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

Hi all,

I'm a network engineer by profession with linux as my hobby for many years now. Recently I watched a couple of presentation on YouTube on Netflix using FreeBSD and decided to give it a try. I bought the new book by Michael W. Lucas, installed FreeBSD 11.2 on my laptop and I will install it on my home servers as well. Currently I'm liking it quite a lot and I don't plan to return to Linux.
 
Hello,

First used FreeBSD 2.1.5 back in 1996, and have jumped back and forth between it and mostly Debian ever since. Spent some time in 2018 running SmartOS (a nice Illumos derivative), and just recently found my way back over to FreeBSD.

Greetings from WI, USA, on a snowy winter night. :-)
 
I played games on windows 98 and then windows XP until about 2013.
I got a job at a university and I sat down with a coworker who was a FreeBSD user. I wanted to learn FreeBSD because his computer screen looked like the Matrix screen with the green text in the Pop-culture science fiction movie form the late nineties.
He walked me through installation on an older laptop i386 and then he said that teaching me FreeBSD was like teaching me how to rebuild a car, a Chevy, and that I should be thankful for the car.
Now I can get around on the internet in my Free"Chevy"BSD
I like the idea of learning PF, UNIX, and something other than Windows/MAC to be counter cultural.
 
Windows 95/98/xp/ user -> Linux Redhat 7/8/9,Mandrake,Debian -> FreeBSD 10/11/12
I was so happy with Debian but the bad bad init replacement fuc$#d off..
today FreeBSD for:
Freedom of choose , I cant hack and change everything, simplicity, great community
just simple as that..i love it

I forget..the latest software and ports
 
I first used FreeBSD as remote host at the beginning of the 1990 years, but I was SunOS user and later Solaris user. In the beginning of the 2000 I installed Linux, but it was so strange to me that I installed FreeBSD after a while. Later I moved to OpenBSD that I continue to use: the wlan drivers seemed me to run better there, also UMTS support (I no idea how to use UMTS with FreeBSD). I began to use FreeBSD again because I needed ZFS. I like both, OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but they are somehow different. The reasons: BSD because it was familiar to me from SunOS, ZFS because I wanted a file System that run in many Operating Systems and will be alive for (I hope) many decades, I wanted the redundancy and self healing. I think, ZFS is too complicated and heavy for my purposes, but it is a compromise that fulfill the main conditions: I do not know an alternative. Before using SunOS I used the OS available in the computer I had to write a program, for example TOPS-10: I did not expend much time with the operating System, I learned the minimum I needed, important was only the result of the program. I think, I expend too much time with the OS and that is not healthy.
 
Hi everyone,
My first computer was a TRS-80 with 16k of ram. I did lots of basic programming in that. That was many, many moons ago.

Since then, I've become a bit of a systems polyglot; setting up and learning about more OS's than most people know exist. DOS (PC, MS & DR/Novell), Windows 1 thru 10, MacOS 7-9 then into the X, VMS on VAX and Alpha, SunOS and Solaris, IRIX, AIX, Novell Netware, SCO, many Linux distros and the main BSDs.

When I had the space, I was amassing a large personal computer museum with all sorts of hardware. Mac, PC, HP-RISC, Sparc, SGI, DEC, etc. I always tried to get them running, if not with their original OS, at least with Net or OpenBSD or a Linux system. Of the two Alpha's I had, an AXPpci & the DEC-XL, the XL would only run Linux or Windows NT. I got running Linux. The AXPpci was the slowest 64 bit computer I've ever used. I gifted it to a burgeoning young computer nerd just 2 years ago.

At home for the longest time, I ran Macs. In my hometown, I was one of your three places to call for Mac service - and the other two Mac places would contract me as well.

It was before Apple made the switch to Unix that I started teaching myself Unix and Linux. Friends of mine were all "Get your MCSE! It's easy!" I said "You can throw a stick into a crowd and hit a dozen MCSE's. Now find me someone who knows Mac or Unix. Less competition and I can't stand Windows." I was an "Anyone but Microsoft" type back in the 90's.

I'll admit, my main desktop has been some variant of Linux for a while now. Kubuntu lately, just because it works for me. Some of the more niche hardware, like the video capture devices, have been a bit of a challenge, but nothing show stopping.

My home server, however, has been a FreeBSD powerhouse for several years now. Once I got into ZFS and jails, holy smokes. I've got a file server, my wife's CRM system & and Minecraft server for my step-daughter running on the same system, with ZFS snapshots being sent to the backup server. I've run into a couple hiccups, but again, nothing show stopping. All learning opportunities.

I like the streamlined approach of FreeBSD. The manual pages are descriptive. The layout is concise and clean. The flexibility is astonishing.
My biggest wish is the ability to grow ZFS volumes by just adding disks and not having to repurchase the whole array in larger drives. That's the only Enterprise level storage feature I miss from ZFS.

Anyway, keep on keeping on :)
 
ikbendeman said:
Who's new to FreeBSD? Did you migrate from another OS and what was your reason?
Click to expand...

I am a student of mathematics. I am familiar to UNIX user-land, it's simplicity, FHS. Linux is way too much fragmented for me. I prefer BSD license philosophy. I also use Windows and macOS casually. FreeBSD for daily usage on desktop. I am learning system programming here (I use jails for that). Very cool OS.

fbsd.png
 
Hello. My primary interest in FreeBSD is my alarm at the increasing dependence of people on "the cloud", my desire to have my own personal network infrastructure in my own home, and FreeBSD seeming to be the best tool to make that happen--more robust and secure with Linux (which I'm quite familiar with) but more widely supported by PC hardware than the other BSD flavors. Right now I don't have any "real" BSD machines, but I do have one running in a VM on my Windows box that I'm using to practice and learn the ropes of administering FreeBSD (I tried Project Trident, but it just felt like a clumsier, uglier Linux distro so I decided I would configure FreeBSD myself). Eventually I plan on building a home server and running FreeBSD on that, rolling my own equivalent of Microsoft OneDrive to back my Windows and Linux home directories to a RAID, perhaps even using it to publish my own website without external hosting.

Before recently when I started using Linux on my laptop on a daily basis, I used almost exclusively Microsoft operating systems, from DOS/Windows 3.1 all the way up to Windows 10, which I unfortunately have software that depends on too much for me to just ditch Microsoft altogether. Working with *nix operating systems has taught me a huge amount about how computers and software actually work, and hopefully I can learn enough to take power over my own computing and get "the cloud" out of my life as much as possible.
 
ikbendeman said:
badbanana If you have linuxulator enabled, you can use linux binary installation programs; it's also possible to install using .deb, .rpm, etc., as well. There are tools in the ports tree to make this easier if you don't want to do all the work manually, I believe. Why you would want to, outside of special applications for enterprise or something, I'm not certain but that's why the system lets you customize.
Click to expand...
What are some of these tools?
 
Hi all,

Im IT enginner and use PC (usualy Windows) for my daily work. Many years ago, on high school, I started to play with linux. More or less successfully until I discover The Book: Absolute FreeBSD from M.Lucas. Its not only full FreeBSD manual but also great guide how to understand IT world and sometimes unexpectedlly funny. It was including CD (with v4.7 I guess) and that was my first step to BSD. Since then FreeBSD is my favourite system and this year finaly I started my own small server. Just for personal usage.
 
FreeBSD has a good response. It is sufficiently secured and it gives good server services, in my opinion.

I use NetBSD because it is really fast and secure. Linux is for me too slow, like ms windows, waiting, please wait... and not secured enough. Windows spying on your data and it does harm users passively and is actively stealing user data and information.
 
I'm a unemployed male. 22 yrs old. Quit college because bad heath and has mental problems. Living with my parents. Use Linux mainly for browsing. Firefox and Chrome combo. Want an alternative OS.
 
I'm slightly new. I got a PC from Tiger in 2013 and bought PC-BSD, and had a system but it crapped out quick, thanks to Tiger. So I still ran Win 98 with Kernal extension, on my old systems. My brother was always trying to get me to go with Linux but I wanted to have a more complete system. So it is now I have FreeBSD up and running on a i386 computer. A Dell Dimension 4550 i386. I have very little RAM...1 GiB. I had a really hard time doing this, but I am happy to know that is because of my lack of knowledge, not because of a closed system.
 
badbrain said:
I'm a unemployed male. 22 yrs old. Quit college because bad heath and has mental problems. Living with my parents. Use Linux mainly for browsing. Firefox and Chrome combo. Want an alternative OS.
Click to expand...
FreeBSD is a robust OS, easy to install, and you have full Unix Opensource power in your hands. It just works.

NetBSD or OpenBSD would be for later after a start in Unix world.

People are always winner if using an operating system and opensource software. Respecting user choice of software freedom.
 
Started with Windows and did quite a bit of system development, debugging, hacking and more on it. This was ~95-2015.
In parallel gradually started with GNU+Linux. Evolution: debian 2005 -> ubuntu 2010 -> arch 2013 -> gentoo 2015 (as my knowledge deepened).
I started using FreeBSD in 2016 for work, mostly networking, jails and cloud development, also Java software development.

Things I like most in FreeBSD: ZFS, OpenRC init system, resource and process efficient (no bloating), very friendly community, stability and continuity, knows its focus.
Things that could be improved: Certain parts of the practical daily usage could be a little more user friendly (mostly for the newcommers). Certain parts of the documentation could be refined or extended.
All in all, it's a great OS and while not covering all my use cases, it's one of the 2 I will be using in future.
 
Hello all! I'm a long-time Linux user for work/home (mostly Debian and occasionally Arch). I've had a crush on the BSDs for awhile and am finally going to put some serious time into installing and learning FreeBSD on some systems. I'm drawn to the 'completeness' of the OS and the community seems great.
 
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