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

I started using FreeBSD (and Slackware Linux, plus Debian, RedHat and SUSE) as just a simple hobbyist on a Dell Optiplex desktop PC by the mid-90s. At that time, you had to order the FreeBSD CD ROMs from Walnut Creek. I was immediately fascinated by FreeBSD, as it was well documented -and, I must say, intellectually stimulating. I remember the handbook came included in the CD-ROM as a simple “book.txt” file. Greg Leahy’s “The Complete FreeBSD”, which I read, was a great introduction. I even used to compile several ports. I loved FreeBSD, I considered it much more versatile than Linux.

Then I had a few bad experiences with file system corruption (maybe sometime around 2006-7?) and by 2008 I had to use a laptop and abandon my desktop PC. I switched to Ubuntu Linux, which came preinstalled on a Dell Inspiron 1525: even in 2008 and with Ubuntu, installing Linux on a laptop could be intimidating.

My dream, though, was getting FreeBSD on a laptop. I tried installing it on an OS-free Lenovo, with devastating results, sometime between 2008 and 2011. It was so catastrophic that the laptop became was unable to boot, no BIOS, nothing. It just died. I tried twice on different laptops, with the same deadly results. Scary. So, I just gave up. Until now.

In the summer of 2022 I replaced my old but good Lenovo G50-80 by a modern and fast LG-Ultra, OS-free, on which I installed Ubuntu 22-04 LTS without any hassles. I became nostalgic about FreeBSD, so I tried to experiment, first by installing GhostBSD and NomadBSD on a USB, and then FreeBSD 13 on an external HDD, hassle-free. I didn’t dare install on an internal drive, as I just didn’t want to repeat my previous catastrophic experience. With external drives everything worked smoothly, more or less, and reasonably fast with USB 3. No disaster.

I tried booting these FreeBSD USB drives on other laptops, and I was pleasantly surprised when it worked. Finally, I installed it on the Lenovo G50-80 (6 GB RAM, 1 TB) with a fully dedicated ZFS drive, and on my first Linux laptop, the previously mentioned Dell Inspiron 1525 (2GB RAM) after replacing its HDD with a 500GB SDD. I noticed wifi was somewhat slow on the Lenovo (iwlwifi driver) so I installed wifibox and it worked. On the Inspiron it wasn’t necessary as the wifi driver seems to be working perfectly. Using UFS, it coexists there with MX Libretto (and, for sentimental reasons, Slackware 15.0).

The final result is that I have become another FreeBSD hobbyist -again, after almost 15 years.
 
Koque said:
I started using FreeBSD (and Slackware Linux, plus Debian, RedHat and SUSE) as just a simple hobbyist on a Dell Optiplex desktop PC by the mid-90s. At that time, you had to order the FreeBSD CD ROMs from Walnut Creek. I was immediately fascinated by FreeBSD, as it was well documented -and, I must say, intellectually stimulating. I remember the handbook came included in the CD-ROM as a simple “book.txt” file. Greg Leahy’s “The Complete FreeBSD”, which I read, was a great introduction. I even used to compile several ports. I loved FreeBSD, I considered it much more versatile than Linux.

Then I had a few bad experiences with file system corruption (maybe sometime around 2006-7?) and by 2008 I had to use a laptop and abandon my desktop PC. I switched to Ubuntu Linux, which came preinstalled on a Dell Inspiron 1525: even in 2008 and with Ubuntu, installing Linux on a laptop could be intimidating.

My dream, though, was getting FreeBSD on a laptop. I tried installing it on an OS-free Lenovo, with devastating results, sometime between 2008 and 2011. It was so catastrophic that the laptop became was unable to boot, no BIOS, nothing. It just died. I tried twice on different laptops, with the same deadly results. Scary. So, I just gave up. Until now.

In the summer of 2022 I replaced my old but good Lenovo G50-80 by a modern and fast LG-Ultra, OS-free, on which I installed Ubuntu 22-04 LTS without any hassles. I became nostalgic about FreeBSD, so I tried to experiment, first by installing GhostBSD and NomadBSD on a USB, and then FreeBSD 13 on an external HDD, hassle-free. I didn’t dare install on an internal drive, as I just didn’t want to repeat my previous catastrophic experience. With external drives everything worked smoothly, more or less, and reasonably fast with USB 3. No disaster.

I tried booting these FreeBSD USB drives on other laptops, and I was pleasantly surprised when it worked. Finally, I installed it on the Lenovo G50-80 (6 GB RAM, 1 TB) with a fully dedicated ZFS drive, and on my first Linux laptop, the previously mentioned Dell Inspiron 1525 (2GB RAM) after replacing its HDD with a 500GB SDD. I noticed wifi was somewhat slow on the Lenovo (iwlwifi driver) so I installed wifibox and it worked. On the Inspiron it wasn’t necessary as the wifi driver seems to be working perfectly. Using UFS, it coexists there with MX Libretto (and, for sentimental reasons, Slackware 15.0).

The final result is that I have become another FreeBSD hobbyist -again, after almost 15 years.
Click to expand...
Hmmm... I installed FreeBSD on a couple Lenovo laptops (an Ideapad 13-ARR and a Thinkbook 14 G4), and it worked fine. The Thinkbook does have SODIMM RAM, so I was able to jack it up from 16 GB to 40 GB, that helped. But this is the first time I'm seeing a horror story of an installer frying the metal to the point that it actually loses its BIOS and can't even boot... wow. I did have a cheap and crappy SSD once (on a different machine), it died after I tried to install FreeBSD and tried to compile my way into KDE... but that SSD did not take down the rest of the hardware when it fried... I just swapped in a Samsung SSD, a known good brand, and then the compilation proceeded without a hitch.
 
Koque said:
I started using FreeBSD (and Slackware Linux, plus Debian, RedHat and SUSE) as just a simple hobbyist on a Dell Optiplex desktop PC by the mid-90s. At that time, you had to order the FreeBSD CD ROMs from Walnut Creek. I was immediately fascinated by FreeBSD, as it was well documented -and, I must say, intellectually stimulating. I remember the handbook came included in the CD-ROM as a simple “book.txt” file. Greg Leahy’s “The Complete FreeBSD”, which I read, was a great introduction. I even used to compile several ports. I loved FreeBSD, I considered it much more versatile than Linux.

Then I had a few bad experiences with file system corruption (maybe sometime around 2006-7?) and by 2008 I had to use a laptop and abandon my desktop PC. I switched to Ubuntu Linux, which came preinstalled on a Dell Inspiron 1525: even in 2008 and with Ubuntu, installing Linux on a laptop could be intimidating.

My dream, though, was getting FreeBSD on a laptop. I tried installing it on an OS-free Lenovo, with devastating results, sometime between 2008 and 2011. It was so catastrophic that the laptop became was unable to boot, no BIOS, nothing. It just died. I tried twice on different laptops, with the same deadly results. Scary. So, I just gave up. Until now.

In the summer of 2022 I replaced my old but good Lenovo G50-80 by a modern and fast LG-Ultra, OS-free, on which I installed Ubuntu 22-04 LTS without any hassles. I became nostalgic about FreeBSD, so I tried to experiment, first by installing GhostBSD and NomadBSD on a USB, and then FreeBSD 13 on an external HDD, hassle-free. I didn’t dare install on an internal drive, as I just didn’t want to repeat my previous catastrophic experience. With external drives everything worked smoothly, more or less, and reasonably fast with USB 3. No disaster.

I tried booting these FreeBSD USB drives on other laptops, and I was pleasantly surprised when it worked. Finally, I installed it on the Lenovo G50-80 (6 GB RAM, 1 TB) with a fully dedicated ZFS drive, and on my first Linux laptop, the previously mentioned Dell Inspiron 1525 (2GB RAM) after replacing its HDD with a 500GB SDD. I noticed wifi was somewhat slow on the Lenovo (iwlwifi driver) so I installed wifibox and it worked. On the Inspiron it wasn’t necessary as the wifi driver seems to be working perfectly. Using UFS, it coexists there with MX Libretto (and, for sentimental reasons, Slackware 15.0).

The final result is that I have become another FreeBSD hobbyist -again, after almost 15 years.
Click to expand...

You have been unlucky...FreeBSD at today works good in a lot of cases...
 
That was around 2009 or 2010...I just returned the laptop to the seller. I didn't investigate, but I tried again on another new laptop, same model, with the same results.

Anyway my recent experience has been wonderful, and I've got Freebsd 14.0 ZFS working perfectly on a relatively old Lenovo G50-80.
 
cdominguez_96 said:
Good Day Everyone,

I am new to FreeBSD; I look forward to being active here on the forum. I distro-hopped with Linux before finding out about FreeBSD. I am definitely a noob. I am forcing myself to read the handbook very slowly to grasp as much as possible.
Click to expand...
The Handbook is a good starting point for doing anything interesting with FreeBSD. Basically, if you have an idea of what you want to do with FreeBSD, check out the Handbook first - that topic may have been addressed there already, with success. :)

And, on the Forums, people are quite willing to help you connect the dots. :)
 
I was 25 years at IBM before it died at the hands of Marketing.
Next was Master CNE, VMware sysadmin, HP system programmer, then retired.
I continue to support a small SOHO customer base just to keep my chops.

I run a big ESXi host in my home lab with a variety of VMs for different needs.
One of my lodge past masters gifted me with a slew of Xeons and a bucket of SSD for my projects.
The big one is 128gb of ECC on a SuperMicro with a Xeon 8/16 and nVidia GTX4060ti for ripping and hardware transcoding.

I came to FBSD via XigmaNAS.

I'm a Rope and Tire guy, and FBSD is stable, does what I want and without the fluff.
Never had a taste for Linux, but did used CENTOS for quite awhile.

I still write a whole lot of software, mostly for my own amazement.
I do a huge amount of structured coding projects using Excel.
My utilities are written in Delphi / Lazarus because I really dislike the Visual Studio IDE and compilers.
I started out as an ASM coder, and wrote a huge library of routines in ASM.

meme.computers.rope.tire.what the customer wanted.jpg
 
My first "real" UNIX was BSD/386, back in the mid 1990's (1994-5?). I was an early-ish Linux adopter (summer of 1995) and had used it as my daily driver since. There was a short stint around the turn of the century where I was into OpenBSD and ran it on my daily driver, but abandoned it in favor of Debian 3.0/woody when it was released. I was basically a Debian purist from then until -- on the advice of several trusted friends -- I put in a pfSense box in 2022. Then I needed a mail and web server, and tried FreeBSD 13.2 on a whim. After I spent a few days tinkering in earnest with that FreeBSD box, I began to realize that many of the things that had annoyed me about Linux weren't a thing in FreeBSD. So, with the new year came a new workstation, and I decided it was time.

The three big reasons I came to FreeBSD are:
  1. Because Linux distributions keeps swapping out core system components for no reason other than to keep up with each other (e.g. systemd). Debian did this less routinely/rapidly, but still enough to be annoying.
  2. The overall architecture of FreeBSD seems more refined and polished, and
  3. The FreeBSD community isn't the nuthouse that the Linux community has become, filled with distribution wars and GPL zealots. (These are not new to the Linux community, but it seems like they have become more pronounced as younger generations join the fray. Yes this is a case of "old man shouts at clouds", or similar.)
In short, I'm just looking for an OS ecosystem that works for me, not against me. FreeBSD seems to fit that bill.

I still have plenty of Linux boxes (physical or virtual) hanging around, some of which will have to remain Linux boxes (e.g. my Splunk instance, or my Ubiquity controller, etc.). But as for my daily driver, it shall be FreeBSD.
 
Been using linux since 2018. I started with Ubuntu, then switched to Manjaro and went full Arch at 2020 or so. Switched to FreeBSD at 2023 after deleting my /usr/bin while was sudo doing something on work because was the only iso I had at hand. Then I started reading the handbook, switched to ZFS, started learning bhyve because I still needing of linux software such as docker. The outcome was a really nice system and went with.
I really like the way FreeBSD made me interacted with computers. X11 Fowarding was like the discovery of fire for me and I didnt had any contact with it using linux but crossed that while learning how to use Bhyve. I feel likes I interact better with the system, PF was a good discovery too and it's being really nice addition to my stack of knowledge.
At start I struggled a lot with network, i was like hey where is my nmcli and ip, and went learning more and more about ifconfig and dhclient and wpa_supplicant, as things went, service is really simpler and less complicated than systemd and all that crazy stuff with systemctl or DKMS on linux.
With Jails and Bhyve it seems that my dream of a personal infra with some private users cases can be really true, and I feel like i can do everything local without have to care about those cloud services and docker and kubernetes marketing in my head. It is sad that stack is the go for industry and it is still needed to have a nice job since I do not see to have FreeBSD based jobs locally and the remote ones are looking for full wizzards that know how mess arround with kernel, ZFS and other things that I didn't have the baggage to work with. But this is it, I am learning a lot of things that I consider interesting and find utility in a daily basis.
 
dostoievsky said:
I really like the way FreeBSD made me interacted with computers. X11 Fowarding was like the discovery of fire for me and I didnt had any contact with it using linux but crossed that while learning how to use Bhyve.
Click to expand...
X11 Forwarding works on Linux, too... it's the same Xorg everywhere. But yeah, FreeBSD does have a much simpler and more sensible approach to service management, and doesn't swap out major components at the drop of a hat (unlike most Linux distros), so I'm with you on that.

Anyway, welcome to the Forums!
 
_al said:
Great story. Very cool!
It's rare to see an 80's ISA-bus card designer.

As for the coprocessor, here it is:
View attachment 17935
Click to expand...
Yep, good old intel 80287. I wrote a library of floating point routines for that chip in masm back when those were around :)

The 8041 microcontroller underneath it was apparantly used to provide a PS/2 keyboard interface to the PC, according to this link:-

It's kind of a shame that making daughter cards for modern PC's nowadays is not so approachable as the old ISA bus was. The pci-e bus is (much) more complex to work with, so everyone ends up doing this kind of simple design with a usb interface or using a daughter processor like a raspberry pi. You could have a lot of fun back then making these kinds of cards, and of course you learned a lot about the PC architecture by doing it. That was also something that was really good about working on 8-bit micros, too.
 
I came to FreeBSD a few years back after having used Funtoo for many years and Gentoo before that. What attracted me to FreeBSD was:

1. documentation
2. community / forums
3. the whole OS, it is complete

While getting marginally better performance and reducing your attack surface was cool, upgrades were often painful. So much so that I had built my system to run from a squashfs image to save space, improve speed, and make it immutable.

With FreeBSD, it is pretty awesome, boot into a new BE, then update packages, apply FreeBSD updates, etc. and you're done. Taking that a step further, it'd be nice to see FreeBSD have a separate base system which provides a barebone kernel and OS so that you would only need to reboot if the kernel needed to be patched. Your actual OS would be automatically jailed.

With Linux, there are any number of ways to do something because each distro does something slightly differently and that can be frustrating.

That said, each of those projects has great ideas that could streamline processes and Linux has become mainstream so more tools and drivers work on that platform now.
 
tOsYZYny said:
I came to FreeBSD a few years back after having used Funtoo for many years and Gentoo before that. What attracted me to FreeBSD was:

1. documentation
2. community / forums
3. the whole OS, it is complete

While getting marginally better performance and reducing your attack surface was cool, upgrades were often painful. So much so that I had built my system to run from a squashfs image to save space, improve speed, and make it immutable.

With FreeBSD, it is pretty awesome, boot into a new BE, then update packages, apply FreeBSD updates, etc. and you're done. Taking that a step further, it'd be nice to see FreeBSD have a separate base system which provides a barebone kernel and OS so that you would only need to reboot if the kernel needed to be patched. Your actual OS would be automatically jailed.

With Linux, there are any number of ways to do something because each distro does something slightly differently and that can be frustrating.

That said, each of those projects has great ideas that could streamline processes and Linux has become mainstream so more tools and drivers work on that platform now.
Click to expand...
With the dependency hell, upgrades on FreeBSD are just as painful as on Linux, stuff does break - coming across that kind of info on the Forums is only a matter of time... That said, I do feel the same frustration with Linux - every distro doing every little thing differently... ;)
 
astyle said:
With the dependency hell, upgrades on FreeBSD are just as painful as on Linux, stuff does break - coming across that kind of info on the Forums is only a matter of time... That said, I do feel the same frustration with Linux - every distro doing every little thing differently... ;)
Click to expand...
With FreeBSD, I've had far fewer issues, but that said, I'm not compiling any packages from source. With Funtoo or Gentoo, it was built from scratch ...
 
astyle said:
With the dependency hell, upgrades on FreeBSD are just as painful as on Linux, stuff does break - coming across that kind of info on the Forums is only a matter of time... That said, I do feel the same frustration with Linux - every distro doing every little thing differently... ;)
Click to expand...

Well, dependency hell on FreeBSD is different from dependency hell in Debian. The base system keeps working. So you can recover by just blowing away all installed packages and reinstalling them using the base system, which keeps running all the while. My latest Debian to commit dependency suicide had it in udev, which you can't remove without tearing the system so far down that it doesn't run anymore.
 
tOsYZYny said:
With FreeBSD, I've had far fewer issues, but that said, I'm not compiling any packages from source. With Funtoo or Gentoo, it was built from scratch ...
Click to expand...
Ouch, I compile all of my ports, and I have a Poudriere-based project (a bit on the back burner ATM) that explores a way to ameliorate dependency hell by compiling only KDE updates against an existing base of stuff.
cracauer@ said:
My latest Debian to commit dependency suicide had it in udev, which you can't remove without tearing the system so far down that it doesn't run anymore.
Click to expand...
udev is not part of the Linux kernel? What would happen to FreeBSD if you remove for, example, OpenZFS? or is it so well integrated into the kernel that pkgdb registration is unnecessary? 😲
 
astyle said:
udev is not part of the Linux kernel? What would happen to FreeBSD if you remove for, example, OpenZFS? or is it so well integrated into the kernel that pkgdb registration is unnecessary? 😲
Click to expand...

udev under FreeBSD and ZFS on FreeBSD are not part of ports/packages. So dependency hell won't affect them in FreeBSD.
 
astyle said:
Ouch, I compile all of my ports, and I have a Poudriere-based project (a bit on the back burner ATM) that explores a way to ameliorate dependency hell by compiling only KDE updates against an existing base of stuff.

udev is not part of the Linux kernel? What would happen to FreeBSD if you remove for, example, OpenZFS? or is it so well integrated into the kernel that pkgdb registration is unnecessary? 😲
Click to expand...
I haven't come across a similar build system to Gentoo/Funtoo that uses use flags both at a global and per-package basis (To be fair, I haven't checked out Poudriere). If that is something that can be done then I'm in. When I've used ports for a little bit, it is painful. I wish that the standard process could be improved.

On another note, building and installing a custom kernel is easy and it is nice to have those tools baked in.
 
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