I have achieved something amazing with FreeBSD.
I have one ancient laptop with FreeBSD 9 besides my main workstation. I upgraded it with freebsd-update to 12.3 almost without any effort, such a huge jump and it works just fine. I now have upgraded kernel and base, but i refused to upgrade ports. Why? This old badboy has very old nvidia gpu that requires 304 version of driver to run, this driver requires old version of Xorg to work, i could not downgrade Xorg to 1.19 ABI. So i upgraded OS to stable and supported release while keeping my files, games, wine, xmms, GNOME 2 and X intact.
Now i have everything i want on this laptop, i have modern latest software and my old comfy environment that i don't have to touch. Just a reminder, even latest modern FreeBSD can RUN old executables down to FreeBSD 4... Even windows can't do this. Its amazing how FBSD can achieve this, keeping performance, security and legacy all in the same time.
This enables me to run jail with same FreeBSD release from where i will pull latest software to work with. Because X supports ssh tunneling i can use anything GUI related from jail, like latest IDE's, java and web browsers.
I could do just clean install but i will have unusable GPU and my CPU would burn from vesa driver. I would not be able to watch even a simple video offline. For any case i installed compat9x package, if some executable starts to complain.
So, thank you FreeBSD for such an amazing experience. Most usable and awesome unix system available today. Such a masterpiece.
EDIT:
I thought that Gentoo Linux is most flexible and powerful OS available today, but i was wrong. FreeBSD can do everything Gentoo can and even more. I would like to see some some other OS(Linux or other doesn't matter) to be able to upgrade several generations painlessly and so easy and while keeping their old stuff exactly how they are.
I have one ancient laptop with FreeBSD 9 besides my main workstation. I upgraded it with freebsd-update to 12.3 almost without any effort, such a huge jump and it works just fine. I now have upgraded kernel and base, but i refused to upgrade ports. Why? This old badboy has very old nvidia gpu that requires 304 version of driver to run, this driver requires old version of Xorg to work, i could not downgrade Xorg to 1.19 ABI. So i upgraded OS to stable and supported release while keeping my files, games, wine, xmms, GNOME 2 and X intact.
Now i have everything i want on this laptop, i have modern latest software and my old comfy environment that i don't have to touch. Just a reminder, even latest modern FreeBSD can RUN old executables down to FreeBSD 4... Even windows can't do this. Its amazing how FBSD can achieve this, keeping performance, security and legacy all in the same time.
This enables me to run jail with same FreeBSD release from where i will pull latest software to work with. Because X supports ssh tunneling i can use anything GUI related from jail, like latest IDE's, java and web browsers.
I could do just clean install but i will have unusable GPU and my CPU would burn from vesa driver. I would not be able to watch even a simple video offline. For any case i installed compat9x package, if some executable starts to complain.
So, thank you FreeBSD for such an amazing experience. Most usable and awesome unix system available today. Such a masterpiece.
EDIT:
I thought that Gentoo Linux is most flexible and powerful OS available today, but i was wrong. FreeBSD can do everything Gentoo can and even more. I would like to see some some other OS(Linux or other doesn't matter) to be able to upgrade several generations painlessly and so easy and while keeping their old stuff exactly how they are.
