A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.

This article almost makes me want to try it. Anyone here have tried? I imagine its very outdated but stable. Can you even run modern stuff like Firefox and editors on that thing?

  • Bob Robertson IX English
    3·
    14 days ago

    I used it back in the early 2000’s too… I worked at a local ISP and put it on the network to run my torrents. I have no idea why I went with FreeBSD over Linux, but it was SOLID. I never had to mess with it. It ran on an old PC that my dad had bought in 1993. When I left that job I left this computer running on the network with my boss’s permission. Every couple of years he’d reach out and ask if I still used it, and I’d tell him that I was. Then the company got bought and my former boss retired… shortly after that my computer went away. This was 2017.

    It was great because it was stable, I never did anything with it to really know how it was different than Linux though.