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 I imagine its very outdated but stable.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?

  • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
    3·
    15 days ago

    I’ve never been drawn too it. There are so many Linux distros to try, and even then I gravitate towards Debian and Arch.
    There are plenty of BSD tools in most Linux distros, right? Yeah, bsdutils and the rest. So I’m happy to benefit from it.

  • Bob Robertson IX English
    3·
    15 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.

  • Notamoosen@lemmy.zip
    2·
    15 days ago

    I’m currently playing with it in my home lab, specifically to re-familiarize myself with jails. It’s always nice to be reminded just how stable and flexible it is. Also, its documentation is top notch. Having the handbook directly on their site is something I’ve yet to see matched by any other major OS.