It has been years since I tried any BSDs and I have been given a couple of old laptops so I thought they would be perfect to have a quick play with FreeBSD. The last thing I installed a BSD on was an old Windows CE netbook with a MIPS CPU (NetBSD/hpcmips). So for FreeBSD I found a couple of introduction videos and got started. This is by no means any kind of a comprehensive review or set of deep insights into FreeBSD. This was purely a rainy afternoon of operating system curiosity.
Why am I interested in different operating systems?
One of my first computers was an Amiga. This was back in the day when Windows was on version 2 or 3.1 and you had to wrestle with DMA and IRQ settings in your config.sys to get your terrible single tasking OS to blink a lonely cursor at you. What did I learn from using the Amiga? That an operating system can be quite wonderful. Firstly fast, preemptive, multitasking (not cooperative or from my experience on Macs of that era, quite uncooperative multitasking). Secondly many helpful systems and structures that we now take for granted, but coming from DOS to an Amiga was eye opening. Some features still seem to be lost from that era such as ARexx ports which were often provided by programs to allow scripting and automation.
To get back to the point I found that operating systems were quite fascinating and over the years have enjoyed playing with the likes of BeOS, QNX, ReactOS, but Linux has really become the star of the show when it comes to operating systems nowadays.
I do also think about resilience. The widespread use of Linux on a vast number of internet connected devices does seem somewhat risky in terms of diversity and being familiar with some dissimilar systems like FreeBSD sounds like a good insurance policy.
Getting started
The install process was very smooth, if a little bit manual, and I had X up and running in no time. The startup was clean and fast and almost everything on the laptop was picked up automatically.
(e.g. Netflix and Juniper)
I like that FreeBSD has a clear separation between what is in the base system and what are ports or packages and that you can upgrade the two separately. Again, this feels like a very clean design. There are a few basic command differences such as the use of doas instead of sudo for privileged command execution, but it still seems very familiar for a Linux user. There is also a Linux compatibility subsystem which seems to offer the ability to run a large range of Linux apps on FreeBSD. I contemplated trying to get Steam running to test gaming performance, but after reading around I decided that it might be a quite time consuming.
Installing and testing a few applications was quick and easy and I can certainly understand the benefits of a single consistent operating system. The use of ZFS as the standard file system along with the excellent documentation makes me want to repartition my Linux boxes now. The snapshots and pools are great features.
Wrap up
So would I move to FreeBSD? As a lowly end user I suspect that staying with popular Linux distributions is just going to be easier for me when it comes to things like Steam for games or Pipewire for parametric audio equalisation. It is something that I might consider for a raspberry pi though. For more critical server environments it is a well trusted and highly reliable OS (e.g. it is used by Netflix and Juniper) and this is where it really shines.
