Hello again, and thanks for all the fish

Just wanted to make a quick post to say thanks to the BSD guys for sticking around all these years. My first Unix experience was a shell account on a FreeBSD box back in the late 90s, and it inspired me to set up an OpenBSD box for my home firewall a couple years later. My job as a software developer has led me through a whole bunch of UNIXes (Digital, SCO, IRIX, Solaris) although nowadays of course everything I deploy goes to Linux flavors. After a few years on and off trying to "get" the MacOS UI, I am now back to Windows for both my work and home OS, but I've missed my command line tools. The upside of spending some time on MacOS was that going back to the broken GNU tools for Windows felt weird, so I started looking at BSD again. This afternoon I started up Hyper-V on my Windows laptop, downloaded the latest FreeBSD image, booted it up, and within about 10 seconds I had a command prompt. It took me a bit longer to realize I had to set up all the services myself, but after ifconfig, dhclient, and service sshd start I was good to go. Added 2 lines to /etc/rc.conf. Updated everything with one command. Installed ksh, Git and Node. SMB-mounted my Windows user directory. Now I have a fabulous little command line that kills Cygwin and Gow and whatever Git For Windows installs, plus I no longer need to go to the OpenBSD website to read a decent manpage to boot. ps aux shows nothing running except for my sshd. What a breath of fresh air. I even get a fortune when I log in. After puzzling over how to administer MacOS from the command line, and having to re-google everything I thought I knew whenever I log on to a Linux box these days, it's a really satisfying experience to go back to BSD 15+ years later and everything just works like it's supposed to. Good work, everyone :)
 
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