How does knowing how to use FreeBSD/UNIX benefit you?

C

curses

Yeah, I mean FreeBSD is great and all, but how do you benefit from knowing it? I know for me it is a hobby and a toy. I try to see how far I can get without asking for help.(not very far, lol.)
Do some of you use it in your jobs? Is it just so incredibly useful that you've installed it on your home computer and love it?
I've still got gentoo on one half of the hard disk because, well, I know it well enough that I can use it without frying stuff. Plus I can at least print from it.
Anyway, what do you gain from knowing FreeBSD?
 
Quite simply, I gain a working computer. Computer without an OS is useless, and for me the OS is FreeBSD.

FreeBSD may seem strange and obscure to you now if you are used to other systems, but to me it offers a very natural, stable and reliable environment. It's simply a matter of what you're used to and what you like.

If you're using Gentoo already, my guess is it won't take long for you to accomodate to FreeBSD. Once you know the shell -- and that shouldn't be much different from your Gentoo shell -- it's only a matter of learning and getting used to the things where FBSD differs from Gentoo and GNU/Linux in general. Once you're used to it, it'll become simply a matter of personal preference.
 
I get highly efficient system, that helps me accomplish many different tasks in very short time....

Many things I do are very hard to accomplish on Windows.....
And I totally love console
 
Its a big benefit of all unix systems - you knowing them well you gain good,interesting job plus simple and very fast/stable tool to setup our network or server. You can customize any application, totally and deeply integrate applications, making them work as single and stable thing.
Why FreeBSD instead of Linux? One word: ORDER
 
For me, like yourself, FreeBSD started as a hobby. The more I learned, however, the more I realized that the values behind FreeBSD line up with the values I want in an OS. I suppose that's why you have advocates for every OS.

So how does it benefit me? Peace of mind. I'm not fighting with an OS that is going a different direction than I am.
 
1- Curiosity : Now, I know how a OS load from MBR (Linux/Win didn'y help me)
2- Job/Life : Web Designing / App Programming (Win is Expensive, Lin is confusing)
3- Simplicity : Compare thos GNUish manual pages and configurations files with related BSD -- just in a base system. And about the Win : I feel more relax with FreeBSD rather than Win, in both configuration & application cases, Icon-Based system make me dumb.
4- Aesthetics : Nice Logo, Red Colous, Simple Red-Colour offical site, Best Installer [sysinstall(8) The Great], boot0/boot0sio/boot0cfg angels
5- Documentations : Hero
6- Update/Install && Utility/Apps/Kernel/Base : I thinks Better than any OSs
7- And know Helpfull Forum
 
Plenty of the above. FreeBSD (after a few years of fumbling around) lets me use my computer instead of frustratedly trying to find, download, install, and use some kooky shareware program to burn a stupid CD.

It's silly, but every time I think of some tool that I would want & wished I had the know-how to write, I search the man pages, the handbook, or the interwob, & sure enough FreeBSD has it, a lot of times in the base install.
 
Besides general awesomeness?

I get a virus free, amazingly stable home serve/desktop OS that I can configure from the ground up. Plus an excellent development platform for my classes. Plus I can gain knowledge of concepts used in my classes by actually using the technologies in question without having to pay hundreds of dollars for them.
 
A really awesome, rock-solid, stable, fast, mature Server/Workstation OS.
FreeBSD related Job still missing but thats only a matter of Time :D
 
I saved my school a lot of money using FreeBSD. Last year, they had to purchase an expensive mail server solution that really sucked, but I replaced it with a new one based on FreeBSD a month ago. It didn't cost a single penny.
 
Flexibility
wikipedia: Flexibility (engineering), in the field of engineering systems design, designs that can adapt when external changes occur.

(in windoz you cant do something that the developers didnt anticipate)
(what has BSD over linux? elegance ..)
 
For me, its not what gain I get from knowing how to use FreeBSD... its more the fact that anyone interested in computers, software engineering, networking, etc... really should get off their arse and LEARN about this operating system. If not, they are simply not truly interested in their profession / hobby.

Suffice to say, FreeBSD is the only OS in which I like the direction in which it is going. OpenBSD is good too but is slightly impractical in this "binary blob" world in which we live :p

I also find an operating system to be too important for it to be closed source. There are other alternatives I guess, such as Linux... but as before, I like the direction in which FreeBSD is going...
 
I get a strong measure of reliability. I just had to reinstall my Windows partition because of breakage, something about spreading important bits across 3 partitions after install seems to have broken it. Those 10 minute boots were really fun.

FreeBSD has never broken for me like that, even if I later decide that I'd prefer having things running on more, or sometimes fewer, partitions or even disks for that matter.

Now that I know what I'm doing, breakages of any significance are infrequent, and usually the result of something going awry in the ports tree.
 
curses said:
Anyway, what do you gain from knowing FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

FreeBSD's design is/was elegant and charming enough that it reinvigorated my interest in IT (after a couple head-scratching years with a Linux distro that I won't name), and provided me with good fundamental knowledge via its documentation and user communities.

More to the point, grasping FreeBSD directly led to a much stronger understanding of Linux and computing in general. That translated into a better IT career, which translated into $$.

QED.
 
anomie said:
More to the point, grasping FreeBSD directly led to a much stronger understanding of Linux and computing in general.
Click to expand...

Same here. I didn't really have a clue about how operating systems actually worked until I used FreeBSD. FreeBSD definitely has a steeper learning curve, but it's sure worth it.
 
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