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.