2022-06-05
The active SDF community seems to enjoy using the BSDs as their
main drivers quite a bit more than I would have thought.
I personally have used Linux as my main driver for many years
now but I have a great fondness for FreeBSD. In fact the very
first operating system I ever installed outside of Windows was
FreeBSD.
Around late 2001, I had an old dual Pentium II computer. This
thing was honestly well past its prime but this was still the
age of single-core computing, so having posession of a dual
slot 1 Pentium II motherboard was still kinda cool. Of course
the machine at the time had been running Windows 2000 for years
but I had recently gotten very interested in the FOSS desktop
world after watching my college roommate install Mandrake on
his computer.
I'm not sure why I didn't just install Linux at the time but
for some reason I got it into my head that FreeBSD was just
better at SMP and supporting 2 processors. It could have just
been the standard forum boasting but not knowing better at the
time, I just ran with it.
To be honest, I should have just installed debian. FreeBSD was
such a weird and user unfriendly experience that I'm actually
surprised that I bothered to stick with it. At the time, I
remember I had to recompile the FreeBSD kernel to support SMP.
It's so weird to think nowadays, but recompiling kernels to
support hardware was just something that everyone just agreed
was OK for the average user. Pretty ludicrous to be honest
and I think FreeBSD shortly thereafter just included SMP
support in their generic kernel which made me upset later.
In hindsight, the idea of using CVS to keep your FreeBSD system
up to date was also pretty nuts. I'm not sure when binary ports
became a thing but I distinctly recall using the source ports
back in the day and I actually stupidly compiled KDE3 desktop
from ports on that FreeBSD machine. I remember it definitely
took more than a day on those Pentium II 450MHz CPUs.
All in all it was a crazy introduction to Unix and the FOSS
world but in the end spending those days messing around
on FreeBSD actually helped me land my first job out of college.
In the early 2000s, Windows NT was conquering the world but
my job wanted old school Unix experience (AIX actually) and
just talking about setting up my FreeBSD computer and what I
had to do to get it working and tuned pretty much helped me
ace my 1st interview.
