I may be a little premature in posting here, since I've not even done a test install of FreeBSD on a VM or anything as of yet, but I'm at the point where it feels like my move to FreeBSD pretty much feels as though it's a foregone conclusion.
I've been using Linux exclusively for personal use for around. . . Coming up on 20 years now, and nearly all of that has been on Slackware with the odd jaunt over to Arch for a year or so. Ran CentOS on my desktop for about the same amount of time just because I thought it'd be the lazy option to go with on account of the workstations and servers used by my employer at the time were CentOS boxes — that ended up being a waste, as it just brought annoyance home with me.
I've always been interested in going the BSD route for a while, as I like the idea of sticking with as much of a Unix approach as possible, but never had too much of a push to because Slackware is a great distro and easy to get into a groove with. The (perceived lack of, at the time) hardware support for BSDs in general was my biggest point of hesitation, but that seems to have been seeing a great deal advancement over the past several years. More and more, though, I had to acknowledge I was more enthusiastic about using Slackware than using "Linux", and I've seen more and more over the past several years to make me less than comfortable with the direction that Linux, kernel and shorthand, have been and seem to be inescapably headed.
I don't pretend to be more of an expert than the dudes who are actually putting in the work and design efforts, but I do have my personal priorities like anyone else. As much as I appreciate and respect much of what Linux, GNU, and related efforts has been able to accomplish over the years, I can't help but feel that the growth has been at the expense of severe compromise to practical autonomy. With the permissiveness in acceptance and deep adoption of technologies that radically alter the fundamental "Unix-like" character of the broader Linux ecosystem (at the risk of losing further points for originality, I'll use the go-to examples of eager implementation of the Nyarlathotep beast that is the now-ubiquitous systemd, and cozying up to Microsoft and willingly allowing them to run the extend, embrace, extinguish con on the whole game) the forecast I end up with for long-term independence for the projects and users leads isn't very cheery.
But that's alright. Things change and projects and users go different directions. I'm just happy that there are options, and especially of the quality that seem to define the offerings here in BSD territory. There's new tools I get to use and different ways of doing things that, so far, read as more immediately intuitive to me. And that's pretty awesome.
EDIT: Made a pretty heavy edit to more accurately reflect my sentiments here. First draft came across as way too whiny and doom-driven. I know better than to write about anything I care about before having any coffee, and yet, , ,
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