Hello fellow BSD users. My name is Kirpaul and I have been using computers since my first 486 DX2-66 in 1993. Hated them prior to that for whatever reason, but once I unboxed that Packard Bell and fired it up, I knew I was hooked. I immediately got rid of Packard Bell Navigator and uncovered the even more horrific Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I didn’t know what was out there but I knew I didn’t want Windows. I immediately started searching for a replacement and found OS/2 Warp, which I quickly got and installed via floppy. When Windows 95 came out I jumped back on that bandwagon because it frankly didn’t look bad and I thought it would be fine. After many blue screens and frustrations, in 1998 I found Mandrake Linux in my local military exchange for around $30. I installed Linux and never looked back. I had zero knowledge of BSD at that time.
Later during my Linux desktop usage I did hear about FreeBSD, but still didn’t know anything about it or how it was different than Linux. After 20 years of Linux usage, I grew tired of discord in the “camp” and the implementation of systemd, which although worked for me, did not sit well with me in terms of overall design philosophy. It did not do “one thing and one thing well”, it did 500 things and was not simple at all. I had a friend at work that was a huge FreeBSD fan, albeit for servers, not desktops. Through his encouragement, I went for it and replace Linux as my desktop with FreeBSD. I am not going to say there weren’t growing pains, but I persevered and am 100% on FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE as my desktop. I can write, do banking, scan docs and photos, game, anything I could do on my Linux desktop previously.
I now have a monster workstation (HP Z800, 2x6 Core Xeons, 96 GB RAM) I use headless as my package build server and serve packages to my brand new home built PC running 12.0-RELEASE. I implemented poudriere on the build box and use nginx to serve the packages to the PC. This was implemented using how-tos graciously contributed by the FreeBSD community on the FreeBSD forums. The sense of community and amount of help makes me feel excited to fire up my system, learn new things and contribute back to help others. You will not find this sense of community among commercial OS users.
Thanks go out to Roman for providing the means to share our stories!
You can find me on Twitter.
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