6th October 2024 - FreeBSD
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My first real concious use of BSDs was through SDF. I joined in 2021
after finding out about gopher and found it rather bewildering. I had
used BSD via a mac while in primary school many moons ago but that
did not involve any command line stuff. I soon got my head around
NetBSD thanks to the tutorials and reading around. However, simply
using an operating system does not really help matters. The effort of
keeping things working is mostly removed from you. However, this is
where you see how helpful an OS is.
SDF's introduction of beastie which runs OpenBSD as opposed to NetBSD
was a useful exposure to the differences in BSDs. I find it hard to
make sense of which BSD to use as they are similar and yet different.
In the end, I have decided it is about who's documentation you prefer.
I played around with NomadBSD which is a live bootable version of one
of the BSDs. I forget which. It introduced me to the errata and
applying those changes. I borked a few installs through that. However,
it is a frustrating OS as it forces the use of OpenBox as a window
manager. Not my favourite and the boot times were pretty long. In
fairness, they are quick considering what NomadOS is trying to do.
After some mucking around I decided to play with a VPS. I tried the
SDF VPS and found it rather good. I was a little baffled with how to
set things up and lacked a fair bit of knowledge. However, I did get
help quickly from membership. The SDF VPS interface is nice and gives
you plenty of control. Costwise, it is pretty damn cheap. I found
myself not using it. I was lacking a purpose. I also worried about
having to keep asking membership for help with daft beginner things.
Silly I know but we all have these moments of being daft.
During various interactions, I caught a link from mnw to a vps hosting
price comparison place. This came as I was wondering about hosting my
own gopher site. Well, one price caught my eye. Hizakura, a
Netherlands based company offered a fairly low spec VPS at 10 Euros a
year. Now this was worth mucking around with. I have turned it into my
web and gopher hosting for the FLUX radio programme meta files. One of
the frustrations with aNONradio's archives is the inability to find
the meta data. I ended up with FreeBSD for this VPS. Well, I had not
tried it on any other platform and the documentation seemed more
approachable. The larger user base means more chance of finding
answers.
I have found FreeBSD rather delightful to work with. I mean NetBSD and
OpenBSD were great to work with as well. Things just work and I am not
battling systemd. The daemons seem to give me sensible feedback and
are simple enough to configure. I have not tried setting up syncthing
and this is something I probably should play with. That was the last
time I was battling with systemd. However, I am running a http and a
gopher server with ease. The other side of FreeBSD I have appreciated
is the easy package management and system upgrades. I managed to
upgrade from 13.3 to 14.1 in 30 minutes today. Most of that was trying
to remember the syntax for config file mergers so I could work out
what I was looking at. The other aspect which surprises me is how
quick FreeBSD appears to be. It is fractions of a second but it just
seems to be quicker. I cannot really explain. It is silly.
I appreciate I have not tried running a desktop with FreeBSD. This may
very well change my mind. I would love to use FreeBSD on more devices
but I tend to use laptops and that means wifi fun times. Hopefully the
new efforts to improve this side of life will work. My next desktop is
very likely to run FreeBSD. I am also tempted to move the tmux session
hosting and syncthing master Raspberry Pi over to FreeBSD.
I am enjoying FreeBSD and glad it remains an option. I need to learn
about features such as jails now.
