Hi, I am Andreas Drewke (andreasdr) from Berlin/Germany and a happy BSD user. My story is not like straight ahead maybe but still very BSD related.
My first contact with BSD was in 2004 I guess, since I discovered NetBSD at this time, after playing around with Linux and BeOS. It was approximatly the 2.0 release. I loved its performance, the clean design in many terms, and the userland/cli tools. Also the geekyness. I did not know about OpenBSD but FreeBSD. However I was disgusted by FreeBSDs installer this time.
I played around with NetBSD/macppc and ended up using NetBSD/i386 on my Lenovo R40 laptop at work. I had a contract which involved software development with JAVA mainly and some CSS/HTML and Lotus Notes/Domino :D I even had Lotus Notes/Domino via Wine running on this laptop. It was a lot of fun! Somewhere I have a evidence screenshot :D I ran this setup for 2 years until my NetBSD got broken.
Later on I did a 3 years pause regarding software development.
When coming back I bought a MacBook Pro with MacOS X which is also similar to BSD. I was tired of open source operating systems that needed too much focus on fixing and setting up things instead of just getting work done. I still use a MacBook Pro for my jobs from time to time, but came back to BSD in 2017. This time it was FreeBSD.
Because then I got a very fast AMD Ryzen based machine and got my feeling back of a real workstation PC that costs a quarter of a MacBook Pro and outperform MacOSX significantly, I guess mainly due to better hardware. FreeBSD is my current OS of choice. Large portions of my 3D engine and our current game I am working on, were developed while using FreeBSD. Nobody believes it maybe, but I can tell you that FreeBSD is faster than Linux and a lot faster than Windows 10 if it comes to giving CPU cycles to its processes or maybe also file system and disc IO. Believe me I have every of those OS on my machine on equal drives :DDD
FreeBSD only took like 3 hours to set it up for me and then it just works. One time I did manage to destroy it, but this was after 1+ years of usage.
Unfortunatly I can not check NetBSD currently or OpenBSD as the first lacks 3D hardware acceleration for current graphic cards and the second has still issues with AMDGPU driver. However FreeBSD + NVIDIA first and later AMDGPU served me real, real great. I am in love. For about 2 years now. <3 <3 <3
I could probably tell more, but thats it for now.
Oh btw. I would love to know some more BSD people (in Berlin). Anyone wants to start a Berlin BSD user group?
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