Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

[Cath O'Deray]

Hello everyone! Newbie here and I want to learn, explore, and try not to be a PITA. …

Hello

What is the best way to learn freeBSD?

Good question.

Resources for newcomers include two bullet points under learning. The first of the two points describes two things as essential. A recent survey revealed significant dissatisfaction with the first of the essentials – the FreeBSD Handbook.

The FreeBSD Project's Community page includes some good pointers, although this page is amongst the many that are outdated – no mention of Mastodon, and so on. Click Community in the main bar (not community to the left of the BSD Daemon (Beastie)).

… Please point me in the right direction if I am in the wrong place.

The FreeBSD Handbook is, debatably, not the best place to begin. Recommendations to read the Handbook before anything else are well-intended, enthusiastic, but somewhat out of touch with reality.

Good luck with finding the right places

 

[smithi]

Good luck with finding the right places

Never mind ...

 

[ngnicholson]

Hello i am Neil new to the forums, been using FreeBSD for the last few years first in vm's, now on hardware at work. FreeBSD is the best operating system i have used to date been using Linux since the 90's.

 

[fmc000]

Hello, my name is Fabio and I'm from Italy. I'm 55 and I am a Unix user since the late eighties/early nineties. I started using Linux in late 1996 but, strangely enough, only a few years ago in my professional career which spans almost thirty years.

On my personal systems I have only used Linux since 2001 and I decided that I wanted to try something new (to me), so I installed FreeBSD 14.1 on my laptop as the only OS. I am pretty surprised to have been able to come up with a very usable desktop in such a short time, a few things still don't work but it's OK.

 

[serjei_mikailov]

Hello, my name is Fabio and I'm from Italy. I'm 55 and I am a Unix user since the late eighties/early nineties. I started using Linux in late 1996 but, strangely enough, only a few years ago in my professional career which spans almost thirty years.

On my personal systems I have only used Linux since 2001 and I decided that I wanted to try something new (to me), so I installed FreeBSD 14.1 on my laptop as the only OS. I am pretty surprised to have been able to come up with a very usable desktop in such a short time, a few things still don't work but it's OK.

Wdym with "a few things still don't work"? Maybe we can help you to figure out.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

Tech support questions away from the intro topic, please.

Thanks

Wdym with "a few things still don't work"?

Hint: either (a) visit a person's profile, or (b) click their post count. For the latter:

Searching: users, and search numbers

Spun off from a post about someone's use of operating systems … Oops! We ran into some problems. This member limits who may view their full profile. The search above works because a user's ID number is persistent (exceptions includes people who choose to delete their accounts, and so...

forums.freebsd.org

 

[balanga]

Actually using it.

I've been using it for about ten years and starting to get the hang of it...

I've found that the more I learn about it, the more I realise how little I really understand. There is just so much to it!

 

[SirDice]

I've found that the more I learn about it, the more I realise how little I really understand.

That's generally the case for any kind of knowledge, the more you know about a subject the more you realize you know nothing about it.

 

[lgrant]

Hi, my name is Lynn. I used several Linux distros about 20 years ago. One of the advertised features of FreeBSD is that each release is tested as a whole, whereas Linux distros take the latest version of each package and slams them together. I have been burnt by incompatibilities a few times with Linux. I also was not happy with the way things were going with SystemD,

I have used FreeBSD-based things like M0n0wall, OPNsense, FreeNAS, and Asterisk over the years, so I was somewhat familiar with it, and started using it for small machines to monitor my network, and non-network-connected UPS devices, and that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, my mail machine has been a Windows box, because I depend on some Windows-only products like Adobe and Draftsight. Recent developments with Microsoft and Adobe have been irritating me, so I am working on eliminating these dependencies.

I have tried setting up a FreeBSD desktop off and on for the last decade. It keeps getting easier, but there was always something that didn’t work right. I finally got it right last year, then things went South when I installed the driver for a new NVIDIA GPU. I put SUSE Linux on the box for a while, then the mobo went bad. When I get that box running again, I am going to give the FreeBSD desktop another try, because I understand FreeBSD better than Linux and am more comfortable with it. This time will be the charm.

 

[FreeWay]

That's generally the case for any kind of knowledge, the more you know about a subject the more you realize you know nothing about it.

Rabbit holes. Sooo many rabbit holes! Or more like a labyrinth of Caddyshack gopher holes forming an underground network that all connect to the rabbit holes.

 

[astyle]

Rabbit holes. Sooo many rabbit holes! Or more like a labyrinth of Caddyshack gopher holes forming an underground network that all connect to the rabbit holes.

The rabbit holes in FreeBSD at least lead somewhere. In Linux, I got frustrated by the fact that things change at the drop of a hat, and vary from one distro to the next. When I was in college, I was used to RPM - but then DEB became the hot stuff to know. ifconfig was replaced by ip, and there was a proliferation of filesystems that claimed to be different from one another, but in reality made no difference on my machine - until I discovered ZFS, that one was a total game changer for me.

 

[kpedersen]

I got frustrated by the fact that things change at the drop of a hat, and vary from one distro to the next. When I was in college, I was used to RPM - but then DEB became the hot stuff to know. ifconfig was replaced by ip, and there was a proliferation of filesystems that claimed to be different from one another

This is so true. It is mentally exhausting and I suspect contributes to subtle burnout within the open-source community.

In many ways, I appreciate the lag that BSD often has from Linux. It filters out the pointless noise from the truely useful innovations.

One example is Wayland. Whether it is the future or not doesn't really matter. Watching the Linux community struggle with a currently ~60% complete ecosystem is just frustrating. FreeBSD is taking a responsible approach with this. Not blanketly saying "no", but also waiting until its ready and there are a wide range of (usable) compositors available before all of the documentation or GUI related ports jump ship to a potentially broken platform.

 

[lgrant]

When I get that box running again, I am going to give the FreeBSD desktop another try, because I understand FreeBSD better than Linux and am more comfortable with it. This time will be the charm.

I had a spare little fanless machine, so I decided to give FreeBSD a try earlier than planned. This time it worked, and I now have an xfce4 desktop. Shortly thereafter, we had a nearby lightning strike that took out the cable modem, one port of the router, two Ethernet switches, the cable box, the TV and...my Windows machine.

So I am using the FreeBSD machine as my daily machine, and I am not missing the Windows machine very much. I am pretty clumsy in GIMP, because I have been using Adobe Photoshop for the last 30 years, but I can get things done. I had recently switched from Dassault Systems Draftsight to LibreCAD on the Windows machine. It is available on FreeBSD, so no change there.

I have a project where I print a bunch forms, with the date and day of the week on each one, and some fields that change based on the day of the week. I had been using Adobe InDesign data merge with an Excel spreadsheet. I ended up creating the form in GIMP, exporting it as a PDF, and then using a shell script with date, enscript, and pdftk to merge in the date and the weekday dependent fields. It is a lot more flexible than doing it with InDesign and Excel was.

I use the Wiris MathType equation editor, and I have not found any open-source equation editors that I like as much. In the 20-some years I have been playing with Linux and FreeBSD, I have never tried Wine. But I read a post where someone said they were running MathType under Wine, so I tried it. It worked like a champ on the first try.

I'm pretty happy.

 

[tuxador]

I had a spare little fanless machine, so I decided to give FreeBSD a try earlier than planned. This time it worked, and I now have an xfce4 desktop. Shortly thereafter, we had a nearby lightning strike that took out the cable modem, one port of the router, two Ethernet switches, the cable box, the TV and...my Windows machine.

So I am using the FreeBSD machine as my daily machine, and I am not missing the Windows machine very much. I am pretty clumsy in GIMP, because I have been using Adobe Photoshop for the last 30 years, but I can get things done. I had recently switched from Dassault Systems Draftsight to LibreCAD on the Windows machine. It is available on FreeBSD, so no change there.

I have a project where I print a bunch forms, with the date and day of the week on each one, and some fields that change based on the day of the week. I had been using Adobe InDesign data merge with an Excel spreadsheet. I ended up creating the form in GIMP, exporting it as a PDF, and then using a shell script with date, enscript, and pdftk to merge in the date and the weekday dependent fields. It is a lot more flexible than doing it with InDesign and Excel was.

I use the Wiris MathType equation editor, and I have not found any open-source equation editors that I like as much. In the 20-some years I have been playing with Linux and FreeBSD, I have never tried Wine. But I read a post where someone said they were running MathType under Wine, so I tried it. It worked like a champ on the first try.

I'm pretty happy.

Typst is pretty powerful to produce beautiful PDF with an intuitive templating system

 

[degauss4]

Hello everyone! I am 28 years young and I have been learning FreeBSD for the last couple weeks. I knew a bit of Linux when I was in my late teens and I started using it professionally for over 7 years. I've been having frustrations with Linux since last year because of random sudden changes, it started when they decided to remove moving up and down the console, and I find the userland very inconsistent and changes often. The "man" pages aren't so great and a couple of things are lacking. Handbooks are hard to find and searching on the internet typically returns very old results. I tried every main distro but often found something which ended up annoying me. RedHat is like a soulless IBM nowadays so I don't want to support them. OpenSUSE works decently but downloads are extremely slow, and YAST is a nice tool but it has many unfinished features. Debian is the best for production servers but a tad too slow on getting the latest features (even on Sid). Even after all of that, I started to dislike "systemctl" and "ip" and all the mashed together modern tools.

I encountered FreeBSD when switching companies. I was not the administrator but I was very surprised by how it worked, and then I learned the history of the AT&T UNIX and University of Berkeley days. I have been reading the handbook and "Absolute FreeBSD" and I love the constistency to everything. It will take me quite some time to get confortable on everything that FreeBSD has to offer but it is without a doubt a wonderful OS and I can't wait until I learn more and start setting up some personal projects and professionally in the future.

I also like this forum haha, it reminds me of the classic internet back in the 2000's before all the algorithims took over so I will try to be active around here

 

[Some Anon Guy]

Systems admin for 20+ years.
Tired of the ever changing (for no good reason) landscape in linux...
Moving everything I can to FreeBSD. (Mostly virtual hosts (bhyve), and web/api servers)

 

[lgrant]

Just to follow up, my replacement Windows machine finally arrived, and was quite the disappointment. Not the hardware; it is a pretty powerful gaming rig, and I swapped in a 1050-watt PSU and an NVIDIA RTX 3070 graphics card. The problem is Windows 11. First I have to sign in with my Microsoft ID, then I have to answer a half-a-dozen questions to tell it all the personal data I don't want sent back to Microsoft HQ. It automatically creates my home directory, named with the first five characters of my Microsoft ID, so I have to create a new ID with the right home directory and delete the old one. All the while it is giving me these cheery "We're getting your computer ready for you. We'll be done in just a moment" messages which irritate me no end. And they include a trial version of Norton antivirus, which keeps getting in the way of installing things. (Things are a little better after uninstalling it.) Meanwhile, some of my USB devices, which worked fine under Windows 10, are no longer recognized under Windows 11.

I need to keep a Windows machine around, because I have some Windows graphics programs (Reallusion) that need a good GPU card, and also I periodically experiment with Fortran parallel processing with CUDA, and FreeBSD CUDA support isn't quite there yet. But I am going to be spending a lot more time on my FreeBSD machine than on my Windows machine.

BTW, I spent about a decade, off and on, trying to get a working desktop on FreeBSD. I would always run into some error (usually with X11) that I did not have enough FreeBSD smarts to troubleshoot. Three things made it possible this time: 1) the installation process for desktops has gotten easier, 2) I have a few more FreeBSD smarts than I used to, and most importantly, 3) I discovered the FreeBSD forums. They have been invaluable in figuring out any problems I have run into. Thank you all!

 

[lgrant]

Hello everyone! I am 28 years young and I have been learning FreeBSD for the last couple weeks. I knew a bit of Linux when I was in my late teens and I started using it professionally for over 7 years. I've been having frustrations with Linux since last year because of random sudden changes, it started when they decided to remove moving up and down the console, and I find the userland very inconsistent and changes often. The "man" pages aren't so great and a couple of things are lacking. Handbooks are hard to find and searching on the internet typically returns very old results. I tried every main distro but often found something which ended up annoying me. RedHat is like a soulless IBM nowadays so I don't want to support them. OpenSUSE works decently but downloads are extremely slow, and YAST is a nice tool but it has many unfinished features. Debian is the best for production servers but a tad too slow on getting the latest features (even on Sid). Even after all of that, I started to dislike "systemctl" and "ip" and all the mashed together modern tools.

I encountered FreeBSD when switching companies. I was not the administrator but I was very surprised by how it worked, and then I learned the history of the AT&T UNIX and University of Berkeley days. I have been reading the handbook and "Absolute FreeBSD" and I love the constistency to everything. It will take me quite some time to get confortable on everything that FreeBSD has to offer but it is without a doubt a wonderful OS and I can't wait until I learn more and start setting up some personal projects and professionally in the future.

I also like this forum haha, it reminds me of the classic internet back in the 2000's before all the algorithims took over so I will try to be active around here

One of the things that started souring me on Linux was a couple decades ago when the distro I was using (don't remember which one) decided to change the mailbox format. They had a script that would automatically convert your existing mailboxes in place. And they had a backout script to put them back like they were if the conversion script didn't work. Actually, neither script worked, and they just trashed all the mailboxes. This was early in my Linux adventure; had I had more Linux smarts at the time, I would have done my own backups of the mailboxes beforehand. But it made it clear that they were not testing things very thoroughly. There were a few other occurrences over the years that made it clear that were some problems with the way Linux was tested.

 

[lgrant]

That's generally the case for any kind of knowledge, the more you know about a subject the more you realize you know nothing about it.

I think that's where the term "sophomore" comes from. "Sophos" means wise, and "Moros" means foolish in Greek, so the idea is when you are a sophomore, you've learned a bunch of stuff and are starting to feel really smart, but you don't yet realize how much you still have to learn.

 

[astyle]

First I have to sign in with my Microsoft ID,

No need for that. There are workarounds that you can find with a little googling.
One that I found is here, start at step 18.

 

[lgrant]

No need for that. There are workarounds that you can find with a little googling.
One that I found is here, start at step 18.

That's definitely good to know. But I wish I didn't always feel like Windows was fighting me. When FreeBSD is fighting me, it's because of bugs, or not well enough documented stuff. I can live with that. When Windows is fighting me, it often feels like it is because Microsoft made some decision that was good for them, without really caring what was good for the users. That really irritates me.

 

[degauss4]

One of the things that started souring me on Linux was a couple decades ago when the distro I was using (don't remember which one) decided to change the mailbox format. They had a script that would automatically convert your existing mailboxes in place. And they had a backout script to put them back like they were if the conversion script didn't work. Actually, neither script worked, and they just trashed all the mailboxes. This was early in my Linux adventure; had I had more Linux smarts at the time, I would have done my own backups of the mailboxes beforehand. But it made it clear that they were not testing things very thoroughly. There were a few other occurrences over the years that made it clear that were some problems with the way Linux was tested.

I find it similar, it seems that new changes are not tested thoroughly, and instead of making the more modern software work with classic tools that have been around forever, they make new tools that do half of what the "legacy" tool does, and it doesnt seem that well tested or thought out

Just to follow up, my replacement Windows machine finally arrived, and was quite the disappointment. Not the hardware; it is a pretty powerful gaming rig, and I swapped in a 1050-watt PSU and an NVIDIA RTX 3070 graphics card. The problem is Windows 11. First I have to sign in with my Microsoft ID, then I have to answer a half-a-dozen questions to tell it all the personal data I don't want sent back to Microsoft HQ. It automatically creates my home directory, named with the first five characters of my Microsoft ID, so I have to create a new ID with the right home directory and delete the old one. All the while it is giving me these cheery "We're getting your computer ready for you. We'll be done in just a moment" messages which irritate me no end. And they include a trial version of Norton antivirus, which keeps getting in the way of installing things. (Things are a little better after uninstalling it.) Meanwhile, some of my USB devices, which worked fine under Windows 10, are no longer recognized under Windows 11.

I need to keep a Windows machine around, because I have some Windows graphics programs (Reallusion) that need a good GPU card, and also I periodically experiment with Fortran parallel processing with CUDA, and FreeBSD CUDA support isn't quite there yet. But I am going to be spending a lot more time on my FreeBSD machine than on my Windows machine.

BTW, I spent about a decade, off and on, trying to get a working desktop on FreeBSD. I would always run into some error (usually with X11) that I did not have enough FreeBSD smarts to troubleshoot. Three things made it possible this time: 1) the installation process for desktops has gotten easier, 2) I have a few more FreeBSD smarts than I used to, and most importantly, 3) I discovered the FreeBSD forums. They have been invaluable in figuring out any problems I have run into. Thank you all!

I also need to keep a Windows machine around (just for gaming), and I have figured out a way to install a very clean and as little bloatware as possible. Check out Windows 10 LTSC, and when you do the first install of the OS, disconnect the internet! That way you can create an offline account without all the Microsoft always online things.

My mom got a brand new laptop with Windows 11 and I have to help her out often, and I am disgusted at what Microsoft is doing. Everything is cloud and everything is all microsoft services. The laptop is in spanish but all the cloud services are in english so she can't read half her computer!

 

[Zonoia]

Hi!

I'm new to the forums, it seems like a nice place!
As for why I've joined... the BSDs always had a certain allure and having worked with FreeBSD some years ago didn't change that feeling.
The BSDs seem like a great place to learn more about systems development, which I'm interested but inexperienced in.

Of course it makes little sense to work on something for free if you don't use it.
So I'm currently setting up FreeBSD on a RPi3 to see if it holds up for me personally in a 'baby server' setting.
I've put it on my laptop as well. There's definitely things I like and things I dislike. Nothing that stops me from having fun though!

If it holds up for my home stuff, I'd like to get into doing dev work for the ecosystem, but we'll see when we get there.

See you around! ?

 

[lgrant]

Welcome, Zonoia!

Yes, FreeBSD works great for baby servers. I have a couple of installations on small fanless computers. One collects logs for various IoT devices on the network (using syslog-ng), and performs any other network-related tasks that need a home. The other just runs nut (network UPS tools) to monitor a UPS in the back room. (I probably should have gotten a UPS that could talk to the network, but I didn’t.)

I have a third fanless computer with FreeBSD and the xfce4 desktop. I originally set it up to fill in while I waited for the replacement for my broken Windows machine. But I have grown quite fond of it, and now I am kind of unhappy when I need to do something on the Windows machine. It is also running Lyrion Music Server (formerly Logitech Media Server) to feed music to several Squeezebox devices. Also, since one of my other projects is to stop using Adobe products, I have LibreCAD, GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus installed, and combined with the CLI tools enscript and pdftk, I am doing data merge projects with much more flexibility than I used to have with Adobe InDesign.

 

[Espionage724]

I've used Linux primarily since Windows 10 came out (2015 or 16), and as of a few days ago tried FreeBSD 14.1. I am absolutely loving it!

On Linux I've only done Arch Linux a few times (the cli ground-up to desktop), but generally stuck to Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE (GUI installers, pretty DE o-t-b). I didn't think I'd like it with FreeBSD for fear of being annoying for reinstalls, but I'm learning more about FreeBSD's file structures and configs (handbook is awesome), taking careful notes, and I'm finding I don't have any real reason to consider a reinstall yet! I'm using Xfce, and have my 14.1 notes here.

My initial concerns were with a few games and Wine. Early on I installed wine-devel and winetricks, winetricks told me some pkg32-like command to run for 32-bit support, I ran it (impressed that worked ), and got Diablo II working. I'm impressed my Linux notes for D2 were so good that they worked as-is on FreeBSD (the prefix, wine on installers, glide wrapper, and cli starting) but I'm also impressed I can seemingly take most of what I did on Linux right on-over to FreeBSD with little tweaking (FreeBSD D2 notes)!

I have my desktop set-up mostly down enough to be productive and play games (still need to check 2004scape and WoW), but I'm eager to get FreeBSD on my server next! Looks like nginx, php-fpm, and MariaDB are all available, and I expect it to be pretty easy for a first-time BSD server experience

I was using Fedora Workstation primarily 20-something until 38 or 39 no problem, but I started experiencing a gamble with logging in from GNOME. I figured it'd just get-fixed eventually, but it continued with Fedora 40. I tried Plasma 6 fresh on F40, and ran into OOM killer really making me question what developers are prioritizing. I went to openSUSE TW GNOME for a bit because it didn't have that unstable log-in, but it started happening there too eventually (guess some update). I greatly dislike Wayland. systemd I let pass but started questioning that a while back when VPN connections could leak through it because it had its own DNS rules or something. Fedora forums are more and more populated with Atomics and other non-Workstation stuff, and they even added an AI chat bot. All that, paired with GNOME and Plasma prioritizing Wayland without session restores making unrelated apps/work held-hostage if the DE gets huffy, GNOME being broken, and no mainstream distro prioritizing Xfce or Xorg has me not interested in Linux's future.

The first time I was almost interested in installing BSD was with DragonflyBSD a couple years back, but I heard it was odd about newer AMD GPUs while also being the best BSD for newer GPUs (I don't quite remember specifics but I had RX 580 or 6600 XT). I've messed with Hackintosh (PearOS, Tiger, up to SL) and kind-of had a taste of BSD already, but right now is the most I've ever really dived into it