owo, what’s this?
Hewwo everyone, I’m yuki_is_bored. You may know me on Twitter or Fediverse or you may know me for my open source work at coala, notably dependency_management.
I’ve been using BSDs since 2016 and I’ve started using them as my daily driver in 2017. Like some people, I moved to BSD systems because of the advent of systemd.
But unlike what most people say about it, I gotta say that I kinda like the idea of having a complete system layer maintained in a single repository rather than a compilation of software created by random people (kinda like BSD, though some people will send me death threats if I say that).
My dislike of the project is mostly aimed at the poor maintainership
of the project along with the terrible community management thanks
to le terrible, Lennart Poettering. Feedback and suggestions to the
project (especially those related to security concerns) will be
thrown into /dev/null or be tagged as “notfix”.
After experiencing Debian’s first baby steps into systemd along
with the terrible events surrounding of the past systemd maintainer
that have lead my laptop into the new world of libsystemd hell,
I had enough and decided to move to other distributions which doesn’t
use systemd.
Around this time, People thought Devuan was a clever ‘troll’ in the Debian mailing list and people were skeptical about the future of the project. The Anti-systemd movement was on the rise and the debut of a lot of systemd-free distribution. There wasn’t a lot of choices which I like so I decided to move to Gentoo/Funtoo which seems promising.
I liked Gentoo because of its flexibility which is granted by its BSD ports inspired system called Portage and Gentoo also has a lot of small communities within its community such as the Hardened Gentoo community which delivers a hardened kernel, userland and compiler.
During my days of emerging various ports and perfecting my system, I slowly found its flaws as well. At that time, LibreSSL support was bad along with some roadblocks with Portage1 that ultimately made me recompile my whole system numerous times. I ultimately became unsatisfied with Gentoo.
Around this time, I discovered FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I discovered OpenBSD mostly because of the Heartbleed incident and its response to it and I discovered FreeBSD because of the rising popularity of ZFS. I tried playing with them but back then, I had decided to stay with my Linux-isms and just keep trying to build the perfect system out of mismash of different tools.
In 2016, I was helping my school with setting up a new school-wide WiFi. While I was searching solutions for the main router, I found a project called pfSense which uses FreeBSD as the base operating system. It is a Free (as in Freedom) firewall solution that can run on normal amd64 machines. I thought that this was a great choice and thus I decided to use it. The school’s system administrator was skeptical about using a free solution instead of using a well-known solution such as MikroTik’s Routerboards. So, We decided to compare the two. The pfSense setup was very easy and straightforward. I got my setup running in mere hours. After I got it setup and connected it to the network, The school sysadmin borrowed a routerboard from one of his colleague since we didn’t have a license nor hardware for it and tested it.
The “makeshift” pfSense router which was using an old unused machine was more capable than the routerboard. On top of being a router, we can easily do other stuff as well such as having an IDS to protect the network, Windows update caching, etc. So we ultimately decided to go with the BSD route rather than the MikroTik way.
Thanks to pfSense, I began to fall into this rabbit hole which is BSD. I learned how it works along with how the project is maintained and structured. In the end, I fell in love with it. Since pfSense is using pf, I thought about how helpful it is to learn more about PF so I read “The Book of PF”.
From there, I discovered more about OpenBSD and start to like it. So, I migrated the router from the pfSense system to OpenBSD because I believed it was more lighter and I like the pf.conf(5) syntax so much rather than the GUI editor. After I boot my USB flash drive that has been flashed with installfs, I was surprised by how beautiful simplicity can be.
To me, OpenBSD is the very definition of consistent quality. It feels like a proper complete operating system made by very talented developers. It never once felt like a compilation of different tools rather it feels more like a whole experience that has been crafted to perfection. At that point, I started to understand how beautiful a true UNIX system can be. With that, I believe the OpenBSD project has raised the barrier of quality that other operating systems should follow.
At that point, I decided to move to OpenBSD. I read the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD by Michael W. Lucas, the FAQs, the beautiful manpages and I subscribed to the mailing lists (announce, misc, tech and ports) and joined the IRC channel.
Before this, I couldn’t imagine how beautiful an operating system can be. OpenBSD is the perfect example of that. It is a great example of thriving towards correctness, consistency and overall perfection. Each line of code is crafted along with the documention which are made with love. Suggestions and feedback are taken seriously. However, it is not for everyone. They wrote the operating system for themselves and its users. Thus, it lacks the fancy bells and whistles which the community deemed to be unimportant or harmful.
Okay, how about FreeBSD?
After I got a new laptop to replace my Thinkpad E430 which had a broken case due to chemicals eating away the plastic case (whoops), I decided that I need a server to store and sync my files along with an always on torrent machine.
First, I tried using OpenBSD. It did pretty well but I wouldn’t say it was a really good experience. OpenBSD’s FFS2 file system is pretty good for the most part but lacks the performance, the shiny bells and whistles. fsck is very basic, I regularly have to scour through lost+found every time there’s a power failure.
So, I decided to give FreeBSD a go. While it doesn’t have the same consistent quality as OpenBSD, it is a decent operating system with some quirks. However, once you know its quirks (and how to fix them), it’s a really great operating system. Thanks to the amazing technologies which is shipped by FreeBSD like Jails and ZFS, I was able to have a great experience.
It was able to handle all of my hentai anime collection that I
throw at it without a sweat. High workloads like streaming HD videos
while downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of data wasn’t a problem
for it. I began experiencing technological nirvana where I don’t
have to worry about loosing data (thanks to file synchronization
with Syncthing) and I don’t have to worry about the whole operating
system taking a 180 degree turn without advanced notice. I started
to worry less and just focus on my work.
Thanks to my BSD experience, I started to have experience in other UNIX opearting systems and interoperability between them and I was able to do rigourous testing on cross UNIX compatibility for coala.
As of the time I’m writing this which is my 2nd year of daily driving BSD, I’m a happy camper that won’t go back to lennart-ware infested penguin land . Thanks to the warmth of the BSD community along with the friends and people I met along the way, I was able to get an experience that is incomparable to the one I had with Linux.
The BSD community feels more like a family rather than a huge bazzar filled with millions of people. I feel like I’m on the same boat as the whole BSD community rather than “some random user”.
I’m hoping to be able to contribute back to the BSD project in the future.
Right now, I’m rocking a beefed up X220 with FreeBSD, an Android phone that is totally degoogled and I’m starting to use BSD systems at work.
Anyway, if you want to follow me in my adventures (well, not physically, please don’t literally follow me), You can follow me on Fediverse or Twitter (though, I’m more active on Fediverse now).
You can also go to my blog where I write about my adventures with computers, my hobbies and (mostly) random thoughts.
Have you experienced how fun it is to update gcc? :) ↩
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