# Ditching Linux in Favour of BSD / ed formatting prompt // 20-02-12

[sparcipx][1] started a small gopher thread about ditching Linux in
favour of BSDs, OpenBSD in this case, pointing out it was for no
particular reason but rather out of boredom. Others chimed in, but
(not astonishingly) mostly citing *very specific* reasons why they
did so. I also have switched from Linux to (Free)BSD, although for
mixed reasons: I had slightly bad feelings about systemd, yes, but
for several years I wanted to have a closer look at BSDs, which I
only knew a bit from SDF.org (purely from a user's viewpoint). So
this was an opportunity rather than a need.
I tried OpenBSD but found it difficult on my old portable hardware
then, so I gave FreeBSD a try, and I've stuck to it for some years
now. However, I'd have no issues switching back to OpenBSD. All of
the BSDs seem very reliable and well done to me, and I would have
difficulties in deciding for one of them (aside of fitness for
specific applications like servers/laptops/gaming/whatever, but
I'm not really the expert on that).

OTOH, I don't feel any desire to switch back to Linux, although
I'm quite happy with Debian at work, but there I'm just a user
(profiting from the knowledge and experience of the fine team at
nic.phys.ethz.ch) and no sysadmin. I have no desire to learn to
work with systemd, and the cheap VPSs I'm using to host some of
my stuff I'm basically running "out of the box" with Ubuntu, not
caring much about their innards. They could also run on anything
else, provided it offers all my favourite command line tools. ^-^

---

Side note about writing: [solene][2] mentioned a clever idea of
using ed's prompt as formatting tool, but unfortunately I forgot
to bookmark the post and can only refer to the author, sorry!
I'm writing this with the prompt consisting of 5 TAB, a dot,
3 more TAB and a colon, which gives handy marks at columns 40
and 64, the latter well suited as line length indicator for such
gopher posts.

[1]: gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/sparcipx/phlog/February_2020
[2]: gopher://dataswamp.org:70/1/~solene/