FreeBSD. Last December I got a beat-up ASUS M409D and went straight to install FreeBSD 15 without any issues. As planned, I go full text mode only--for tasks that need a graphical environment I still keep my Legion with Debian on it, mainly for video calls and web dev works.
I found joy again since I use FreeBSD, one of them is being in terminal mode only, I have all the reasons to write programs for my own needs; this is very refreshing and indeed one of the personal reasons why I chose this OS. I can leave the noisy and messy world of web development behind during the night and for the whole weekend. Also, this forum is (surprisingly!!!) very friendly and welcoming. I don't feel alone.

Thank you, and please forgive me for my bad English.
 
aphrxia said:
Greetings from Indonesia. Sorry, it took me so long to introduce myself here.

I am just a low-life webdev, got myself a taste of UNIX-like OS back in around '99 when I played around with Slackware on my Pentium machine. Have to switch to Windows later, but after that went back to Mandrake, and then ended up with Debian up until now. In the last couple of years, I feel like I started to take everything for granted when using this piece of technology and all of its waste. I just want to be able to really use the OS again. So in the last 2 years I have been researching the BSD family for my next shelter and eventually rest my choice on FreeBSD. Last December I got a beat-up ASUS M409D and went straight to install FreeBSD 15 without any issues. As planned, I go full text mode only--for tasks that need a graphical environment I still keep my Legion with Debian on it, mainly for video calls and web dev works.
I found joy again since I use FreeBSD, one of them is being in terminal mode only, I have all the reasons to write programs for my own needs; this is very refreshing and indeed one of the personal reasons why I chose this OS. I can leave the noisy and messy world of web development behind during the night and for the whole weekend. Also, this forum is (surprisingly!!!) very friendly and welcoming. I don't feel alone.

Thank you, and please forgive me for my bad English.
Click to expand...

Welcome! Your English is excellent if not perfect. The joy you find in using FreeBSD is shared by most in this Forum. Everyone uses it their own way. I'm a GUI person, for instance. I am lucky and I have a decent-enough computer, so I can go all KDE Plasma. But it's FreeBSD which makes the experience enjoyable because of its great performance and of technologies such as zfs. The astonishingly great number of ports also helps.
 
I'm a boy from China who is 14 years old,I used to use Windows11 and Gnu/Linux.
I had tried many Linux Distros. It's a big waste of my time and I even installed Gentoo with full disk encryption. Ops!
I had also tried OpenBSD , It's simple and secure but so SLOW!!!
After trying 20+ of Linux Distros, I swtich to FreeBSD,It's awesome!!!
It's like a system that is between GNU/LINUX and OPENBSD.
It's fast,secure and cool!
I join this Forums to improve my English and just for fun.
(SYSTEMD IS THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD,BTW)
 
ikbendeman said:
Who's new to FreeBSD? Did you migrate from another OS and what was your reason?
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I came from Gnu/Linux (GENTOO DEBIAN DEVUAN VOID ARCH DEEPIN FEDORA MINT UBUNTU OPENSUSE PARROT KALI popOS <I had used all of them....>) Windows11 and OpenBSD.
I'm 14 and I think It's a big waste of my time for me to use them.
Gnu/Linux Distros are too hard to decide and I hate systemd a lot.
So I switch to FreeBSD!!!
IT IS ONE OF THE BEST CHOICES IN MY LIFE!
 
Hi everybody 👋 I'm just getting serious about switching to FreeBSD. :)

It's funny, it doesn't feel like I chose it as much as my path led here. It just makes sense for me to move to FreeBSD.

It's not my first experience with FreeBSD either. I already installed it something like 15 years ago, to "see what a BSD looks like". Back then, I was very much chasing ever inch of additional comfort I could have (a certain kind of comfort, since I was using Gentoo ; I was not after "UI comfort" but more after "feature comfort"), testing all new alternatives for every software I was using to see if I could go a bit further, taking pride in having the system the most fit to my needs and personality as I could. So my first contact with FreeBSD was brutal. 😅 It felt like all the software I was used to, but with the comfort/sugar layer removed. That didn't work out for me.

Since then, though, something happened. I got tired of having to change programming language or framework, in my work as a developer. I got tired of having to "fix" software I wrote not because they had bugs, but because backward incompability were introduced in their dependencies. Or the system they were relying upon changed somehow. Or they were made using last year trend of architecture instead of current year's one, and I was to feel ashamed about it. My reaction to this was radical. I decided that C was my new language, that I would write my interfaces as vanilla web, my backends as C/CGI, and that I would stick to standards, limiting dependencies to the bare minimum. I decided I would build eternal software, allowing me to keep fixing new problems instead of always fixing the same few ones, not daring adding new solutions to the list because of the burden of maintenance.

And from there… GNU/Linux started fighting me. Trashing it would be quite ungrateful from me, given I've used it for a couple decades and it was instrumental in poor as dirt part time pizza delivering young me learning serious programming and becoming a professional developer. But let's just say it became quite clear that being standard compliant was not the main priority of the OS (a high priority, but coming after innovation and user-friendliness). And after that, I realized that the constant changing I was observing in the tech industry tooling… was very much part of Linux' culture by itself: the same thing happened on my OS. I kept having to "fix" it because this or that perfectly working software was replaced by an other, and the change was forced on me.

From there, I started to think even more radically. I planned to build a LFS system, with the idea that "instead of updating all software all the time, I would only update those having security issues". Maybe I could use something similar to Gentoo's Portage, by having scripts to build each software, so I don't struggle twice to find the good options… It sounded dreadful to do that for a whole system, but I had a plan: keep the main system to the bare minimum, then build some "containers" (using chroot and Linux namespaces) to build and run the big software with many dependencies (all the things relying on Qt or GTK, for example) to isolate those set of dependencies so I don't have one big host for which I had insane dependencies version resolution to do…

And then, this happened: https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/lfs-announce/2026-02/msg00000.html (LFS announcing their doc will be SystemD only as of now on)

Oh for f*** sake! 😂 So it meant that if I wanted to make my dream system, I had to be comfortable basically making my own distro, without even the support of LFS documentation. I was torn apart. On one hand, this seemed within reach, just barely (certainly would have a lot to learn, but that's the fun part). On the other hand, I perfectly realized the amount of pain and sweat this would require to do it all by myself.

So, I brainstormed with Gemini to figure out my options. And their reply was basically a polite and long version of: "FreeBSD, duh!".

That was a surprise to me. So started reading the handbook, and while reading it, I went: "oh… oh. Oh!". It all clicked. The ports, the base system, the jails, the reliance of standard tools… And I realized that all the things I loved about Gentoo actually comes from FreeBSD. I could write patches for the software I use, make them part of the build system, configure everything to the extreme… And even better, I could have everything closer to POSIX, stable for the ages, now that I'm not chasing comfort anymore. This is the perfect home for my eternal software.

So here I am. I've installed FreeBSD on a spare laptop, just to get used to it and make as many of the errors I'm going to make at first, before installing it on more important devices. Then I'm going to migrate one of my homelabs, MZ01CE1/Epyc based systems with four Nvidia P40 each - from what I've seen, having Cuda running will prove challenging, but I'm ready to experiment with that (plus, it's time to check where Vulkan is at these days). Then the other homelab, then the Raspberry Pi server (providing DNS, HTTP server and running a few tasks), then the gaming PC, all their own challenge. And by then, I should have enough experience, I hope, to replace my main system on my laptop, which is by far the most critical one, given the amount of personalization I expect from it.

See you around!
 
Hello,

I am not new to FreeBSD and I have not migrated from another operating system as reply to OPs question.

Well, technically I came to FreeBSD via the ZX Spectrum - Amiga - PC route. The hobbyist route.

(Short break here to thank SirDice for keeping the fs-uae and mame ports alive - it's very much appreciated)

I did however take the leap to actually work with IT and started with RS6000 and Windows NT and when someone mentioned NetBSD I got curious and started to look at the BSD variants and got hooked on FreeBSD.

I think what attracted me most about FreeBSD was the ability to build small separate things like firewalls, DNSs, DHCPs, file servers, web servers. Not only simple things but also technically advanced - there is no limit to the capabilities of FreeBSD.

And of course that FreeBSD has very humble hardware requirements. Also that it was and still is a learning process to hack together things that actually work.

And once you get something to work with FreeBSD it just never stops. The maintenance becomes easier because of the learning process. And the knowledge gained transfers to other operating systems. It's incredibly rewarding.

/grandpa
 
Hello, I haven't migrated to freebsd yet as I'm still waiting on my mother's job to update their computer systems (she's going to try to get me one.) Currently live in Washington state, USA.
I first heard about freebsd back in the late 90's when a guy I knew in a somewhat small mountain town (not named south park btw) in Idaho started convincing others in the church that I used to attend to try freebsd out.
At that time my mom had a windows 95 computer that she used to help her with college before upgrading to windows 98. I wasn't about to start playing around with it but I was smitten with it.
In 2008 I finally got my hands on a laptop by Toshiba, one of the satellite models and regrettably kept windows Vista, then 7 when it came out.
My mom got an hp laptop around the same time that win7 released in 2009 but gave it to me around 2012 when she had to get a different laptop for online college classes.
That hp laptop currently has Linux mint 17.3 on it (has wifi card issues) I used it to try out Linux for the first time in my life.
Enter covid 19 and mom sells her house to try to buy land up in alaska and get "stuck" here in Washington in what's essentially a studio apartment with said mom and younger brother and his pitbull (who is sadly no longer with us)
I do have a raspberry pi 4b but can't really do anything with it due to only have a tv.
And thus we have reached the end of my life story involving computers, I am eagerly awaiting the moment when my mother actually tells me that she has obtained a computer from her work so that I can finally see what freebsd has to offer me and my... humble needs (which my smartphone is currently meeting, sad as it is)

Thank you listening to my rambling;
indifference-ninja
 
FreeBSD was installed on my work PC (which had an AMD K5 CPU) in 1997. I've loved and used it since, and "maintain" a few ports.

How I used to install it:

Photograph of a collection of CD and DVD cases for FreeBSD releases from 2.2.7 in August 1998 to 5.2. Behind these is a FreeBSD 14.0 amd64 labeled CD-R.


How you know where it ran:

Photograph of the bottom of a PC case with a metallic badge showing the BSD daemon and the legend, Powered by FreeBSD


I read the book:

Photograph of the front cover of the book, The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey


I'm not shy about promotion (but stickers are forbidden):

Photograph of a Virginia license plate featuring a SR-71 Blackbird spy plane and the letters FBSD.


In addition to virtual machines, I still run it on hardware, too:

Photograph of the FreeBSD 15 boot menu on a on laptop computer screen
 
grandpa said:
I came to FreeBSD via the ZX Spectrum
Click to expand...
Me too!

Picture of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum


For the folks who aren't busy threatening children on their lawns, the first non-business computers most folks had in their homes were known as "home computers". They typically came as all-in-one units which connected to a television, ran their own proprietary OS which was stored in ROM (so we never had to update it), and usually booted to a BASIC interpreter. Memory in both ROM and RAM was usually measured in kilobytes. Various peripherals were available for storage and input, and software - including many games - was often sold on audio tape cassettes.

Now please would you

GET OFF MY LAWN
 
AJCxZ0 said:
Me too!

View attachment 25453

For the folks who aren't busy threatening children on their lawns, the first non-business computers most folks had in their homes were known as "home computers". They typically came as all-in-one units which connected to a television, ran their own proprietary OS which was stored in ROM (so we never had to update it), and usually booted to a BASIC interpreter. Memory in both ROM and RAM was usually measured in kilobytes. Various peripherals were available for storage and input, and software - including many games - was often sold on audio tape cassettes.

Now please would you

View attachment 25454
Click to expand...
:) Oh the days of Z80 assembler ... Loading software from tape recorders

I can recommend these for nostalgiacs:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404567/?ref_=fn_t_1
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5843300/?ref_=fn_t_2
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4603210/?ref_=fn_t_3

/grandpa
 
i have been using pfsense for a while now. I was running OMV on a hp microserver and moved that to a a8-5500 system. I have since migrated from OMV to freebsd and just flabbergasted how much faster it is. I have a 60TB server that is still running OMV that i have Jellyfin running on it. I am in the process of testing jellyfin on the a8-5500 system. Unfortunately i can only find 10.11.6 of jellyfin. I would love to be able to get 10.10.7 running but it seems that is not possible. So it is fail forward from here.

that being said, freebsd is unbelievably fast. I see myself sticking with it for my servers for a long time.
 
doctorx said:
i have been using pfsense for a while now. I was running OMV on a hp microserver and moved that to a a8-5500 system. I have since migrated from OMV to freebsd and just flabbergasted how much faster it is. I have a 60TB server that is still running OMV that i have Jellyfin running on it. I am in the process of testing jellyfin on the a8-5500 system. Unfortunately i can only find 10.11.6 of jellyfin. I would love to be able to get 10.10.7 running but it seems that is not possible. So it is fail forward from here.

that being said, freebsd is unbelievably fast. I see myself sticking with it for my servers for a long time.
Click to expand...
It's also much faster for your desktop. You should try it.
 
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