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

pc-xt keyboard, like this
Yeah. A friend of mine had the IBM Portable PC - the keyboard really was magnificent!

Cherry G80-3000 is worth a look. Gold crosspoint MX switches. [..] The feel is good, but overall build quality nowhere near as good as IBM.
I have the G80 lying on my cupboard. Put it out of service. Was not satisfied. (hated it for several reasons)
The MX switches are fine, but I find the brown ML switches feel very much better.
Unfortunately those are only to get in Cherry's G84 models (compact, weird order of special keys),
but nowhere else, because everybody is talking MX only 😭

At the moment I'm using the KC-6000 slim - nice one at a reasnoable price (worth a try.)

But - i agree - NO KEYBOARD I had under my fingers so far, can hold IBM's a candle.

So, now we went complete offtopic.
SORRY OP!!
...maybe better actually open a real keyboard thread instead?
 
Hello guys! I am LapsangS and I first tried FreeBSD back in 2004 or so when I got my first broadband connection. I used it for several years as my main desktop but I didn't bother to learn anything else than how to get the PC running as desktop... So yes, even back then the handbook was good but I was a bad student. Then I swithched computers many times and run windows/linux/whatever but I always had this memory of how cool and simple the FreeBSD was and that it didn't install any garbage by default. So now I am back after several years of moving around...
 
Hi! I'm Alex, an engineer from Russia. About 20 years ago, a friend of mine sent me FreeBSD CD and said "Try this true UNIX". At that time I used MS DOS and MS Windows only. I tried and it was painful :) I wanted to investigate this OS and to understand how it works. Well, I'm still a noob but I like FreeBSD because it's really free and follows the true UNIX way.
 
Hi! I'm Alex, an engineer from Russia. About 20 years ago, a friend of mine sent me FreeBSD CD and said "Try this true UNIX". At that time I used MS DOS and MS Windows only. I tried and it was painful :) I wanted to investigate this OS and to understand how it works. Well, I'm still a noob but I like FreeBSD because it's really free and follows the true UNIX way.
FreeBSD has improved since then, and it's MUCH easier to install these days. Wi-Fi is a pain point, as well as 'dependency hell'. But welcome to the Forums, please feel free to ask questions! You'll be referred to the FreeBSD Handbook a lot, it's great reference material that everyone on the Forums is expected to have a handle on. No, we don't expect you to read the entire thing, but at least the parts relevant to the question you ask.
 
Waay back in 2007, I bought a brand new Gateway computer and was happily running Windows XP on it. Then, Microsoft introduced Windows Vista. Suddenly, my brand new computer was having trouble running Vista with Norton to protect it from viruses (Norton was pretty much a virus itself). I was absolutely angry at having bought a brand new computer, which included nearly $100 for the Windows license, then having to subscribe to Norton Antivirus, then having to pay exhorbitant prices for any add-on software to make the computer useful, and then having it struggle to just boot up, much less run anything useful. There just had to be a better way!

So, after searching the Internet, I came up with Ubuntu and FreeBSD to try out. I immediately became disenchanted with ubuntu, because the first thing I encountered was having to purchase software again, so I turned to FreeBSD. In order to figure things out, I bought a book on FreeBSD (can't recall the title), but with that and the official documentation, I was able to get a system up and running with all the necessary software to make a useable and useful system. I tried to convert my family, but in 2007, schools were just learning that computers were useful tools, but, alas, Windows was the only OS they understood and in 2007, .doc format was the only thing they accepted.

So, since that time I have bounced around between Windows 7, macos, and linux, but in the past couple years I have returned to FreeBSD. Probably due to my previous involvement with it, I just feel more competent with FreeBSD than Linux. Windows 8 turned me away from MS again and I will never go back. Apple has now angered me with their forced/planned obsolescence in their iphones and my Macbook pro, so I won't be blowing a big wad of $$ on their gear anytime soon.

So, currently I run a 2015 HP laptop and a 21TB NAS (based on a 2006 Intel cpu) on FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE, a very old Toshiba laptop on GhostBSD, an i5- based Linux box on Arch Linux, and a 2014 Macbook Pro that is no longer able to update due to all the bloatware Apple installs with every update on that tiny little non-upgradeable storage drive.

By the way, Windows Vista was the best thing that ever happened to Apple, but Apple is losing ground with their forced obsolescence. FreeBSD does everything I need and allows me to run my hardware until the hardware breaks. In my generation, the motto is "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without!" I absolutely hate throwing away hardware that still works. I do upgrade hardware when I have to, but I love buying a "new computer" for $50 and using it for another five years! FreeBSD lets me do that!
 
I don't understand how Ubuntu forced you to buy software and FreeBSD didn't. Across the pond we are also concerned about indoctrination in school and planned obsolescence. There were even activist initiatives to return the Windows license and get the money back after buying a PC.
I found free software simply looking for a non-professional replacement for Photoshop. I never wanted cracked and dangerous software. Now with Adobe licensing it's even bloodier.
 
I don't understand how Ubuntu forced you to buy software and FreeBSD didn't. Across the pond we are also concerned about indoctrination in school and planned obsolescence. There were even activist initiatives to return the Windows license and get the money back after buying a PC.
I found free software simply looking for a non-professional replacement for Photoshop. I never wanted cracked and dangerous software. Now with Adobe licensing it's even bloodier.
These days, the few reasons to really have Windoze are for bleeding-edge stuff like GPU's, wifi cards, and some built-in laptop components that don't play well with Open Source stuff. Uhh, also scanners, Zoom/Teams/Skype and TurboTax (The last one is US/Canada only, but still).

On my Lenovo Ideapad 720s-13ARR (Ryzen 5 2500U, 8 GB RAM), I discovered that www/chromium is the only browser that really behaves. And, on my profile, I posted some notes that show results of my research into what it takes to get a browser to behave and not crash the system.

Beyond Zoom/Teams/Skype/Turbotax/occasional scanning, FreeBSD offers a pretty decent place to be, software-wise. Yeah, there's this little thing called dependency hell, but I personally find it to be something I can live with, considering that the alternative is to pay, pay, and pay again.
 
I am new to FreeBSD I am interested in all kinds of operating systems and old laptops/desktops.

After years of playing with Linux operating systems I wanted to try other things because even though Linux is good... times are moving on and Linux destros are moving with the times well most of the detros... some of my older laptops will no longer run Linux anymore and although there is Puppy Linux which runs on pretty much anything i'm not much of a fan of it and there is TinyCore.

I can think of better operating systems for old machines like MS-DOS or even freedos and Windows95/98 for retro gaming and stuff plus programming old things via the COM port there are more things you can do in those operating systems than you can in lets say Puppy Linux. Puppy Linux revolves around internet usage and old computers are too slow to be connected to the internet anyway so you'd be limited to the in built applications in Linux which isn't much fun.

All my old laptops are Panasonic ToughBooks that I buy for cheap just to play about with them and see what they can do. I also have desktops that I pick up from various places normally for nothing because they are no longer required. They are normally dual core systems and if I'm lucky some i5 machines. In my opinion dual core systems are very much still usable for everyday modern tasks and can run light Linux distros just fine or Chrome Flex.

I really like Chrome Flex as its very stable and its perfect for an old dual core machine whether that be a ToughBook or desktop.

It was then I came across FreeBSD and I thought to myself this looks interesting I'll have to try it out sometime... I read that FreeBSD is SSD friendly and can run on very old hardware which might be perfect for two old computers I have one of them being an old iMac G3 which has been doing nothing for years. it has OSX installed on it but its too old for any use in todays world. FreeBSD will run on it which is great. I haven't tried it yet but I have downloaded all 3 versions of FreeBSD to try out. The second computer is an old Panasonic mrk1 CF-28 ToughBook and drivers are very hard to find for the mrk1 versions so Windows 98 on this would be pointless as nothing would work without drivers and its too slow for Linux or Chrome Flex with its 600MHz processor and 384MB RAM limitation but FreeBSD may be perfect for it.

I'm looking forward to diving into the world of FreeBSD on old computers.
 
FreeBSD has improved since then, and it's MUCH easier to install these days. Wi-Fi is a pain point, as well as 'dependency hell'. But welcome to the Forums, please feel free to ask questions! You'll be referred to the FreeBSD Handbook a lot, it's great reference material that everyone on the Forums is expected to have a handle on. No, we don't expect you to read the entire thing, but at least the parts relevant to the question you ask.
Thank you! Now I do not have any problem with FreeBSD install :) Also, I'm a port maintainer and I have 10+ FreeBSD servers on support. Though I have to work with Linux too, I like BSD :)
 
Good morning, all! My name is Bronwyn and I've been using FreeBSD since version 7. I started using it then because I'd acquired an old-ish PC and I had no idea what to put on it (couldn't afford Windows at the time). I have no recollection about how I'd discovered FreeBSD in the first place, probably just wandering around the internet. Anyway, MANY years and PLENTY of screaming meltdowns later here I am, still loving using it :p
 
I hope FreeBSD is this dream OS :cool:
Hello all !

Two year later still there with FreeBSD and only FreeBSD. Now FreeCAD work fine, it's the most important for my work.

With a minimalistic setup (557 packages): still using TWM window manager and all legacy Xorg software, xeyes the most important at all :cool:

Some softwate I'm using: nano & xfw for text editing, feh to display images (desktop wall paper), xpdf as its name implies viewer for PDF files, xcdroast to burn CD/DVD, xeyes track and monitor my mouse pointer, xosview & xload let me take a look on system load, dooble wed browser and audacious to play some mp3 music.

I am very pleased with FreeBSD and my setup today, it took some work and adaptation but now every thing runs well and fast, I'll keep it for years, for sure !👍

A big thank to the whole team of FreeBSD for providing us a such free UNIX system.

A big thank to this forum for many help.
 
I've been using the different FOSS and MIT/BSD operating systems in some since or another since I was twelve or thirteen years old. The first time that I culturally managed to get FreeBSD up and running on bare metal was back in the days of either 8.x or 9.x. I can't remember which branch it was but boy did I learn about how hard an adjustment it. Especially coming from the point and click environment of Windows and Apple. My migration path from Wintel to to Linux i think it was either very early Debian or Ubuntu and then I started getting curious about FreeBSD because I'd heard about how stable that it was.
 
I used FreeBSD 11 a few years back, but I became agravated with not having as many apps as I had in Linux. Or, if FreeBSD had the apps, they were older versions.

Now I am now reconsidering FreeBSD.

There is a lot to like about FreeBSD. FreeBSD does not seem to believe in change for the sake of change and/or forced upgrades. I don't have to constantly relearn the OS. FreeBSD is fast, solid, and reliable.

I use several OSes. They all have their strengths, and weaknesses. I am presently dual booting Windows 10, and the Developer (free) version of RHEL 8.5.

The popularity of both of these system leaves me bewildered.

RHEL 8.5 is, by far, the worst version of Linux I have ever ran. It's slow, resource intensive, you cannot upgrade from RHEL 7.x to RHEL 8.x, you need to reinstall. RHEL 8.5 even crashes every so often. Software often does not install. I have had a lot of trouble with SAMBA and Apache. You have to re-register, and re-subscribe, every year. Getting RHEL to dual boot required an undocumented hack. Wayland, Gnome 3, and especially SystemD, are all steps backward IMO (to be fair, wayland may have potential, but it's not ready for prime time yet).

My Windows 10 installation started randomly rebooting. A google search showed me that this is common problem with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Are they kidding? Maybe this was excusable 30 years ago, but where is the progress? I have been following some procedures that I am finding online to fix the problem, so far, none have worked. I hate the change for the sake of change. I hate the forced "upgrades."

I also use MacOS. I have a 10 year old Apple desktop that works just fine, but cannot be upgraded. I think the hardware could run a newer OS, but Apple will not allow it. I intend to keep using MacOS, because, at least it works; but I don't care much for the forced obsolences. Also, I like Keynote.

I am beginning to think: maybe I can do without some of the apps, or the newest versions. Again, there is a lot to like about FreeBSD.
 
Hello people. I have been using Linux (mostly Arch and more recently Void) for the past ten years, but before that had been using FreeBSD as my daily OS for a number of years. Recently I've been getting more and more annoyed with the almost fanatical move to containerizing everything, starting with Docker and continuing on to Flatpak and now immutable filesystem distributions. I simply don't want my desktop OS to work like an Android phone, for one thing. I have fond memories of the years that I spent on FreeBSD and decided it was time to come home, basically. Since installing FreeBSD-13.2 I have felt right at home and wonder why I ever switched in the first place.

In the intervening years I've gone from just being interested in using the OS and some light shell scripting to becoming quite interested in programming. I'm hoping to get involved in the project on some level and have already submitted some patches in the ports collection.
 
In the late 80s I enjoyed playing Mach3 on an IBM PC/XT (at work). At home I had an IBM PC/AT with 1 MB RAM and 20 MB HDD. Оn the picture - its motherboard (since the coprocessor got very hot, I put a copper five-kopeck on top) ;)

ibm_pc_at__.jpg
 
I'm not new per se, but I've been unfaithful. I used FreeBSD exclusively on my desktop for a few years in the early 2000s. I was an edgy hax0r cringey kid with fluxbox, dig, nmap, a few issues of 2600 under my fingertips and burning with smug excitement. Embarrassing, but those were the days of wireshark and routers with default admin/password logins. My journey back to FreeBSD is long and boring:

Linux these days seems to be lacking in some way I can't articulate. I started playing with Linux in the late 90's and early 00s and I think things are better in many ways now, but also so much more disorganised.

I was fortunate in the early 00s to be able to work with some Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC machines running Solaris - my first REAL Unix experience! I fell in love how they seemed to do the impossible. At that time I didn't know much about computers (I still don't) but I was blown away by things like Windows running INSIDE the SunOS!!

A co-worker of mine at the time was a professional IT guy and we both were able to acquire some Sparcstations for own personal use. I ran Solaris and he ran something I'd never heard of called OpenBSD. He told me the history of BSD and explained that I could run FreeBSD on my laptop/desktop instead of the Linux I had. We both decided to have our desktops fitted with FreeBSD 4 or 5 (whichever was shiny and new in those days) and keep our SPARCs for those other OSes. it was a wonderful, if frustrating, learning experience!

After some years I switched back to Windows for some reason and then to Linux/Windows until around 2014 or so when I experienced my first Mac. Mac was very close to recapturing the magic I had only experienced with Sun. But, as much as I like Mac I have some issues with Apple too.

I'm really only an ambitious hobbyist and not the hacker I always wanted to be. I enjoy some basic C programming and general Unix tinkering. In fact, I got a Macbook M2 so I could try learning Objective-C and some Swift. As I get older it seems to get much harder to learn anything new.

Recently Grex, aka Cyberspace, shut down. I had a shell account there for a couple decades and could ssh in and play nethack, use a compiler, and get a good dose of Unix fun. Over the years they ran an assortment of OSes like SunOS and most recently OpenBSD. I guess that's a large part of my return to running FreeBSD on my own hardware.

I haven't decided if I will brace for the pain of getting it working on my Thinkpad or if I will try to get a cheap desktop to install it to and try setting up a small personal webserver. So I've returned to FreeBSD in a VM for now. FreeBSD has so many features I don't understand and probably will never learn how to use effectivley, but I miss the completeness and professionalism of it.

Either way, I figured it's a good time to register here and see what other BSD-ers are up to these days.
 
first off I can be tongue and cheek and poetic in my writing style and my grammar is usually off so please bear that in mind . with that out of way my profession is caretaker for my 94 year mom and my advocation is wannabe hacker in older school sense modder and kitbasher,climber of the os montains os/2 windows and linux mainly ubantu mate. I do remember seeing a altair 8800 growing up telling how old I am. though the years hearing vernable name unix and how its needed but very arcane and difficult it is. leap to current time to a couple months ago I had a builder itch, lurking on you tube on the cyberdeck builders side and amazon seeing the price of the raspberry pi 4 b+ falling precipitously from 240 dollars to roughly 140 dollars . when i saw the price I was I'm in and brought a sunfounder case and other supplies need to build the cyberdeck. and got the supplies and the raspberry pi i began to build but due to catastrophic breakage of main power usb plug the planned laptop form of the cyberdeck was trashed. i had a month to plan and retool the design cyberdeck into the form you see below . during this time i had to pick an operating system out so i went to distrowatch to see what arm based operating systems are there . so debian based systems was out had bad experience with them, arch based systems no thank you , ubuntu next, pop naw, kali oh hell no not that kind of hacker. no 6 was you all freebsd, reasons i picked freebsd if you indulge me here first bsd or unix has a cyberpunk quality to it, secondly i wanted something well old school freebsd has it in spades in its linage ,third i wanted to learn an unix like system again freebsd . also the freebsd you tubers in particular one robonuggie set me on the right path of success how to install freebsd and use it as a daily driver system. during the building process of the cyberdeck there were several reinstalls of arm freebsd on micro sd card due to i am total noob comes to unix like systems so. once i got the commands down it was easier for me move around and change the stuff i dont like. i settled on icewm window manager. you cant the windows 95 out this hacker . i try to be bloatless as possible in my program choice. my review of freebsd is rock solid os with many features pardon this i am used to in dos and many more might use might not. the forums were helpful and pointed me in the right direction . the package system on freebsd is lovely no multiple package systems. yes hardware is an issue for me i worked around it. freebsd is a gem of a open source system you gained a new user actually love freebud

ps last reason i pick freebsd because its a whole system not a frankenstein kernal that many linuxes are
 

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I started considering getting into FreeBSD and other such operating systems when I started considering to get into server-related stuff, planning to hopefully try it out once I got a home server for all my data hoarding needs in mid-2022 or so (that has yet to come, though). Around that time, I used Linux - Arch Linux, to be exact.
Following that, my next experiment with the BSD family of OSes was an OpenBSD VPS in which I tried to move on of my websites to at the start of 2023 - I ended up failing, because it turned out that I didn't even have enough memory to allow myself to run everything I needed to run on it, but I also realized that there was "something" about the BSDs that made me unable to look at Linux with the same eyes I saw it with before then.

Fast forward to May, and after months of testing on virtual machines due to my interest in FreeBSD only getting bigger after that fiasco and my increasing dissatisfaction with the major Linux distributions, I finally gave in and installed FreeBSD on my desktop, and have been there since then, for some time as the only OS, for some other as part of a dual boot system with Linux, but FreeBSD has managed to very quickly grow on me regardless.

As of lately, I've managed to set up a bhyve VM for Photoshop and plan on becoming a port mantainer in order to make programs much easier to use on FreeBSD, which I especially want to do as there are more than a few pieces of software that I feel should really be ported.
 
Hello,

I am a relative newcomer to the FreeBSD/*nix scene. Indeed, until around 2020, UNIX/Linux were only vague concepts to me. So not exactly an old hand. Still, I would like to share my experience as a new user.

My first laptop as a kid was an old HP running Windows 98, after which I had mostly MacBooks in my teenage/college years. For a long time, I was really impressed with Mac OS X and cut my teeth in the command line using the Mac Terminal (and now understand that a lot of OS X userland is based on BSD). There was a point in the mid-2000s and early 2010s when OS X was a pretty darn solid UNIX. But recent iterations of Mac OS (starting in the mid-2010s) have become increasingly untenable propositions for me as a power-user. Suffice to mention the creep of infuriating features like aggressive application sandboxing, SIP, removal of kext support, disabling of verbose boot, and generally creeping iOS-ification (as reflected in the dreadful rebranding as 'macOS') and the immense drive to integrate with the Apple 'ecosystem'. Apple's tendency to ship outdated software (e.g. OpenGL) was a problem, too.

This prompted me to start looking initially into GNU/Linux, and eventually, as I started to get into more advanced systems administration, into the BSD family of systems as an even better alternative. I immediately fell in love with FreeBSD and have spent a fair amount of time over the last 2-3 years learning in-depth about the core OS as well as figuring out how to make it work for me as a daily driver.

I now use FreeBSD on my work laptop and on my home workstation (both 13.2-RELEASE, amd64), and would say that I am a very happy customer. So far, apart from suspend/resume – and my lay understanding is that this is due mostly to motherboard manufacturers' non-adherence to standards – I've had no hardware support issues whatsoever. In my office, I use a somewhat older iMac (running Mojave) and maintain several local/cloud servers for HPC with GNU/Linux distributions (mostly Debian/Ubuntu). The day Nvidia adds CUDA support to their FreeBSD drivers, I would like to migrate those to FreeBSD, too. At the same time, I am sanguine about Linux providing objectively better hardware support in many cases and so I expect to be on some kind of mix of FreeBSD and GNU/Linux systems going forward.

The FreeBSD project is something that I find genuinely amazing and inspiring. I'd love to give back to it in some meaningful way. Unfortunately, I have virtually no knowledge of low-level systems programming. However, if I can get a bit more confident with the ports tree, I might consider volunteering as a maintainer for a few abandoned ports or putting together some new ones myself. I would also like to contribute constructively to these forums as much as possible. As a 'lurker' hitherto have been impressed by the level of competence and helpfulness in the community here.

Professionally, I have no formal CS background and would label myself an amateur/enthusiast. I live in a non-English-speaking country and work in a field in academia where advanced knowledge of computing is, to put it mildly, not widespread/the norm. Most colleagues, if they can make sense of the term BSD at all, assume it's some kind of Linux distro, but that's fine, because I think that an important part of being a FreeBSD user/enthusiast is spreading knowledge about it and encouraging adoption.
 
Software developer for the last 20+ years. My main focus was operating systems and communications for embedded systems running on super low power. Industrial control in the most hazardous places on the planet. Did Linux Kernel development and designed RTOS for hardware we designed in house.

After that I jumped into web development working on sites for a few global brands. If you drink soda, have a cell phone or buy sports equipment chances are you went on a page i worked on. Did a stint making home IoT hubs and now work for a hospital.

My focus in college was OS and Hardware integration designing a system where use of FPGA could be programmed on the fly as the needs of the system changed. Sadly the concept was too expensive at the time and now systems are too fast for it to matter.

OS question, ran linux since 95 (slackware to Gentoo). FreeBSD and NetBSD for specific systems in different jobs but still mostly Linux. At the moment i have a FBSD box running at home for random tasks and a linux laptop. OSX for work computer. Editor is Vim since 95 too, cant use anything else due to muscle memory.

Outside of computers I'm a Ham Radio operator, do lots of outdoor stuff, etc
 
Ohh.. the noob thread is in Off-Topic! No wonder I couldn't find it! Honestly, I probably missed it in the required reading threads. LOL

Anyhoo... Hello! Been a long-time fan of UNIX based operating systems with Linux as my UNIX of choice for many years. Started off with Mandrake Linux while going to college and eventually moving to Debian and it's variations as well as Fedora off and on.

Professionally, I'm a System Administrator working primarily with RedHat Enterprise Linux. I started off on the Windows side of the house, but after all the frustration and agony of trying to manage Windows Servers remotely without any sort of lights out management, I finally lost it (came to my senses?) and jumped ship. Initially to Oracle Solaris, then Oracle Linux, and now RHEL. Much much happier Sys Admin! :)

My first run-in with FreeBSD was with FreeNAS when I built a file server for my homelab. Ran that FreeNAS 9 system for years and years. That thing just didn't know how to freak out! So solid and stable! Since FreeNAS proved to be so stable, I decided to try FreeBSD. First, with another server I built that houses a couple VMs and a number of jails (those are really cool!) and now I'm trying my hand at desktops. I have an old System76 Laptop running FreeBSD 13 with the XFCE Desktop Environment and outside of the hardware quirks related to the laptop's age, it runs well. I'm planning to slowly transition all of my Linux systems over to FreeBSD. So, as long as applications or services are available on FreeBSD, I will move them over. It's just too solid and efficient to not to!

My next main desktop I want to build will have FreeBSD as it's foundation with a few Bhyve based VMs that I hope to get a video card and USB card passed through to it. I've watched a couple videos on how a few people got it working. So, hopefully I can follow along assuming the hardware I choose is compatible. I realize Linux may have the upper hand in this department, but I want to see if I can make it work with FreeBSD first.

Outside of computer geek things, I'm also a car nut with Subarus as my favorite (hence my screen name). I build them and eventually race them through the SCCA as often as I can.
 
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