These all link to the same site, so I am wondering if it is your own site. Is it? Just curious. It is good that you are making an effort to help others, either way.
The formatting and layout is quite nice and some of the info looks probably useful too. Good job on that, if you're the one who created it, or to whoever did! However, since the text was (according to the site's policy page) written with significant "AI" (LLM) input (and hence almost certainly contains large amounts of aggregated and transformed and randomized but ultimately still essentially plagiarized text from other people's personal creations and time and labor) I personally am going to pass on reading it. Subtly wrong information (as AI very often is) is also even worse than clearly wrong info and thus I don't want potentially subtly misleading information floating around in my head. It is good that the author of the site (possibly you) had the integrity to mark the website as such though. That will at least reduce the chances of circular feedback loops of slop generation.
I'm strictly anti-AI myself, but some others on here seem fine with it. The community here seems rather mixed in reception about LLMs. NetBSD and Gentoo in contrast are highly anti-AI, which still greatly tempts me whenever I think about NetBSD, since FreeBSD still hasn't decided on an AI policy for included code yet and I am really very earnestly hoping that they adopt a similarly highly restrictive policy as NetBSD or Gentoo to protect the integrity and security and long-term legal and ethical future of the FreeBSD codebase. FreeBSD has so much better documentation and resources than NetBSD though, alas. It'd be really awesome I think if FreeBSD core team decides to strictly forbid all LLM generated material from the FreeBSD base, though third party software in
pkg can't be realistically policed in contrast of course. There is honestly a
lot of danger inherent to the push for so much LLM stuff right now. As a society we really need for there to be untouched safe havens of human-made code and also computing environments where one can be assured a hidden LLM spyware bot isn't harvesting our data to plagiarize it.
Anyway though, more to the main subject of the thread though, as a partial newbie myself, I will add a few of my own tips on learning FreeBSD fundamentals that have helped me so far:
- Michael Lucas's books ("Absolute FreeBSD", "FreeBSD Master: ZFS", etc) are the most well-written resources I've found so far and even have great touches of humor at times. They really help for getting a better sense of how things fit together for real use cases and are less dry than the official FreeBSD Handbook, though the Handbook (and other docs) are pretty awesome already. Also, even more compellingly, Lucas says explicitly on his main website that none of his books use any AI, and thus his books are thankfully truly trustworthy and credible and ethically made.
- Awareness that both the forums and the mailing lists exist helps a lot. Previously I was unaware of the mailing lists, but they contain a large amount of useful info too and either can be searched on the internet by adding
site:forums.freebsd.org or site:lists.freebsd.org respectively on most major search engines such as DDG, etc. Remember to search the mailing lists if you can't find something on the forums, or vice versa, and don't forget the official docs too of course, which are really great.
- The online Illumos book on ZFS contains some great clarifying information on ZFS, especially since Illumos is desended from Solaris, which was the actual place ZFS was invented at.
- Various old Unix related used books can be found for cheap and still contain many useful pieces of information and are interesting to browse through. I have a stack of 'em now. Fun!
- Using
zfs snapshot pool_name/ROOT/default@snapshot_name before installing packages and then using zfs diff ... to see what the package changes is an extraordinarily helpful way to see what is really going on with the package system and the ease of undoing changes via zfs rollback ... makes for a truly awesome learning environment that systems that don't support ZFS as well cannot match. It is a really cool filesystem for so many use cases. FreeBSD thereby can be made to feel almost like something in-between a traditional Linux "distro" and Nix or Guix! Being able to experiment freely without much concern has a great empowering effect and makes one more willing to do the kinds of experiments that teach interesting and insightful lessons about the system.
Those are the top things that came to mind for what has helped me personally the most while learning more about FreeBSD, especially in regards to foundational/fundamental things so far.
In any case, have an awesome day/night and good luck to all fellow newbies on their own FreeBSD adventures!
