In the late 90s my employers chose Red Hat (version 6.2 I think) over FreeBSD, after I introduced them to both systems-- they knew nothing whatsoever about FOSS at that time-- but later we all regretted it when they split Red Hat into Fedora and Enterprise Edition, which got all the routing and ipchains/iptables features we wanted (for some kind of fee, I forget how much). We continued using 6.2 for routers and gateways only long after the support for it started running dry. These were all headless machines with no desktop environments, and RH also had a buggy but usable IMSBASIC implementation which we used to support legacy BASIC software for a few live customers. Personally I experimented with X-windows features at home, using the FreeBSD documentation, which was much better and more comprehensive than anything I could find easily for Red Hat. I personally went dry on all GNU/Linux after that, until a few years ago when I started using Linux Mint to replace Windows on a few of my friends' boxes which were unable to keep up with the ever-growing hardware requirements for Windows, but whose hardware was not supported by FreeBSD. I've hated Windows for decades and haven't used it personally since Sun successfully sued M$ for-- what was it-- around $14 million back around the turn of the century, when M$ more or less killed Java applets on the desktop through blatantly illegal contract violations and anti-competitive business practices. They were laughing all the way to the bank I'm sure when they paid off the $14 million which was chump change for them. Playing around with Linux Mint sent me running back to FreeBSD again right away-- I had been using MacOS X for several years, and played around with Debian in 2011 for a server implementation-- anything but Windows for me ha, bad enough that I still had to support Windows for several years, for customers running PowerTerm, putty, and the one and only M$ app we had written in Borland C++ for Windows.
