What Do You Use FreeBSD For?

As the title says.
I haven't got a clue how to program, and my terminal knowledge is basic. I only use sh to perform basic maintenance :)
I'm a 24-year-old philologist, and I use FreeBSD for work, studying, research, music, and browsing the internet.
How about yourself? What do you use FreeBSD for?

BTW Nice to meet you all! ^^
 
Nice to meet you too. I am 25 now but when I was 20-22 I was using FreeBSD off and on as my full-time desktop, until I had to switch to Wifi, which was not as great then as it is now. Currently I only use FreeBSD on my servers but I am thinking of switching back to FreeBSD on the desktop if I can manage to try the new mt76 driver and see how the performance is with my current wifi card (which is an MT7921).
 
To test the limits of old hardware capability, you can think of it as experiment but in length is my general purpose daily driver. I have learned the innards to keep the environment optimized and measure the longevity of this machine.
 
Nice to meet you! I first encountered FreeBSD in the 1990's when I was still trapped behind a 2400 baud modem and a telco's rates that didn't match the revenue from my newspaper round. Then came cable internet. Woohoo! I ended up being on the UNIX team of a technical university for a number of years, tending a whole slew of FreeBSD-based servers for e-mail, web and other tasks. Nowadays I run FreeBSD mostly at home as I'm not directly involved in running servers at work anymore. My desktop, laptop and NAS run FreeBSD. I've taken to experimenting with Kubernetes on Talos Linux as a learning experience. The storage backend and backups are still FreeBSD though. Can't lose any data now can we? ;-)
 
Welcome. As most people, daily driver here as a general purpose OS. Includes anything from paid development work (java and c# mostly), browsing, listening to music, movies and gaming.
 
As of right now I use FreeBSD to host a single jail for our Unifi controller. I used to use it for building firewalls but now use OpenBSD for that. Work laptop is a MacBook Air. Personal laptop is a 15 year old Dell Latitude running Windows 11. As soon as it dies I'll be replacing it with a MacBook Air as well!
 
"Unix is my IDE"

Unix IS an IDE. :cool:
It may be not a very nice nor powerful one coming in its most basic forms as "vanilla default". But apart from all unix[like] can be extended by packages added and personally configured to become an individually tailored, most powerful, absolutely professional IDE, it already is in all its most basic forms: Every unix[like] always already comes with at leat a C compiler and a decent texteditor (at least vi, plus often others.) That might be not much.
"All a dwarf needs is an axe." [Terry Pratchett]
Anyway it's more than I got in MS-DOS and all Windowses I used. Those all came with no programming languages at all, particulary no C compiler, and a lousy texteditor, only. Such had to be installed extra. Plus the environment (shell) is also something not to be underestimated to make a powerful IDE, while until W7 (the last W I experienced) did not come with any shell at all. Naming this "MS-DOS CLI" a shell was an euphemism.

The reason for that I do not want to elaborate here again, but short it's because of Unix' origin is in pure computer science. This heritage we benefit from today in all unix[like]. This needs to be preserved. There must be at least one free scientific based OS to preserve free computer science.
 
Admitedly, I only use BSD these days to stay true to my UNIX roots. For my day-to-day stuff I'm stuck with Debian Linux. I Occasionally run a BSD VM when I want to test something out without all the GNU bloat. I frequent the BSD forums due to the higher concentration of grey matter here than on the "social experiment" Linux forums.
 
My OS tinkering days were in the 80s with the IBM PC and all the follow on operating systems. Then a long side adventure with NetWare then VMWare.

Today all I want to do is work so no tinkering. MX Linux for daily driver as a refugee fleeing Win11 and Win10 for my DAW, Excel VBA and others that cannot run under WINE or yabridge.

Finally, FBSD running XigmaNAS which I also don’t have to tinker with. It just works.
 
Made a mfsroot based live system 10 years ago but still after 10 years of using a normal disk installation. It runs USB-only on several locations as bookkeeping/financial and point of sale system. It's able to keep on running with the bootstick removed and without any other storage device. It became a circular fork but I follow the official releases and keep everything compatible to always have the latest (stable) features and support of most external software.
But I'm afraid we're going to lose this bare metal control to commercial platforms that side with manufacturers to delete low-level operation for the owner of the hardware. I will quit when the only options left are corporate environments. Phones are already done. The computer at home almost. When do I have to register a secure boot key and pay ??K to have my kernel working on PC?
 
Today all I want to do is work so no tinkering.
Second.
That's exactly why I'm using FreeBSD.

To me all Linux I experienced so far was constant tinkering just to keep the system running.
To me many Linux users are masochists who have too much time and no idea what they actually shall do with a computer. So they chose something that breaks regulary, for they have something to tinker with, and being satisfied, when they got the thing finally running again, instead of actually using the computer.

FreeBSD needs to be set up and configured the way you like it. That can be a task, especially when you are new to it, yes. But almost all you need is in the handbook. The rest is in this forums. All you need is to find and read it. And then that's it. FreeBSD once set up right just runs. No tinkering.
Above all no trial-and-error BS, because there is either no correct up-to-date documentation, or none at all. And when you ask in their forums most you get is, 'Duh, imbecile, when you're not born with that knowledge you don't belong here! Go get back and play with Windows, moron!' I had such so many times with Linux.
Not with FreeBSD.

I'm running FreeBSD since 10.something. No tinkering. Particulary not to just keep the system running.
At least not, when you run quarterly.
If you run some still-in-development-not-yet-released-for-production version, experimenting, or messing things up yourself, e.g. by mixing up packages and ports of different versions all the time, it's your decision, but not FreeBSD's fault when things are not running smoothly then.
Stick to RELEASE and pkg OR ports, and it's undramatic rock solid. No tinkering at all. Just doing the job. Everything anybody needs who's looking for only doing the work and least tinkering as possible.

Well, of course, sometimes there is a major upgrade, and something is changed, like from 13. to 14. when the default shell was changed from csh to sh. You get a config file to decide with both versions, and need to know that you need to delete the commentary lines, and the ones of the version you don't want. That's not turn key, I give you that. But I wouldn't call that tinkering. Such things happen maybe once a year or every two years, or so.
If you are not impatient - always must have immediately the very top most recent version available for everything within the next five minutes at the latest no matter what, and don't know why, 'it's new, so I must have it instantaneously; yesterday it was version 0.1b.0.2.3.0.1, now there is 0.1b.0.2.3.0.1b; must have it, or my machine will flare off!!😱' - but you can wait a couple of days, or even a few months with a major upgrade, wait until the flaws are ironed out, and can see what the forums provide, read the official announcements, then you know what comes, and needs to be done to not hit an iceberg but doing it the right way in the first place.

FreeBSD: I never experienced a more rock-solid and less tinkering OS like this one. (Well, Amiga OS was also alike. But an OS from the late 1980s is hardly comparable with what needs we have today.)
If FreeBSD means tinkering, then you either doing it wrong somehow, or you're experimenting. Then you'd better know why you do it and how to handle it, but that's for sure not FreeBSD's fault if it runs not smoothly then.
Who wants to know how to do it right:
Handbook, forums. It's all in [t]here.
Just stick to it, and FreeBSD just worx reliably, rock solid.
🤓😎:beer:
 
FreeBSD is the Unix system that suits me—plus, I love it.
My home computing needs are actually "overkill" ,with FreeBSD, but it’s just so stable...
I run my LAN on FreeBSD and have one machine with LM; the latter (NiPogi) will switch to FreeBSD with the RELEASE 16
And this is a good opportunity to thank everyone involved in this project.
Long live FreeBSD.
 
FreeBSD is the only operating system, although it has flaws, it has problems, but they are solved, because one OS, one solution. I think the biggest argument is that people are more adequate and can not only talk about BSD, but also tell how it works, what to do. I was scared by ports, but it's not as scary as they scare. There is support
I work in KiCAD, FreeCAD, SDRAngel ...
There are actually a lot of packages in ports, even Valentina is there, a sewing package. So everyone is obsessed with Linux, and if there are packages for Linux, then they are tested on several, often it's Ubuntu and Fedora, and to add BSD it is enough to simply add #ifdef OS==FreeBSD to the lists and that's it
 
My daily driver is Firefox, Office, Gimp/Photoshop on nVidia 4060ti.

I’m just getting started with MX Linux XFCE as an out of the box install.

Don’t need or care about Wayland and all the endless video and other problems I see reported here. At my late stage in life i just want something that works without tinkering with it.

My general impression is FBSD isn’t foremost a GUI desktop but instead a foremost cmd system with a GUI add on that requires tinkering. Perhaps this is mistaken or not but I shy away from FBSD as a GUI desktop because I don’t want the hassle of tinkering and compiling.
 
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