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

Welcome! I switched completely from Linux last year and am very happy. Read docs, ask questions, take your time. FreeBSD does not hold your hand but it is actually very easy to work with. This of course depends on your use case - desktop use always seems to be more complex. I used to be a big DE user on Linux but since moving to FreeBSD, I have gone simple and couldn't be happier. Everything just works and I don't have to futz with things constantly.

Have fun!
 
My history is relatively long.
In 2010 year I bought Motorola Z6 that runs Linux 2.4. I was interesting to embedded Operating Systems so I began to read about Linux. Then I tried Ubuntu (it didn't work for me), CentOS (still like it because of its enterprise style, it really works for me a long time), but I had most fun with ArchLinux. That was time of BSD-style initscripts in ArchLinux that was later replaced with systemd. Simplicity of configuration system through rc.conf pushed me in 2011 year to BSD world.

FreeBSD was my first BSD and since then I tried a lot of systems but anyway I am turning back to FreeBSD.
I feel at home there.
By the way I've tried to dive in love with OpenBSD but release 6.4 even didn't boot on two of my laptops, in addition to other obstacles.

Now I learn system development, I had some work in IT and FreeBSD is my first choise for any idea.
 
I started using Linux about 12 years ago, jumped around, and tried FreeBSD after seeing it on distrowatch. Installed 9.0 and used it for a couple of years on an Eee PC 900a and an old Acer laptop. Eventually moved back to Linux for awhile, and now am back on FreeBSD. I'm not sure what it is, but I feel more at home on FreeBSD. I'm currently in the process migrating my home servers from CentOS to FreeBSD.
 
I feel the same way - it is very consistent. I was never satisfied on Linux and distro hopped like crazy. I never used one distro for more than a few months, or even a few hours for some. The exception was gentoo: used it for 2 or 3 years straight.
 
I was introduced to Linux RedHat in '99 while learning programming at the University. RedHat decided to go make money and spit out Fedora. I opted to use Debian until systemd arrived. The switch did not bother me until verbose at startup and shutdown was telling me that there is an upgrade and the system is busy. I moved to Devuan, great distro, use it on my main box. I started looking around for other distros/OSs not using systemd. I always had FreeBSD on the back of my mind. I run FreeBSD on a second less powerful machine than my main box. My objective is to have FreeBSD running as close as possible to what old Debian used to give me and to what Devuan gives me. I have a few more huddles and I will completely move away from Linux and stick to FreeBSD thanks to the community here.
 
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Woolie Wool said:
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.
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I like your intentions. Having a FreeBSD home server w/ZFS is a tremendous thing. Watch out for the ZIL performance bug. Nothing show stopping, but could be an issue.
 
Sevendogsbsd said:
I feel the same way - it is very consistent. I was never satisfied on Linux and distro hopped like crazy. I never used one distro for more than a few months, or even a few hours for some. The exception was gentoo: used it for 2 or 3 years straight.
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I've been oooookaaaaaaayyyyy with Kubuntu (Ubunut with KDE). It's generally done what I need it to do and hasn't given me any issue. I've set up plenty of Gentoo systems. Once I expermimented with how long a full system compile would take a on a dual p-133 w/80mb ram. 6 days, it turns out! That was circa 2000. Otherwise, I like Gentoo a lot. I've just not wanted to bother with tinkering as much on my desktop - I just need it to be there for me. Kubuntu has been sufficient at that for a desktop.
 
Woolie Wool said:
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
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I agree :) At least with recent versions, you get everything you need, a great storage solution including simple volume management (ZFS), an integrated hypervisor with all the features you could want, containers (aka jails, this is an old one), great support for advanced networking (e.g. VLANs and link aggregation) and so on. I bought a single server machine for my home, running FreeBSD with a minimal set of packages, but many jails and virtual machines for anything I need (router/firewall as a vm, domain controller, file server, DLNA media server, asterisk pbx, internal web server, wifi controller, application server with a full KDE5 desktop, and so on...)
Woolie Wool said:
more robust and secure with Linux (which I'm quite familiar with)
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Hard to tell. The "more robust" might be a reasonable assumption given the fact that FreeBSD is quite reluctant to introduce unnecessary breaking changes (which is a sharp contrast to Linux) and delivers a complete (base) system as a whole. So, it probably is more robust, without a way to actually measure and prove that claim. About "more secure", unfortunately, I doubt that. Again, this is something close to impossible to decide by objective criteria -- but given the fact that FreeBSD code is reviewed only by a fraction of people compared to Linux code, you would expect vulnerabilities in Linux (and GNU userland of course) are found and fixed more quickly. On the other hand of course, FreeBSD is less exposed, so it's a reasonable assumption that the "bad guys" also find fewer holes. All in all, I wouldn't rely on the "nice feeling to run a more secure system", that probably isn't the case.
Woolie Wool said:
but more widely supported by PC hardware than the other BSD flavors.
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Most probably true.
DrTed said:
Having a FreeBSD home server w/ZFS is a tremendous thing. Watch out for the ZIL performance bug. Nothing show stopping, but could be an issue.
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Could you elaborate on that one? I use ZFS and I'm quite happy with it so far -- what performance bug? Got a link or something? Thanks.
 
Hello!

27 year old hardware engineer here. Switched from Linux to FreeBSD as my daily driver for work. A few reasons why:

  • Configuration files are where you'd expect them to be
  • Network interface names are short and simple (eth0, re0, wlan0, etc)
  • Easy enabling/disabling of kernel modules via /boot/loader.conf
  • The man pages have examples

I could go on all day but I wont. I'd love to find ways to contribute to the community here.
 
sgimfl said:
I'd love to find ways to contribute to the community here.
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Welcome!

I started giving back by fixing "bugs" or typos in the docs, and I plan on writing a few articles on the wiki, perhaps hopefully even publish them in the FreeBSD Journal. As I'm not a programmer, this is for me the easiest way to give back. In the meantime I'm also learning C programming so I could perhaps one day hack some code together or fix bugs there.
 
I've been off the forum a while so I'm going to post here.

I was happily using a desktop on PC with FreeBSD release branch 11 for a while. Now I'm back to building a new system and I may want to do something more on the current side of things. Looking at building a FreeBSD box with pretty fresh hardware.

I've been using PCs for several decades now. Started with MS DOS back in the DOS days like most PC users. Wanted to try something other than Windows so I gave Debian a shot back in the mid 90's. Stuck with Debian for a lot of years, but then I didn't like the direction it took. Debian started moving away from traditional Unix and I didn't like that one bit. I've actually had some professional experience with various operating systems over the years so early on I came to appreciate Unix.

A couple years ago I tried FreeBSD, actually almost tried it back when I tried Debian first time, but for whatever reason I didn't. I should have, big neglect on my part.

Now I'm really enjoying FreeBSD for its pure Unix roots which is something I appreciate quite a bit. I'm using it as a desktop system and hope to expand it to the realm of media services for the home theater which might be a bit challenging.
 
I've been using the bsd's on and off since around 2000, just never bothered joining this forum before. Have worked mainly on linux development, software products, some embedded stuff, some hardware.
 
I have been using Linux since 2003, with Windows mixed in for gaming. Now I mostly play a MUD so don't need Windows, just tintin++. I tried to switch to BSD on my daily laptop in 2017 but video driver issues prevented me from doing so. Now with drm-kmod, I made the switch this past weekend. I wanted something systemd-free, networkmanager-free, configured to my needs, and simple. All of this so I can learn programming. I am in a dilemma on which language to choose. C or Go. I want to contribute back to the FreeBSD project some day, so maybe C. But maybe FreeBSD could adopt a project written in Go. I can't make up my mind and so I hinder my own progress by switching languages all the time.
 
robotchaos said:
But maybe FreeBSD could adopt a project written in Go. I can't make up my mind and so I hinder my own progress by switching languages all the time.
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Don't worry, you're not hindering your progress. The more different languages you have done something non-trivial with, the easier it gets understanding pro and cons of new languages.

Aside from that, if there's something you think is missing on FreeBSD (either in ports or base - I'd recommend ports first) and that you'd use yourself, that would be a prime candidate for porting/writing.
 
SirDice said:
Have a look through the ports tree, we have a bunch of orphaned ports in dire need of a maintainer. Maybe that's something you could start with.
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That's a great idea! I would love to do so. Let me poke around and see what I can find :) Thanks for the suggestion.

malavon said:
Don't worry, you're not hindering your progress. The more different languages you have done something non-trivial with, the easier it gets understanding pro and cons of new languages.

Aside from that, if there's something you think is missing on FreeBSD (either in ports or base - I'd recommend ports first) and that you'd use yourself, that would be a prime candidate for porting/writing.
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Thank you for the encouragement. I find this community most inviting of all and I really like that. I think I will stick around, as usually, I am not a social person.

At any rate, I think I will start by finding out of date ports and trying to maintain some of those. That would be cool. Eventually, as my needs grow and I find what might be missing from my workflow, I can try writing something for that.
 
Control. Absolute understanding. Most effective use of resources with minimal execution, in hardware and software. Without a doubt, the reasons I jumped away from Windows to Linux a year ago, and now, Linux to FreeBSD. I've wanted to try FreeBSD ever since I heard of Linux, and with the issues some Linux OSes are having now, it's tipped me over to starting a BSD journey, armed with nothing but the forums and the O'Reilly "BSD Hacks" book from back in 2004 (Can't wait to see what's changed since its printing, lol). I'm tired of people changing the OS for me; It's time I made the changes myself, starting here.

Right now, my eventual home-server computer is installing FreeBSD, and once I've figured out the OS on there, I'll deploy it on my main desktop and laptop, it being the only OS on my laptop, probably. I probably won't talk much, but I'll be using this forum quite extensively, time (And internet) allowing... Especially as I try to implement A\V production into FreeBSD, as I have no idea how that'll go yet.
 
I used netbsd but networking was a problem. Then I used openbsd but it was slow and packages where missing.
FreeBSD works nice as desktop O.S. To boot I use grub/kfreebsd
 
Hi folks,
I'm a long term GNU/Linux user. Startet in 1999 with SUSE Linux, but with the release of Woody I switched to Debian GNU/Linux. Over the years I tried a lot of other GNU/Linux distros, but for my daily driver and for servers I stayed with Debian.
FreeBSD now is relatively new to me, I startet using it with 11.0. First on VM, than on a little server. Until now I have not done some exotic thinks with FreeBSD, just run my little private Nextcloud instance on it.
But now I will dive a bit deeper into FreeBSD and (maybe) also switch to FreeBSD as my daily driver. My hardware is my beloved Thinkpad X230, so FreeBSD should run well on this.
 
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