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

Hello world out there, Hail to yee all,


I will tell my story of getting interested by FreeBSD sort of backwards.

I am not (yet) running vanilla FreeBSD but thought I could drop a line here, because I feel I am on the verge of installing a FreeBSD based-system on one of my laptops. (And, yes, I know: I won't ask in the FreeBSD forum any support for something not quite FreeBSD. I have read the rules before writing my first post --this is the second.) The word laptop is important, I'll explain why further. (For now, please, just mark it.) I have not had any desktop computer for years, nor do I have a landline internet connection. Because, basically, I use a computer to write, period. --Basically. More about that later.

Recently I have tried (via usb live sessions) the now well-known GhostBSD, the niche NomadBSD, helloSystem and its predecessor LiveStep, and also Airyx and CultBSD. --Probono's helloSystem is much promising and I quite like his UX approach. Reading his papers on medium.com is always refreshing and good food for thought. Plus his refutations of the (bad) choices of most desktops is both hilarious and highly relevant. Yet, his helloSystem is not ready for production, I mean for an end-user like me: for instance, the wireless won't work, at least on my Lenovo ThinkPad X230.-- That is why I also tried (again) NomadBSD, GhostBSD and Co. Some years ago (I think it was in 2016), on a spare Dell laptop I was given, I have installed TrueOS, a system that I had been following from afar when it was still called PC-BSD. But TrueOS never worked well on any of my laptops.

Now, there is a gem that is being developed, named CultBSD, that some of you may have heard about. (It was in the thread of CultBSD that I have posted my very 1st message yesterday.) For a desktop-oriented "distribution" --yes, I know: GNU/Linux terminology, not the same meaning as in the D of BSD-- for an eye-candy desktop-oriented distribution, says I, CultBSD is blazing fast! On my 2009 laptop, it flies swifter from usb than the host (Linux) OS installed on the hard drive. Amazing and quite remarkable. --What's interesting with old hardware is that it lets you notice the difference! ;)


Previously, I have of course tried other operating systems: Haiku and many Linuces --and I do mean many!

Like most people who switched from Windows to GNU/Linux in the 2000s, I started my journey with Ubuntu. During several years, I was a happy user. But when the Gnome guys went insane and berserk with Gnome3, I switched to Debian-based lightweight (OpenBox) CrunchBang (#!). It was a superb distro. Quite logically, I broke it in no time by messing with the source-list, mixing stable and testing repositories. (Typical newcomer fatal mistake.) Then I heard about a confidential distro called Arch, rolling-release and equipped with a powerful cli-package-manager called pacman. I was not daring enough to install it from the ground up, but then appeared Archbang, that, to put it in a few words, was to Arch what CrunchBang was to Debian. I had also tried and run other *buntus like PinguyOS, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS. More lately, I also run Manjaro, MX, Void, even some "Slackies", and many others, --the most remarkable of all having been Obarun, some gem of a Linux distro that allows its user regain and embrace the power and versatility of Arch and pacman without systemd. Very more recently, one week ago, I have installed Devuan Daedalus ("testing") on a 32-bit laptop (my dear Samsung N140 netbook), the most problematic of my computers to install anything on not to work toooo slowly. (Hence, a very good test machine for lightweight and efficient systems, provided there is a 32-bit version, which is still the case of Void, Devuan, MX, Haiku and... *BSDs! And that is how I can tell that even the assumedly "lightweight" MX Linux (with Xfce) has already become too greedy 4 years ago, whereas the last Devuan (with LXQt) works quite fine.

Despite this seemingly almost pure Linuxian curriculum, as far as I remember, as soon as I had became aware of what I will call the GPSS, the "Great Proprietary Software Swindle" (and that goes especially for Microsoft, but also for Apple and for the accomplice hardware industry, quite happy that the consumers buy a new machine every five years to run more and more resource-consuming systems), I turned my eyes on *BSDs. I always thought that BSD was the real thing, not GNU/Linux. Especially since BSD kernels are not as HUGE as Linux is. Unfortunately, back then, in 2008, I would not dare install any *BSD --even FreeBSD-- on... a laptop! (Depending on what your hardware is, you might know what I mean.) And after all, back then, only half a dozen months before, I did not even know what a wireless driver was... Going Linux was already a big jump for me!

Let me tell some more personal things about my use of computers: I do not administrate server farms or small computer networks, I do not code, I do not write CSS or HTML, I do not even write on so-called "social" networks --I quite dislike these. Initially, I came to computers to write stories and thoughts, period. (Of course, since 1994, the year I started using MS-Word to write poems and aphorisms, I have also switched to digital cameras and digital voice-recorders, hence, I now have also to manage huge amounts of pictures and sound files on my computers.)

Another concrete example of singularity: I am not a gamer. Unlike most boys of my generation, I never had any Nintendo or Atari or whatever system to play games on and hook me to machines running binaries. Ever since, I have never run any game on my computers in my life but, seldom, chess apps. --As I have already mentioned, I write, that's what I do. I also perform as an actor. What need would I have to immerse myself in a digital clumsy crappy virtual world, while I can analogically enter rich, subtle, and interactive fantasy universes, with true flesh & blood partners, often beautiful and sex-appealing?

So, once again, I basically came to computers to write and print my own words. And, although far from perfect, the Unix management of the keyboard (compared to crappy Windows' one) was one very important of the many reasons that convinced me to go free Unix, whereas I had no previous disposition and was even hardly capable to distinguish between an application --say, word-processor MS-Word-- and an OS --say, MS-Windows XP--, although here better called a US, for Unoperating System.

Because on Unices, among other, we can enjoy the magic power of the Compose key! :) (And I am a grammar and typo nazi.) It is my pleasure and delight to be able to type a letter with its diacritic directly from the keyboard, with my bare fingers --not needing to open some dedicated character map utility. This way, when I get tired of LibreOffice Writer legendary slowness, I can write correct French prose in a mere text editor. (Some of them even allow non-breaking spaces, a very necessary feature for French typography!) All of this is quite impossible in Windows, where you cannot type a capital letter with its due diacritic! (Example: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.) You have to copy-paste it from the Word "special characters" manager. (The same goes in LibreOffice Writer as long as you use it in Windows.)

(Speaking of raw text editing, by the way, if we do lack an application in this versatile digital world, it's something as simple as a text editor for non-coders. A text editor aimed at writing in UTF-8 all the human writings and languages and none of the computer languages. This software could be as lightweight as a feather, highly modular, and coded in a matter of weeks... Of such a software, I know not --but I might have missed it?)


Now, back to the issue of the shift between different types of OS.

If my memory serves me well, it's Theo de Raadt who once said: "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix."

I do concur --partly. It's mainly true --just not completely. (Pero, "se non è vero, è ben trovato!")

Because what I am glimpsing is a deep trend of people who are going to seek shelter into *BSD (and most of them into FreeBSD, because of its user-friendly GUI and live-session capable derivatives) out of their tremendous fatigue of GNU/Linux, after sooo many wrong decisions have been taken in the Linux ecosystem.

It is now twenty years that we are promised that next year will be the year of Linux desktop. And it is now twenty years since the "sexy side" of the "FOSS world" ("Linux is sexy, dude, ya know, more than BSD"), the sexy Chosen Linux community does just the right thing in order to not conquer the minimum desktop computer market share it could claim. Just as, for a decade, Firefox is in spectacular decline versus Chrome, the GNU/Linux battle versus Windows is obviously a big charade.

For... Who wants to run Linux anyway? Gamers? They run Windows. Corporate bitches? Windows too, like their employer. Creatives? They buy Apple --and proudly so!


There is this joke among Debianists that goes: "Ubuntu is South-African for 'I can't install Debian'." In the same spirit, I would dare say: "Linux is Finno-Globish for 'I can't run BSD'." Linus Torvalds himself has somehow acknowledged it at some point!

"Who wants to run Linux anyway?", asks I. --There!: there are the ones who want to run Linux: those who cannot afford Apple computers, those who also hate Windows (but need it dual-booting on their 64-GB RAM computer to be able to run their stupid games) and who are/feel unable to run BSD.--

And of course, one of the many errors of the Linux ecosystem was letting systemd spreading all over the (already) messy place. And then, things got even more messy.


Yee quiet people of FreeBSDland, I am solemnly warning you that most people of the Linux crowd who don't want any of this big-kernel-inside-the-huge-kernel systemd, who don't want to be owned/pwned by the NSA (RedHat's client, remember?), will come to FreeBSD soon or later to look for refuge. And sooner is more probable a scenario. Besides, it has already started, hasn't it? Educated people, be prepared: Eternal September is coming back upon you again.

Now, if that may be a relief to your legitimate thrown of worry, do also know that them Linuxians-to-go-BSD-a-gogo will be the bolder ones --bold as in daring and audacious, not as in gross. As for the gross, most of the illiterate Linuxians will stay where they are, in the limbo of the systemd & Gnome3 hipster hypes, so happy to sink onboard of the Titanic of classical desktop paradigm's destruction, singing and dancing with the loveboat band. There, soaked in the maze of their own limbo, they will still be able to look with sarcasm upon the poor Windowsians --these poor creatures!-- while going on dual-booting Windows to play 3D monster kombat games.

You will have some of them knocking at your door, nonetheless. A minority of them, who are Legion, hence some serious number of them alright. (I trust you will know how to "welcome" them.) But the majority of those who will come first will be the most articulate, those who throw a lucid stare at what GNU/Linux is becoming: the Third Man between Windows and macOS.


There are two radically antagonist main ways to consider computing and computers.

One of them consists in asserting that computers are for everybody, anybody. For quite different reasons, that is the discourse of both the GAFAM and... of the FSF, of both Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman. Steve Jobs (and Bill Gates, and Google, and all the others) used this rhetoric in order to guarantee & enhance their sales. (Consequently, it's no sincere conviction. It's just a claim. Computers are for anybody... able to buy ours.) Richard Stallman, for another quite opposite reason: because the rational treatment of information, just as mathematics (says he), should belong to everybody. It's a common good, it's commonwealth. It mustn't be copyrighted.

On the other opposite hand, one can wonder: does (and should) anybody fly a plane? It needs so much expertise and it consumes so much fossil fuel. (When working, computers do not consume fossil fuel per se, but they are made with rare metals and it takes much fossil fuel to extract these metals and build them machines and transport them from one side of the planet to the other. Regarding the ecological issue, they are a disaster!)

Analogically, one can wonder: should ANYBODY run a computer?


We do not have to chose between these two extremities, the demagogic, and the elitist. We can instead consider that computers (like Asimov's robots) should be at the service of everyone --without enslaving anyone with consumption of personal time, energy, and money. And in order to reach this noble aim, we do need frugal yet effective operating systems, not bloaty CPU-consuming operating systems. If scientific and technological Progress was not but the myth of the 18th-19th ideology (easily refuted yet still prevailing), operating systems (and also the world wide web*) would not be heavier and heavier, and slower and slower as each bloody year goes. --And that's why I accuse the hardware industry to have a collusional complicity with the main crapware publishers: the hardware vendors need the crapware to get more and more resource-consuming in order to let them, in deed, go on selling more and more powerful machines.**

Now, let us suppose one minute that this massive madness of increasingly resource-greedy OSes would stop instantly, by the virtue of some magical wish. The (huge) problem of fixing dysfunctional www would still remain! And that is where another accomplice suspect in the collusion of this Conspiracy of Dunces is made plain clear: the Google-Amazon-Facebook-etc consortium of crapware propagation, a cross-platform, hardware independent, and system-agnostic crapware propagation. An off-shore immaterial propagation, so to say! Today, internet too is a powerful crapware-invaded & invading world, whose corruption alone is able to force most people to buy more and more powerful hardware!


These are why and how, I, who basically was NOT interested (at all!) by computers and computing, eventually came to be passionate about this question. It is not only a technological and technical issue for engineers and nerds. It is not only a geo-strategical issue --some countries, more than others, start fighting to regain their digital sovereignty. It is a political issue too, in the most noble sense of tarnished word politics. An everyday life political issue, at the both scales of each individual and whole humanity!

And yet, I do claim the absolute human right to remain a mere END-USER! An aware and articulate end-user, but an end-user nonetheless.

Because Life has already so much to offer and fight for --and against. How can I, how can you, how can we afford spending our time troubleshooting software and hardware dumb issues!?! It's a matter of lust for life and sheer human dignity.

In these regards, GNU/Linux plays the same game as do corporations like Apple and Microsoft.


I dare hope that BSDs are not the same animal. And I want to check, learn and know. :)


So, in order to come back in-topic and draw a conclusion, I guess that eventually, what brought me to FreeBSD, more than the computers (that I was not raised in), takes its roots in the earth of... my childhood and teenage experience of enjoyment with good ol' typewriters, starting with the budget typewriter of my grand-parents.***

Because, in the end, this hardware/software mix that we call a computer, isn't it but a digital and somehow enhanced typewriter, receiving human input and issuing human readable output that aim at stimulating intellect, imagination, and fancy? Like when we were swimming in the in-fancy**** of childhood!


Truely yours,


O.


* Did you know that, already a few years ago, between %15 and %20 of the worldwide internet bandwidth were busy with Netflix alone? This percentage might have increased since --or decreased, following the rise of Zoom visio-conference massive home-use subsequent to the Covid!

** Cf. May’s & Wirth’s laws, which read, respectively: "Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore’s Law."; and "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."
Inspired by these insightful models, I propose this law (Soller's law): "Software improves at sucking faster than hardware improves at blowing."

*** Even if more performant typewriters would have appeared on the market in the meanwhile, you could always use the typewriter that your grand-mummy or grand-daddy had bought 40 years before!

**** I borrow this play on words to 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume, a thinker mighty worth reading.



PS. Thank you already for reading, and, thank you in advance for any feedback, even controversial! :)
 
to get rid off redhat and "free"desktop as much as possible
also I really love the BSDs community they seem way more open minded
Y'know, KDE on FreeBSD is one reason I like FreeBSD, but the KDE project makes no secret of trying to stay compliant with freedesktop.org standards for usability. 😏
 
… explore FreeBSD... All you need is a compatible laptop ;)

We're on a countdown to compatibility and/or improved performance with a far broader range of hardware. Boot capability, Wi-Fi … happy days :) 𠉶



my first car was a 1965 Hillman Super Minx

… and I often wished that I had kept personal photographs of a much-changed area where I used to park it. Today (thanks, obscurely, to FreeBSD Forums members) I found a stock photo:

No. 10.png

To the left of No. 10 was free parking. Imagine.

… tell us who you are …

Where it was doesn't define who I am, but the place was (still is) a large part of my life.
 
Hi there. My first introduction to *nix world was RedHat 7.something (codename Seawolf ,or something like that). After a short crush on Slackware (which wasn't bad), i came to discover this beast, errr... I meant Beastie. Back then and there (Romania, the far-far east), we used to have a Linux forum, where we used to say nasty things about Microsoft et al. Everyone was, somewhat, scared of the *BSD family, that rang a bell. And here I am, since 2008 or 9. Not a great socializer myself, normally a lurking shadow, but here we go, i just got introducted myself.
P.S: no posts from me, when I come, I do it for solutions, which I usually get. The forum is crowdy-enough as it is. No need for another beanhead.
Sorry for my *nixlish, I really am an ooooldish guy, who wants to solve everything on its own ( not a lot of luck on this ). A Happy New Year to you, all.
 
Hi there. My first introduction to *nix world was RedHat 7.something (codename Seawolf ,or something like that). After a short crush on Slackware (which wasn't bad), i came to discover this beast, errr... I meant Beastie. Back then and there (Romania, the far-far east), we used to have a Linux forum, where we used to say nasty things about Microsoft et al. Everyone was, somewhat, scared of the *BSD family, that rang a bell. And here I am, since 2008 or 9. Not a great socializer myself, normally a lurking shadow, but here we go, i just got introducted myself.
P.S: no posts from me, when I come, I do it for solutions, which I usually get. The forum is crowdy-enough as it is. No need for another beanhead.
Sorry for my *nixlish, I really am an ooooldish guy, who wants to solve everything on its own ( not a lot of luck on this ). A Happy New Year to you, all.
Welcome to the forums! And y'know what? this place is surprisingly useful for problem solving. On my end of things, I discovered that it can be much faster and easier to ask a question on the forums than spend hours looking on Google, and still being unable to solve a FreeBSD-related puzzle on my own. Yeah, it helps to think and frame the question before asking it, and it helps to do a bit of homework beforehand, but we're generally happy to help. :)
 
Thank you astyle and everybody. As I said, I'm fine, whatever questions I ever had, they got their answers here, on this forum. I only run dns/unbound, www/hiawatha, a bit of Perl, a tad of lua for some stats from my inverters (greedy green-energy prosumer). Oh, a couple of net-p2p/verlihub (no longer in ports, not a big issue). It isn't about piracy at all, it is all about communities, which we have here, already. And databases/PostgreSQL, almost forgot to mention.
 
Part of who I am, although I often preferred to hide the badge:

1641623743569.png


Also, a moderator, which was never a chore.

www/waterfox just found its way to the tree. …

Marked as "Temporary experiment" (Demo)
EXPIRATION DATE: 2017-12-12 …

(An unexpected outcome of 222859 – continue to port and maybe package www/firefox 56.x for some time after 57 is released, overlapping with 221916 – cease www/firefox-i18n dependency on old, incompatible xpi-quick-locale-switcher.)


I am using two web browsers: Iridium and Waterfox. …

… only use the machine for waterfox web surfing …

It's horrible.:oops:

The sheer horror of it all! 😱 – tastes vary :)

For an experiment that was originally set to expire after around three weeks, its official life of around ten months (in the FreeBSD ports collection) was pretty good. Then, after removal from the collection: thanks to the former maintainer, it remained usable (and enjoyable) for another year or so.

Jan Beich was amazing. Is amazing.

The vast majority of what I do, with computers, involves web browsing. When (in late 2019) it became impossible for me to use Waterfox on a suitably updated installation of FreeBSD:
  • I quietly considered abandoning FreeBSD
  • instead, I chose to stay.
No regrets :)
 
I hope FreeBSD is this dream OS :cool:

One year later I can say yes it is :)

Fresh update to 13.0-RELEASE and I've just kicked off this heavy bloated web browser Firefox for Falkon, remains only one problem : I'm not able to compile FreeCAD on 13.0, I get it done on 12.2, so I run a Debian in a VirtualBox for FreeCAD only, it's don't make me happy.

My computer is used for home/hobby/profesionnal work, I can manage my mp3 music, burn CD/DVD, program arduino cards, get some C/C++ coding and make CAD work with qelectrotech & FreeCAD. My window manager is TWM (yes, yes, back to the roots of UNIX) with two monitor I don't need any start button nor taskbar.

2022-01-08-201728_2720x1024_scrot.png
 
Thanks, it's always good to read of people staying with FreeBSD – especially desktop/notebook use cases, and types of work that are not limited to professional.

(I disagree with the occasional implication that FreeBSD is solely for professionals.)

… not able to compile FreeCAD on 13.0 …

FreeBSD bug 259913 – cad/FreeCAD will not build

kicked off this heavy bloated web browser

KDE bug 447448 – PDF content can not be zoomed in or out – ⚠ accessibility – and so on, and (no disrespect to developers or the user communities) I sense that few people are willing and/or able to progress the issues. Perceived lightness of Falkon comes at a cost ;-)

Of course, my preferred web browser has a different set of costs ;-) but I prefer its cost:benefit ratio.
 
This may be an old thread, but I landed here seeing some new posts here. I am a road safety specialist and I have not come across anyone else from my profession yet, who uses FreeBSD. I come from research background and have used various Linux operating systems on my personal computers, since my university days. I have used custom set ups with Arch Linux for over 10 years, but switched to FreeBSD a year ago, as I was finding it increasingly harder to set up a simple system with Linux.

My switch to FreeBSD involved a detailed reading of the FreeBSD Handbook and a few trial installations on my Thinkpad laptop and Optiplex desktop. I am currently settled in FreeBSD 13, with KDE-Plasma on my desktop and laptop. I also have an old Dell desktop set up as a home media/file server, with GNOME.

I intermittently use MS Windows in VirtualBox, to work with my colleagues who use MS Office. For everything else, I use FreeBSD. I am extremely happy with my FreeBSD set ups and would list the following as the reason for it:
  • Solid performance, with minimal system resource usage
  • Simple and predictable set up
  • ZFS snapshots
  • Lessons learned from the Handbook and the Forum
If there are any other professionals from my field here, please give me a shout. Best regards.

Update: GNOME on my home media/file server stopped working after an upgrade in early February 2022. I have replaced it with KDE-Plasma since then.
 
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Hello everyone, I'm a FreeBSD user because I find it easier to learn than The Unholy Mess Linux, and GPL software has some serious design flaws like this that I don't like.

Yes, ASD is Autism Spectrum Disorder, so if you think I said something disrespectful or not quite acceptable socially-wise before you reach out your pitchforks and torches (it's not a critique of any sort, it just happens to me all the time) please correct me, I may be quite unaware of this.

Cheers!
 
>25 year old
>Windows user
>Recently became interested in new systems, checked Wikipedia OS list, found freebsd, thought it was ok because it said free
>Set it up in virtual box
>Thought it looked old and lame
>De-install
>Next day 13.0 released
>Fine let's give it a second chance
>Playing with commands and stuff
>Hey, that's pretty good.png
>2 months forward
>Best OS of the XXI century
 
Thanks
yes, virtualbox 5.2.42, CPU 3 cores , memory ram 3gb, video memory 256mb, FreeBSD Mate Desktop , I start virtualbox outside of normal desktop session .
 
As I see now, I haven't introduced myself. So I do it now: I have switched to a FreeBSD home office workstation only recently, in January this year. Being a long term Linux user since 1993/94, or so.

I remember I have seen back then an offer for 386BSD on 35 or 40 floppy disks which I resisted to buy and to install. The widespread Slackware and Suse Linux cdroms, however, came handy and were a more convenient installation medium; I switched later to Redhat, Debian and so on. From the early 2000s I had MacOS X as a daily driver with some Linux boxes staying around. At work I am forced to use Win 10 Pro. For video conferencing I used to use a notebook with Linux Mint that turned into an Arch Linux driven device a short time ago.

In the mid to late 90ies I had telnet access to NetBSD machines that kept me interested and let me wish to return to a BSD box at some point. But that did not realise until last year (if MacOS doesn't count). I got from Ebay a cheap Frankenstein PC with an Intel Xeon cpu and Nvidia card (one of the lower end ones). Since then I installed NetBSD, OpenBSD and, most recently, FreeBSD as single OS on this machine. Before that I played around a bit with FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi (model 4B) and in virtual machines (Virtualbox and Vmware).

My current setting: FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p7, X11 with Xfce desktop environment and Lightdm display manager (below a neofetch screenshot):
neofetch.png


Besides browsing the web and mail communication, I use it mostly for text related stuff with Latex and Markdown as well as some light video editing (with shotcut and other packages, with ffmpeg and handbrake as frontend for transcoding). Maybe I will try to set up a web based database or something of that kind - not for the public but for myself.

Until now I have tried out CLI interfaces of FreeBSD, window managers like openbox or i3 and desktop environments like KDE, Mate, Xfce.
 
Hello everyone :)

My name is Krzysztof and for the last 17 years or so I've used (both profesionally and for private needs) mostly Linux and macOS. Around one year ago I've migrated from commercially available NAS to a FreeBSD based NAS solution (XigmaNAS) and now I'm considering migrating my servers to FreeBSD to liberate myself from systemd garbage.

To whoever reading these words: have a nice day :)
 
A bit of history:

From 2004 to 2015 I only used Windows (XP, Vista, 7, and 20) on PCs to play games, listen to music or watch YouTube Videos, and thought I would never use anything else (MacOS/Linux/etc.).
In 2016, I installed Linux Mint on an old PC I had laying around, because Windows 7 was running like garbage (thanks to the 2GB RAM and 120GB 2,5" HDD).
In 2017, I installed OPNsense on an old mini PC because I wanted to try out new stuff and I needed traffic shaping because of severe buffer bloat (thanks for the 2,7 Mbit/s upload, ISP).
In 2018, I installed OpenMediaVault on a small ITX NAS i've build for myself, which was my first time playing around with GNU/Linux, storage/RAID, and services like SMB.
In 2019, I installed FreeNAS in a VM on a VMware ESXi 6.7 Server because I heard about how great ZFS is, later that year I installed it on a dedicated Supermicro Server.
In 2020, I switched from OPNsense to pfSense for half a year but ultimately decided to go back to OPNsense, since I already was so used to the GUI etc. and I upgraded FreeNAS to TrueNAS.

All this time, I ran FreeBSD or HardendBSD based systems as well as some GNU/Linux system, but never really thought about why some were based on *BSD.
Every time I read something about *BSD, I asked myself why on earth someone would use something else than Windows or Linux (oh how ignorant I was).
When I upgraded from FreeBSD to TrueNAS CORE, I (unknowingly) started playing aroud with Jails and even a Ubuntu VM for Pi-hole, running on bhyve, and really liked it.
Sometime in 2021 I found out about a Book called "SSH Master" by Michael Lucas and just bought a copy of all of his other books :D.
Last year I also made the switch from Windows 10 to Pop!_OS, after I ran it on my Laptop since around 2020.

Today I am in the process of migrating many things in my Homelab from GNU/Linux and Windows Server to FreeBSD Hosts or VMs, for multiple reasons:
  • Avoiding monoculture: Everyone I know (including my employer) are using exclusively Debian or SLES, running FreeBSD as well seems like a good Idea to me.
  • Systemd: While I like the benefits that came with it, I really don't like how most of the GNU/Linux world is depending on a single Company, with no way to easily replace it.
  • Documentation: It's nice to be able to download the Handbook while installing or from the homepage, instead of using 3rd party docs or Forums posts around the Internet.
  • ZFS: native ZFS support in the installer, integration with Jails, and Boot Environments are some of the things I like the most about FreeBSD.
  • Secutiry (debateable): There are a lot more vulnerabilities found in Linux compared to *BSD, while this may only be a result of "less eyes" on *BSD, I still feel more secure.
  • The OS: FreeBSD is pretty boring to other FOSS OSs, but IMHO this is a good thing, because I don't want a flashy os with much hype around it, I want a OS that just works.
Overall I'm very happy with FreeBSD, that doesn't mean I'll stop using Linux, but I'll use it wherever I can for as long as it makes sense.
 
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