[hackshack]

A bit off-topic, but as a FreeBSD newbie: This summer I switched my ~6 home servers from CentOS to FreeBSD and absolutely love it. Trigger event was trying to set up a dedicated Linux VM for Ubiquiti's UniFi controller software. I was really fighting various dependencies in CentOS, then Ubuntu Server, then Debian... and saw that FreeBSD had an up-to-date package. Newbie FreeBSD user, from ISO install in a VM, to running Unifi Controller, took maybe 45 minutes. I was impressed and as I dug deeper, I began to appreciate its design.

As a 20+ year Linux user and 10+ year paid Linux admin, BSD has really connected with me as a sysadmin. Besides the clean filesystem structure and updated docs, there's generally "one way to do something" (looking at you, Red Hat...) and surprisingly, the packages are more up to date than I'm used to in CentOS / Ubuntu Server, usually tracking the latest stable releases. For the core system, there appears to be no update churn as with Linux distros.

After I discovered the FreeBSD images for the Raspberry Pi, it scratched my tinkerer itch and now... yeah.

People joke about The Year of Linux on the Desktop, but I believe we've been there since ~2014, when Chromebooks started to really get good. Goes to show a full "desktop environment," as we know it, isn't always needed for a great experience.