I remember growing up in grade school my friend's older brother was a very active contributer to FreeBSD. I remember being fascinated by the FreeBSD desktop they had running in the living room and this alternate universe of free software he was helping to create. I don't remember much other than his rants against windows (he thought it was terrible that people let their computers would do stuff like run CD-ROMs automatically on insert) and staring awestruck at some of his big-kid C/C++ files before me and and my friend went to tinker with our kiddie QBasic. But something about that ingrained in me a fascination with FreeBSD at an early age.
I just thought it was so incredibly cool. It ran so lean and cleanly. It was made by passionate nerds like my friend's big brother, volunteers driven by a desire to do things correctly, clearly, and simply. Something about it just seemed so awesome and right. But I didn't have a computer of my own to run it on. Years later I went on to be a Linux user but have often wondered about diving into FreeBSD due to some strange form of nostalgia and sentimentalism.
The FreeBSD handbook, and FreeBSD’s bit-rot resistant documentation, are the primary reasons I use it as a daily driver. I migrated from Linux on the Laptop ~1.5 years ago and my day-to-day has been more calm ever since.
Whoa, there's a *nix distro that actually has documentation that can explain things to me like I'm 5 and show case all things special about the OS? This is exceptional good.
Many years ago I helped translate some of the FreeBSD and Linux documentation.<p>Even then, the Handbook was a marvel compared to most of the cobbled together HOWTOs, I always felt it was a very underrated gem in the echosystem.
I installed FreeBSD on a box a few days ago. It was very frustrating. I didn’t know what I was doing and found myself with a lot of questions. It took a while for me to get comfortable. Now that I’ve been using it a few day, wow, let me say that it’s AMAZING. So, so fast and beautiful. I’m so glad I stuck with it.<p>Everything works so smoothly today. Of course, I had to do little things to get things to work well. For example, backspace wouldn’t work in Emacs out of the box. My keyboard didn’t work out of the box on X11. I had to add this to my .emacs file:<p><pre><code> (normal-erase-is-backspace-mode 1)
</code></pre>
And I had to add this to my /etc/sysctl.conf:<p><pre><code> kern.evdev.rcpt_mask=6
</code></pre>
Now that I’m here (using StumpWM, Emacs, and FreeBSD 13), I’m super happy I stuck with it. FreeBSD runs so well. The way the system is designed (installing packages, ZFS out of the box, the documentation (amazing man pages), the folder structure, minimal bloat, et cetera) is beautiful. Going forward, I’ll be using FreeBSD for my server(s). And I’m going to try to use it as much as I can as my daily driver.
I've yet to try a BSD, but FreeBSD's wholehearted embrace of the ZFS filesystem makes it very attractive to me. Now I have another reason to look at it.
What a coincidence! I just finished reading this. It's the work of many authors, so you may find it a little uneven. But overall I found it to be an outstanding document. It helped me get the lay of the land quickly and easily, coming from OpenBSD. OpenBSD has very good documentation too, but I don't think they have anything quite like this.
I love FreeBSD, but the way it behaves with Home and End keys drives me nuts. Is there a way to set it to behave as Linux consistently, across all users, session, and jails?