This is so nice to see. Glad that FreeBSD is still alive after all these years. I guess I can share my story :)<p>I played with some early versions of FreeBSD and OpenBSD but, at the time, I was still a Linux newbie so I wasn't comfortable with them. Disk I/O on FreeBSD 3.x was super-slow compared to Linux out of the box... because I didn't know what "soft updates" were and how enabling them would have resolved all my issues.<p>It wasn't until FreeBSD 4.0 that I had learned enough Unix to make the jump, and that became my primary desktop for a while. Soon after, I switched to NetBSD (1.5.2), which I used as my only OS for various years, and I became an avid contributor to the project. I ported and maintained Gnome 2.x, and then developed things like tmpfs and the NetBSD testing framework.<p>But... Mac OS X came along, I jumped ship to an iBook, and without being exposed to the BSDs on a daily basis via a desktop environment, I slowly lost the interest to continue using and contributing to them. I always said back then that having a strong desktop story was super-important to capture developers, and I think it still is. And I wasn't the only case. Mac OS X "stole" many BSD developers because it /was/ almost-BSD-but-with-a-great-UI.<p>So I had left, until recently. I had kept a VM around all these years mostly as a curiosity, but just over a year ago, I set up (again) a home server on a "bargain" ThinkStation I found, mostly to act as a NAS and to run VMs on. My obvious choice was FreeBSD (I still "believe in" the BSDs), and ZFS and bhyve have delivered rock-solid and extremely pleasant experiences. Every time I type some zfs or vm commands, I'm amazed by how well the thing works.<p>I used to favor NetBSD due to its minimalism and its portability, which in turn meant it had a neat internal design (which is what "wowed" me). But by then, it's true that FreeBSD was already the "easy to use" FreeBSD with the most active contributor base, although it was stuck on i386. I think this ease of use continues to this day, and FreeBSD has seen a lot of improvements to its internal design to make it portable. FreeBSD is less daunting to the beginner user _and_ developer, and I think the latter is also critical to run an open source projects these days because, to gain new contributors, you have to meet them where they are. FreeBSD's adoption of "common" tools, such as Git, Phabricator or Bugzilla (even if not "ideal" by some standards) has helped.<p>I guess I should spend the time to write a full retrospective, but that will do for today, hehe.