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drewlander

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Why I love FreeBSD 4 months ago

I use it as a daily driver. I have tried to use it in some shape or form for the past 20 years.

I made a career in Linux and Windows, but always have had a heart for FreeBSD. A person I consider by technical mentor, loved FreeBSD. My first "Admin" job was at a small ISP where he worked. That was where I got my first taste of FreeBSD which I believe was version 5.3? He made sure that all consoles were set to show beastie and I really learned a ton which set up the rest of my tech career.

Later on, he committed suicide, and I use it as a daily driver in honor of him.

I have Linux vms in bhyve. I use jails, etc. I find it pleasant and I prefer it over Linux, if I do not mind its paper cuts (for Desktop use).

I had to previously use wifi dongles since it did not support AX200 at decent speeds. Since version 14 though, it has jumped leaps and bounds. I no longer need it.

What I still have to do is use a custom xorg.conf, because I have dual amd and intel video cards. If I start without it, it says I must specify Bus Ids. I can use pure wayland, but if anything requires X, I still need a working xorg.conf.

If you are willing to deal with paper cuts, and workarounds, it rocks. If you do not have time for that, it may not be for you (desktop wise).

Server wise, I still love it, just like 5.3 days.

Former racker here. When RAX laid me off, I was told there was no other place for me to go (which was not true). I loved my time there and the people I learned so much from and loved working with. It hurt. I had fantastic managers who did care, but the company changed and looking back I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cog in the machine. When I was a manager elsewhere I tried to show the same care my previous managers did. I cared even if those at the top didn’t.

I agree. I have worked at various companies that use Red Hat/CentOS extensively and the only time I ever saw someone turn Selinux off was on RHEL 6. Ever since then, it has been easier and easier to use. Not saying it is perfect for everyone, but it does work and can be made to work well.

I’m still using a Phenom X2 with now 12Gb of RAM. I do have 4 spinny 7200rpm drives. Got gifted some of those hard drives from a former company as they were slated to be thrown away (proper methods were followed to ensure they were wiped). Been running FreeBSD with jails for a home server for a long time (now nextcloud, Smb/nfs, now plex, munin, a few other random services. I know it will die one day, but enjoying it while it lasts!

Same here, I thought this was great. Even though I have been in the "computer field" for a loong time, there is still so much to learn! I love articles like this.

works very well. I had it on a Samsung Galaxy S7 and sending messages was wonky due to a known issue with that and a few other Samsung Galaxy phones. However it was easy to setup, use, and absolutely love it, well done! KDE continues to impress. As a side note, I just found out Kmail supports oauth2 with o365!

We use swarm for a small cluster in production a well. Extremely easy, zero downtime deployments are fantastic. I can explain it to someone else and quickly get them up to speed. Having said that, the fact that it seems to be on life support has made me look at other alternatives, even a simple docker-compose per node.

I thought it was very helpful. I am sending it out to my manager and others on our team. We have gone through a transition where I work, and a new product owner likes to send us implementation manuals as design docs because that's how they did things many years ago. We have been trying to get them to work in our process, and I am hoping that this article will help reinforce a change in thinking or at least help us to come to an understanding. Thank you for writing it!

I have no college degree, or college classes at all, and have been doing systems engineering/software engineering for about 13 years now. All self taught/learning on the job. While it is nice not to have had college loan debt, I know there are things I may have a better grasp on if I spent months learning a particular topic. In fact, I am jealous of people who actually got to spend time being taught computer science and learning interesting things. I am sure there are topics/approaches/patterns that would be very helpful. Not that I am complaining, things certainly have worked out for me very well, it is just something else that I know would "boost" what I already know. On the flip side, I know of one job that was a very short interview, as they said they could only offer X (which was laughably less than what I was making currently) because I had no degree. What I knew meant very little (to the place, not the interviewers), having the piece of paper meant more. You could say "their loss" but on the flip side, I have no idea what opportunities I have missed because of it.

[dead] 11 years ago

Former 9 year linux only user here, recently switched to using OS X (mostly) for development. I live in a terminal, always have, and unless I need something specific to linux that will not work on a VM, apart from the mac fancy button crap, I hardly notice a difference. To each his own I guess and at least he stuck with it for a week. Also while most of OS X is closed source, they do use some open source tools: https://www.apple.com/opensource/ but if you want a 100% open system, obviously OS X is not for you.