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

We welcome any slang from Pidgin English to Oxford, indeed, don't we? Some members use an online translating service & from my experience these work sufficiently well. I have even seen some spanish speaking members offering to translate when someone was having trouble to find the right terms in English. This forum is about FreeBSD & not about Oxford English.
 
Mjölnir said:
We welcome any slang from Pidgin English to Oxford, indeed, don't we?
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As long as you don't use rude or offensive words, yes. I often edit posts though, to make them more presentable (we like to keep the formatting the same for everything), correct bad spelling, capitalization, or obvious grammar errors. Don't take that personally, we're well aware not everybody is fluent in English. Heck, I probably make some typical "Dunglish" mistakes too.
 
Probably, we will never know, how many people are coming:
1. From Windows and/or Linux.
2. To FreeBSD, and/or (OpenBSD|NetBSD) <--/--> FreeBSD.
But recently, we've had many posts here. It sounds promising.
 
I think (well, unfortunately) it's more likely to come from Linux than from Windows. Just because Linux is a lot more popular. So, if you have a PC and don't like that thing that was preinstalled, you'll try Linux. Only if you're not completely satisfied, you'll look for other operating systems.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong :o
 
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SirDice said:
As long as you don't use rude or offensive words, yes. I often edit posts though, to make them more presentable (we like to keep the formatting the same for everything), correct bad spelling, capitalization, or obvious grammar errors. Don't take that personally, we're well aware not everybody is fluent in English. Heck, I probably make some typical "Dunglish" mistakes too.
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If you edited my posts, you did it so good that I did not even recognize it... :) (except for one, very early, I know you added or changed some formatting).
 
Greetings, fellow daemons!

I'm a very (very!) recent convert. So recent in fact that I don't really have a proper FreeBSD installation yet, just a VirtualBox VM so far. I'm considering installing it on a Raspberry Pi next.

I've been (and still am) a Linux user for more than two decades, although I did come across some Unix computers in university. I've used mostly "safe" Linux distros such as Redhat, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse. I like these because they tend to be reliable and have big communities.

I think my journey to FreeBSD started with Mac OS envy, recently re-ignited when hearing about the Hello OS. This has morphed into Unix envy and curiosity. And/or I became radicalised while watching FreeBSD YouTube videos! I really enjoy learning about Unix history, the FreeBSD philosophy so on. The FreeBSD handbooks are my Holy Books. I won't bother you with any silly questions until I have read The Handbook!

I work as a database engineer, mostly using MariaDB. I used to be a software engineer, and I still write a good bit of code besides SQL, mostly Python and some bash script.

I'm somewhat into retro home computers such as the Commodore 64, so I hope to find some good emulators for FreeBSD at some point.
 
Hi everyone.

I work full-time as a software engineer (specializing in Scala). I have been on quite a journey to disintermediate all the major cloud/groupware providers from my personal system, and am pretty happy running Nextcloud and various apps in its ecosystem. This is my main use case for server.

Before this year, my infrastructure was all docker/docker-compose. The appeal of docker for sysadmining is that there are thousands of people who make premade container images for everything I want to use, so its literally just a matter of setting a few env variables on the image and off you go. No need to worry about what's in the image, or even what the underlying OS is up to, really.

After a few months of uptime, the containers would start to freeze in weird ways. I took it as a sign that I didn't understand my stack deeply enough. I had been thinking for a while that I needed to commit to a specific Linux distro and go in depth with it, since that would be a precondition for going deep. Funnily enough the "best distro" turned out to be no distro at all, and I committed to learning FreeBSD after being convinced that if offered sensible coherence and after being convinced Linux was giving in to corporatization.

Now I am fully switched to FreeBSD. The handbook is amazing, and through the setup process I finally feel like I have a grip on basic cybersecurity. Coming up next I plan to continue in that vein and learn how to do intrusion detection and audting.
 
Hello everyone!

I work as systems engineer maintaining the CDN and reverse proxy fleet at my current company; mostly working on automation with Python, Go, Terraform, CFN, Github, Docker, Cloud computing and all the things we DevOps love :)

As many other users, I followed a similar path, starting with Windows in late 90s when I still was a teenager, then moved to Linux in early 2000's (Mandrake and Fedora first and then Debian), then completely switched to FreeBSD at home about 4 years ago.

That was not my first interaction with BSD as I was introduced to FreeBSD during my Operating Systems course at University, I think it was FreeBSD 4.x version: I really loved the stronger separation between "base system" and user space, which is something you won't find on GNU/Linux and the documentation, very clear and to the point; but I didn't really have many opportunities to use it either at work or home.

Now that I decided to try and use it on my NAS/router and one HTPC at home, I would not go back and even managed to submit a few ports to the tree: hopefully I'll stick to FreeBSD for a bit longer!
 
SirDice said:
As long as you don't use rude or offensive words, yes. I often edit posts though, to make them more presentable (we like to keep the formatting the same for everything), correct bad spelling, capitalization, or obvious grammar errors.
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I can often get a post through without your editing. Back in the DutchDaemon days, I didn't stand a chance! ;)
 
kpedersen said:
I can often get a post through without your editing.
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It's sometimes akin to trying to drink from a firehose. I much rather spend my time actually answering questions then editing. So I do let some things slide every now and then. As long as it looks somewhat presentable. Some new users often post the most horrid eyesores. Screaming colors, different fonts, several different font sizes, it's like they purposely try to use every bbcode that's available.
 
Regarding the language, I can quote an anecdote.
After giving a very long and complex speech to a 100% Londoner, miserably trying my best Queen accent (no r, we are briton!), I looked at him fearfully, saying (it's customary in the UK to apologize for anything) I'm sorry for my bad English.
He gave me a big smile, and replied: it's a thousand times better than my Italian.
We became friends, and now we write to each other ... in Russian.

As for me, the main problem is the Korean smartphone with a Chinese smart keyboard, setted with Cyrillic alphabet and Italian prediction, which does not like the technical English terms very much.
No way.
Easier with a normal PC
 
Regarding FreeBSD I have been using it since Sun workstations went out of service, and so the Solaris OS.
I started with CP/M on Commodore 128D, going through Amiga, Alpha AXP, Xenix, OS/2, an operating system written by me similar to a rudimentary Linux (at the time of the University), until today.
Essentially I want zfs
 
Computing history goes back to 1983 with the Oric-1 & Oric Atmos when I was 16.
Also used: Dragon 32, Amstrad PCW8512, Enterprise 128, Amiga 1200, amongst others.
First time online was February 1997 using an AST PC running Windows 95 purchased from Comet, where I worked in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Met my wife Arianna online in September 1997 in a Christian IRC channel. Moved to Kentucky in May 1999. Married in Paris (Kentucky) in June 1999.

In my 21 years in the US, for the first 9 years I ran Windows 98 to XP, then discovered Linux about 12 years ago.
Started off with Knoppix live-CD as many did, but started testing other distros. Settled on Linux Mint 6 Felicia and ran that distro until 18 Sarah.
Discovered Solus in November 2016 and have been running that rolling distro ever since. Main PC (System76 Thelio) runs Budgie DE, but I also test Plasma on a Dell 755.

On my 2 Alienware M15x laptops, Max & Erma, I am running:
Max: PCLinuxOS Trinity
Erma: FreeBSD 13.0 RC5

Relatively new to FreeBSD, but have tested a few times. Recently decided to keep FreeBSD permanently on one of the laptops.
Really enjoying learning FreeBSD from scratch, mostly on the console.

So, here I am, and look forward to interacting with y'all.
 
Hi,

François, physician, France.

GNU/Linux user since 1999. Desktop usage, mainly.

I've seen snap, flat, pulse, avahi, wayland... come.
I've seen text logs, sysVinit, ifconfig, dnsmasq... go.

They won't have my /boot and my $HOME.

My Thinkpad is running FreeBSD for some weeks now.
It's under control again and feels like home.

Cheers to FreeBSD developers !
 
Hi I'm wy!

I'm a new-ish programmer working on the original gameboy ^^

I chose FreeBSD since this, to me at least, is like the Ubuntu or BSD (and by that I mean, it's the most widely known BSD from what I can tell) and I also chose to straight up install FreeBSD with no linux/windows/other OS as a dual boot since I like to go into the unknown without a way to back out (weird yes, but that's how I am :p )

So far I'm really enjoying it! I'm surprised rgbds is in the repos (it's a gb complier/linker/etc) and installing stuff seems really easy, aside from needing to edit rc.conf but I got used to that now lol


Oh! I also chose to use BSD in general as I wanted to try out an OS that's more "Unix-like"
 
I'm here as a casual Debian user rather than a technical and deeply exprecienced one but I like to ruin and then after fix the things with the computers. I'm trying FreeBSD in a virtual machine for now and getting familiar with the system day to day. I'm really loving so far. It feels somehow I use a real robust and a solid system.

I'm plannig to completely migrate to FreeBSD soon and especially out-of-box ZFS support motivates me to do that right away.
 
I started with Mandrake Linux back in 2002. Over the years, I got lost in documentation for different utilities. Some distros (think SuSE) ran commands from /usr/local/libexec. some had the exact same commands in /usr/bin, others in /usr/local/bin, others didn't have a libexec directory.... and upgrading was hell. If I wanted a newer version of OpenOffice, I'd go to rpmfind.net, and hunt down dependencies there, only to discover that I didn't finish the job, and by then my system would be so messed up that it's easier to wait for a new version of the distro, and reinstall from scratch. Another frustration that I have with Linux - projects spring up, and disappear. Mandrake split off into Mandriva and Mageia, and Mandriva became OpenMandriva. FreeBSD, meanwhile, stuck around. I know that Red Hat and Debian have chugged along, and so did Arch and Slackware, and SuSE. But trying to find any kind of consistency and standards was a nightmare, with everybody doing the same thing differently.

FreeBSD is incredibly consistent and logical - /etc/rc.conf and /usr/local/bin for bash, and it's been that way ever since I discovered it in 2004 and read about it. Back then, I was unable to install FreeBSD on anything I owned, but I read quite a bit about how it was WAY more stable and a better performer than Linux. Thanks to those rumors, I was installing Linux, but could not get FreeBSD out of my mind.

I only started messing with FreeBSD at home rather recently - in 2017, when I put together my first PC from aftermarket parts. And on that machine, it's working great (it's a Ryzen 5 1400, from the original Ryzen batch that had a compiler segfault bug fixed). I'm on 13-RELEASE right now, and quite happy with it.
 
Hey all,

Not a newbie to FreeBSD, been using it since the good old days of 4.5 on various hardware mainly to run my family mail server and web host, for a time I hosted a fair few scout group websites but when I got out of the scouts I shut that down. I live in the UK and am the technical lead for a local authority providing it to some 30 schools and adult learning centres.

Love FreeBSD, always have, it keeps my interest purely for the capacity for learning.
 
justacurios said:
I'm here as a casual Debian user rather than a technical and deeply exprecienced one but I like to ruin and then after fix the things with the computers.
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You're going to love ports. Sometime fixing one thing breaks another and you get to figure out how to fix it. ;)
 
Hi everyone,

I have been working professionally in the IT industry since 1994, and started of using Novell Netware and NT 3.51. I got in contact with Red Hat early, but an employer I worked for in the past used NetBSD for basically everything, so I soon throw away all the Red Hat CDs. Today I work with eCommerce development, and we are using FreeBSD as web and database servers, running on VMware. I live in Scandinavia. On my spare time I'm collecting and renovating old classic engines like hot bulb engines.
 
On the desktop, I usually use Windows, Linux, and macOS (I reinstall regularly everything and promises myself it will be the last time).

I'm using FreeBSD on a server mostly because it is a Unix and it has a wonderful handbook. I can't stress enough how helpful this handbook has been.
I like how stable things are in the sense that its tools don't change too much (at last what I use)
I also am a big fan of Michael W Lucas. I'm just waiting for Amazon to restock his Absolute FreeBSD to order my copy.
 
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