Hello! New to FreeBSD since 6 months maybe. For me it was quite coincidental: Had an interrupt from university studies here in Sweden and as I went back to school the whole programming approach had changed from solemnly Windows-only into "Make it with GNU compilers"; "Use of IDE is deprecated". So at home I downloaded Cygwin and looked up alternatives for Windows since it was very poor to install the MinGW. At the same time I was talking regularly with a guy brought up with the demo culture and he was surprised in a positive matter and asked me if I was about to become user of *nix instead.
I scouted the web to find something other than the big Linux whale (oops, penguin, *aherm*) because, as I experienced it, a lot of the current presented Linux systems was about looking good and cool. Stumbled in on FreeBSD as a derivative/descendant of Unix and by reading the front page of freebsd.org I realised that this was something great to work with, a lot of thanks to the ever so bright Handbook.
According to Online-documentation BSD had a greater history of security and stability than Linux, and a lot of major servers run BSD, so this made me settle.
The breakpoint came when I started to crash the lovely Windows tinkering with drivers and some other software and through all years windows for me has been: "Hello Sir! You have this problem, but we don't know exactly what caused it, so if you think of solving this you may either spend a day learning what the he_ck just happened or you could buy something new".
(What made me survive 11 years with Windows was games and a high interest for operating systems themselves.)
As soon as I changed, things came to another and deeper understanding and what never seemed to work under Windows due to crappy software or just poor programming was working fluently on FreeBSD - My uncle gave me this laptop stating that the wireless card was busted (and it sure seemed to be under Windows), and after clean FreeBSD install: Voilá!
All on all I have felt very supported directly from the start joining the forums and I have also learnt solving things in another way.
Great thread.
--> This one will not be a Windows user anymore.
- - - michael_hackson