Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

joplass said:
I noticed my boxes at start or shutdown will display a message like "system is updating wait...." and I will wait for the computer to do its business.
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I've got a a Kali 2021.2 rolling release box on metal and have never seen any SystemD message of any kind.

I did look at the Task Manager yesterday and it's running, but it's not been a resource concern and nothing gets updated withoug me entering the sudo password. Which I've gotten used to using but su and working as root till I'm done is my prefered way. I know you can change it back to that but why bother now.
 
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Hi,
I am back to Open Source Software (I was on Linux honestly) after being away for almost 8 years. Though I happily lived with Linux (for me it was the concept of freedom of open source as a principal, and freedom from abuse) since 2000 till 2013. (Efi and UEFI stuff kept me out and I was quite busy, didn’t have time to struggle with it).

Recently retired and I’m all free again.

I recently tried quite a few Linux distros over the past few weeks but to be honest, BSD in general was always like teasing me as I read a lot about its stability, performance and security as compared to other OSs.

What I love mainly about Open Source Software -in addition to freedom and quality… etc.- is the community.

EDIT: I am trying now to make a USB flash disk bootable to try.

I hope I’m welcome!
Thank you.
 
  1. My childhood included these, and a 1976 summer camp that included late night solo and relay streaking, suitably facilitated by camp organisers (Big J, Little J, L and D: thank you)
  2. my voice broke at the relatively early age of eleven (again, thank you)
  3. in my youth I collected things such as this, this, this and this
  4. my first car was a 1965 Hillman Super Minx
  5. if (as in TV advertisements) you aspire to driving a big car through the countryside with not another vehicle in sight, please know that blue Venetian blinds will not help when you go off-road … I was sad when the previous car went to the scrapyard
  6. stuff, stuff and more stuff before and after what's above
  7. I used and managed Macs, including XServe and XServe RAID, for around twenty-one years … made no attempt to archive the public and private websites that I managed/created (if I recall correctly, the Wayback Machine didn't really lend itself to things such as Plone content)
  8. privately, I was the 405th member of AppleSeed (when AppleSeed was a pretty much a secret) … publicly, my reputation was (still is) OK
  9. I sort of switched to PC-BSD, then TrueOS, both of which offered ease of use that taught me to be fearless about straying from -RELEASE, so I switched to FreeBSD -CURRENT
  10. I'm not famous for this, but partly thanks to me you can more easily refer to points within pages at FreshPorts (the #add example at <https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/82319/post-535009>, and so on) – What HTML anchors exist?
Hello.
 
grahamperrin said:
… Macs … I sort of switched to PC-BSD, then TrueOS, … switched to FreeBSD -CURRENT …
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My ramblings didn't answer the opening post:

ikbendeman said:
… why you chose FreeBSD
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Through private conversation today, I randomly stumbled across a 2018 explanation for a switch away from a FreeBSD-based system, to Linux …

… the earlier switch, away from Apple, was essentially a reaction to (Yosemite) removal of the title bar from Safari. I'm passionate about UX.

Postscript

February 2022: I couldn't remember when, how or why I became a FreeBSD wiki editor. Via RecentChanges I stumbled across someone else's home page, then found information about me: add GrahamPerrin who will be performing occasional edits, starting with vbox (2017-03-28).
 
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Yes, for someone that is a stickler for people who go off-topic and will start a new thread to Moderate them you allow yourself liberal latitude in doing it, Johnny Appleseed.??? ?

grahamperrin said:
publicly, my reputation was (still is) OK
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Depends on where you look.? ⌚✂️??


grahamperrin said:
I sort of switched to PC-BSD, then TrueOS, both of which offered ease of use that taught me to be fearless about straying from -RELEASE, so I switched to FreeBSD -CURRENT
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I sot of helped PC-BSD get started, get their priorities right when it came to Xsystems money becoming their focus and brought them back to the flock, and in the end, you won't find any official sign of PB-BSD ever having existed but the hungry ghost of Weixiong who here with me.

And Weixiong wants some XXXLarge FreeBSD T-shirts as swag! That's all, but lots of them. Because I was with them for 7 years that were wiped from history and if Dru and the Less Moore Bros are righteous enough to be supported in representing and promoting FreeBSD, so am I and it's time I am.

I'm calling a microaggression, before it goes macro. It's how I got started.
 
astyle said:
… googling the term AppleSeed …
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Things now are very different. I joined long before the brief blaze of publicity for the (non-exclusive) Beta Seed Program, through which millions of people learnt of the existence of Apple Software Customer Seeding.

For people in an early era, AppleSeed was not only exclusive, it was also very discreet. So discreet that almost no-one mentioned its existence publicly (I recall a brief private uproar when a member used the word in a public forum). First rule of Fight Club, which is nowadays written in humour however there was a time when (for AppleSeed) it was, like, an unwritten rule. 2012:

… When I ran a google search on "appleseed pre-release" the first article I read stated that the "first rule of Appleseed" was not to talk about appleseed. …
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Flashback to 2006: the AppleSeed home page powered by WebObjects!
 
grahamperrin said:
Things now are very different. I joined long before the brief blaze of publicity for the (non-exclusive) Beta Seed Program, through which millions of people learnt of the existence of Apple Software Customer Seeding.

For people in an early era, AppleSeed was not only exclusive, it was also very discreet. So discreet that almost no-one mentioned its existence publicly (I recall a brief private uproar when a member used the word in a public forum). First rule of Fight Club, which is nowadays written in humour however there was a time when (for AppleSeed) it was, like, an unwritten rule. 2012:



Flashback to 2006: the AppleSeed home page powered by WebObjects!
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Sounds like any governmental spy agency on this blue planet should be taking lessons from Apple! ?
 
Basically, wanted to get away from Linux. BSD development I feel is less of a mess and seems to be a better written OS.

Also, if I want to develop improvements to the OS I use, I feel it is lot more realistic to be starting with BSD over Linux. I generally see Linux as an OS for people getting their first taste of a more technical world but who still have a hell of a lot to learn. I am also not a great fan of "benevolent dictatorships", even if said "benevolent dictator" does make some amusing digs at the likes of Nvidia and at C++ developers....
 
ikbendeman said:
Who's new to FreeBSD? Did you migrate from another OS and what was your reason?
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i used freebsd in 2008 and visited the forum the just getting back into using freebsd again enjoyed using it as my main operating system these next few months i will getting my machine running again server wise 5 yrs ago i quit machine monitor broke so i just used windows on another machine i had wife would not forgive me i have never stopped reading the many books i bought in 2008 and 2009
 
grahamperrin said:
Things now are very different. I joined long before the brief blaze of publicity for the (non-exclusive) Beta Seed Program, through which millions of people learnt of the existence of Apple Software Customer Seeding.

For people in an early era, AppleSeed was not only exclusive, it was also very discreet. So discreet that almost no-one mentioned its existence publicly (I recall a brief private uproar when a member used the word in a public forum). First rule of Fight Club, which is nowadays written in humour however there was a time when (for AppleSeed) it was, like, an unwritten rule. 2012:



Flashback to 2006: the AppleSeed home page powered by WebObjects!
Click to expand...

Wow!
You kick me back in early days of my youth... :)
 
I don't live of my tech skills, because i am not enough competent programmer or sys admin. I am currently a machine operator in various factories. I have solved some problems for my company with my programming skills but that is far from something important.

I started game development, an idea popped in my head about three years ago about a game so i started making it little by little. I want to be a system programmer but that is in my opinion a very hard discipline to get into without proper college education(i am probably wrong, i don't know). I want that because that is most appealing to me.

For the first time i tried FreeBSD in 2014(version 10) on an old laptop and since then it feels like home. Shortly after that i switched over to linux because of driver issues. About 2-3 months ago i installed FreeBSD 13 and purged my old Gentoo partitions because of sudden enormous dependency issue that happened overnight, i was using Gentoo Linux for three years i know how to maintain it..
 
ayleid96 said:
purged my old Gentoo partitions because of sudden enormous dependency issue that happened overnight, i was using Gentoo Linux for three years i know how to maintain it..
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Gentoo's portage was inspired by FreeBSD's ports, BTW... When I was on Linux, I wanted to try Gentoo, but back then, install instructions were hard to follow. Ended up on FreeBSD, never looked back. :P
 
In the past i was a gentoo & funtoo user. But both times my O.S. ended up in a complete mess of conflicting packages and settings and think it's called USE variables.
I must once give Alpine Linux with it's musl library a try.
 
Hi all,

I'm a UK based software engineer. Lifelong Windows user (since 3.1) and dabbled in BSD and Linux over the years but always reverted back typically when something isn't available, doesn't work or I'm just stuck through lack of knowledge.

Having a bit of an identity/mid-life crisis I think, my senior role doesn't involve much software work anymore and I have an itch to get involved in something. Write some software again.

FreeBSD over Linux (or other BSDs) for me just feels like a nice well defined system, good documentation. I like the ports system. It appears to have 'clarity' if that makes sense where Linux feels more 'chaotic.

I really want to get away from Windows, the barrage of crap popping up constantly drives me mad and I know there are more efficient ways to work if I just put in some effort (vim).

Hopefully I can make it work as my primary desktop OS as that provides more incentive. When you have to launch it in a VM I just tend to not bother.
 
MattP said:
I really want to get away from Windows, the barrage of crap popping up constantly drives me mad and I know there are more efficient ways to work if I just put in some effort (vim).
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I do think it is almost cruel that Microsoft is destroying a platform that so many grew up with and invested time in. Though as soon as Microsoft brought DRM into Windows XP, that *should* have been a bit of a sign for the sleazy things to come! Perhaps ReactOS can pick up the slack here some day...

MattP said:
Hopefully I can make it work as my primary desktop OS as that provides more incentive. When you have to launch it in a VM I just tend to not bother.
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I have heard this before and can certainly see it being an issue. What my colleague said worked for him was admittedly quite extreme but if non-Windows drivers are the issue, you can consider installing a Core (no "Desktop Experience") instance of Windows Server and then you pretty much have nothing else *but* the FreeBSD VM. Basically by lobotomizing the host, it makes the FreeBSD guest more inviting to use :)
 
I am taking a bit of a career turn, out of need, will be designing and setting up all infrastructure at a new, small start-up company. Some will be Linux, but as I have recently started looking at replace Linux at home with FreeBSD, I am hoping I can introduce FreeBSD at this company.

Hardware support slightly worries me currently. I am not used to systems where this is an issue. We will see.
 
morsing said:
I am taking a bit of a career turn, out of need, will be designing and setting up all infrastructure at a new, small start-up company. Some will be Linux, but as I have recently started looking at replace Linux at home with FreeBSD, I am hoping I can introduce FreeBSD at this company.

Hardware support slightly worries me currently. I am not used to systems where this is an issue. We will see.
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A heterogeneous environment is easier to support, it lends itself better to automation and monitoring.
 
I was a Slackware GNU/Linux user (about 2001).
I was amazed to learn how things worked, how to manually configure the daemons.

For work reasons, I left GNU/Linux for many years and entered the MacOS universe.

But all the searches I did, every problem I found in MacOS, the solutions pointed to FreeBSD/OpenBSD, since virtual memory management, Firewall (PF)...

So, I decided to learn more about FreeBSD (I couldn't use OpenBSD - Urgh!), and I'm really enjoying it. It reminds me a little of Slackware basis. But FreeBSD makes much more sense than GNU/Linux to me (filesystem hierarchy, licence...)

The simplicity of FreeBSD and at the same time its power made me adopt FreeBSD as a Desktop.
And every day I'm learning more and more.
 
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