From about 2005 to 2012 i ran everything on FreeBSD, laptop, desktop and every server I had at two companies.<p>Eventually I moved where I did not have CTO authority (Beggars and choosers) and by 2015 I realised that I was spending more time configuring drivers and trying to get the display manger <i>just right</i> than actually delivering value.<p>What I really wanted about 2010 was a company that sold a laptop pre installed with FreeBSD that <i>just</i> worked - kept the drivers and everything else Shipshape and Bristol fashion . I thought then I would happily pay a annual fee for it - I guess Tim Cook has that fee now.
This feels both useful (should I need to do desktop FreeBSD) and like a walk down memory lane (from when this was how you had to manage Linux, too). Thank you for both.<p>And thank you to all the countless developers who have made this level of fiddling mostly a thing of the past. At least this blog did not have to mention modelines.
FreeBSD is such a great OS and has a very powerful kernel. So much potential, it is sad to see Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction. They've had Jails in BSD long before Docker was a thing. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was promising but it probably just doesn't make sense to maintain that project given lack of attention. :(
What do I love about FreeBSD? You can bring back to life old hardware and put it to do useful things (this is also true with other BSDs and low footprint Linux distros, but so far my experience with FreeBSD has been superb). At the moment the only machine I'm running it is a ThinkPad X230 and everything works perfectly and the documentation is top notch. The FreeBSD Handbook is an excellent place to start for newcomers. vermaden's guide on setting up automount (who also wrote automount) on FreeBSD has been really really useful, thanks a lot for that! One gotcha that I've learnt about FreeBSD is that you have to run RELEASE in order to be able to upgrade the system!
Something that strikes me about FreeBSD is you need a certain amount of knowledge going in. On Linux, you can set up a desktop pretty easily. Then you can find out more advanced stuff later on. BSD just dumps you into a shell. You have to <i>know</i> to install this or that metapackage to get a graphical display going and the concepts are different enough from Linux land so that it takes you a while to get going and feel comfortable
Iirc, FreeBSD has some early support for wayland.<p>I have found running sway on Debian testing really refreshing. Everything is simpler in configuration and usage.