Does FreeBSD make you happy? Explain why

I agree with vermaden drhowarddrfine and fmc000 simply because everytime I have to help my wife with a Windows thing I get pissed off. Why do I need to navigate through 37 different gui screens to find the IP address? Oh system update and now an application doesn't work?

Sometimes a bad attitude preserves your sanity, in response to drhowarddrfine But starting out with a bad attitude is counterproductive.

But I've said this in the past, it's really not the OS, it's the applications which leads to fmc000. If the application you need runs on the OS you want it doesn't matter what the OS is. The problems start when "application doesn't work right" which usually leads to some level of OS debugging steps and if the OS makes it easier for me to do, the OS makes me "not unhappy".

As an aside, we always hear about "disgruntled employees" but never hear about "gruntled employees"
 
My ancestors were all farmers so taking care of my systems is like flowering a plant or petting an animal to me.

Beastie, Gecko, Puffy & Tux are fluffy.
 
mer said:
I have to help my wife with a Windows thing I get pissed off. Why do I need to navigate through 37 different gui screens to find the IP address? Oh system update and now an application doesn't work?
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I used Windows since 95 up to 25H2; I find reports of complexity interesting.

ipconfig reports the IP easily like FreeBSD's one-letter-different ifconfig. And regular Windows 11 is boringly-stable enough on my mom's computer that she'd probably benefit from doing Insider testing for the reward points :p
 
raphael said:
Booting into my retro-riced FreeBSD greeter makes me smile, it just feels great using the computer-- like in the spirit of Sir Sinclair, "Computing is Fun!"
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Running on my old powermacs is one of the things I loved about FreeBSD. Now that 15.0 is on the horizon, my 32-bit machines are migrating to NetBSD. I still will run FBSD on (most) of my newer machines.
 
Espionage724 said:
I used Windows since 95 up to 25H2; I find reports of complexity interesting.

ipconfig reports the IP easily like FreeBSD's one-letter-different ifconfig. And regular Windows 11 is boringly-stable enough on my mom's computer that she'd probably benefit from doing Insider testing for the reward points :p
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I tend to agree.

I believe I'm older than you and my Windows experience dates back to the 16 bit era, Windows 3.0. My last Windows-only system was running W95beta, installed from a CD I got with a printed magazine and that was a massive help with my thesis (I graduated in 1995 and at that time W95beta was the only multitasking environment available on PC that could run all the software I needed, go figure). After that in 1996 I started dual booting Windows and Linux until 2001 when I switched to Linux only on my personal systems; that was until May 2024 when I completely ditched Linux for FreeBSD.

However, work and family "need" Windows 11 and whilst I have to say that as a unix guy it's everything but a pleasant experience, I don't think that for a normal user it's particularly complex. For me a few design choices are somewhat disconcerting and if course all the ads and AI thing are rubbish. Remembering the era of W3 onwards (I used all the Windows versions excluding ME, Vista, 8.0 and 8.1 between personal and work) I have to say I don't remember a version more stable than 11, maybe Windows 2000, which BTW had the best GUI ever IMHO.
 
Crumb 611: True Exclusivity: True exclusivity comes not through money or power, for the powerful and the rich are many. True exclusivity comes through knowledge: knowing the path to a small secluded beach; knowing the album “Psychosexual Chapter 2” by The Spookshow, a practically unknown masterpiece; knowing the obscure one-man-band composer of high-octane instrumental metal Berserkyd, whose every song is a hymn; knowing how to install FreeBSD to enjoy the best workflow, a fantastic performance, and near-perfect privacy.
 
I love it when it works. Like today, my first backup using a new, old stock Sun StorEdge SuperDLT 220 desktop tape drive had a sustained transfer rate of 11 MB/s. Which matches the published spec in the 2003 Sun product brochure !!

Special thanks to Justin Gibbs who wrote the ahc(4) driver! It's a swiss army knife, so capable and flexible. It has brought me significant joy!
 
Let us say the OS itself as a base excluding ports is pretty good.
It works stable, reliable, and has a very good network stack, and the audio sound system is one of the best I could ever work with.

If adding ports to it, I quickly realize that ports are of different qualities.
Not that one port is worse than the other, they are all good as they work pretty well.
It is just rather the amount of options one port let you do, where another port just hardcodes stuff in it, which could be made optional.
It would be fine for a pkg to have as much options enabled as possible to satisfy a broad amount of users, but I think if going through the trouble to build a port from source there should probably be options available to let a user choose what he wants or not, without introducing breakage.

I like that building from source is made easy, although in the past I experienced the contrary with let us say Windows or Linux.
For me it is like a dream comes true, with easy custom kernel compilation, and easy port tailoring to ones specific need.
 
I started Linux Distro OS hopping since I was in UNI time. Working in IT industry for more than a decades, I have mainly stuck to Redhat for commercial works and Fedora for my personal workstations.

Probably I am getting older, Linux feels like for young guy who like trying new stuff and poking around on internet constantly looking something new.

I just want OS that lasts and organize with proper MAN pages. Not some funny commands that I need to look from github sources to figure what that option does or reading gibberish MANual that basically wasting time.

I believe FreeBSD provides me the balance of learn once and use for life time without too much changes and unstable new features that basically do the same thing with different ways or trying to fix issues that doesn't exists.

Also I like Beastie more that Penguin 😎
 
system sleep seems to work fine, but I've yet to hit the space bar and have the same system wake
AMDGPU didn't work for me (AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
Paul Floyd said:
Second reply for the downsides.

It isn't all milk and honey. Like pretty much open source projects FreeBSD has a chronic lack of contributors. That means that bug reports can languish either forever or until they get closed OBE.

Hardware support can be patchy.
  • system sleep seems to work fine, but I've yet to hit the space bar and have the same system wake
  • AMDGPU didn't work for me (AMD Ryzen 9 9900X)
  • RPi 4b and 5 support is poor
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sleep used to work well on 15 current n 14.3 stable then on my lapTop. even usb dongle goes to sleep then. since 15 prerelease n 15 stable now, even waking up, i hv to do netif restart wlan0 to have wifi working again. surprisingly, ifconfig print wlan0 is associated, but on the router wlan0 is not!!!
 
Yes,because it is not so complicated that it turns me off and it's not so easy that it bores me. And those who use it, everyone you see in this place, where I grew up, are very competent and, above all, generous and patient in helping those who want to learn.
 
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