[adamddev1]

I remember growing up in grade school my friend's older brother was a very active contributer to FreeBSD. I remember being fascinated by the FreeBSD desktop they had running in the living room and this alternate universe of free software he was helping to create. I don't remember much other than his rants against windows (he thought it was terrible that people let their computers would do stuff like run CD-ROMs automatically on insert) and staring awestruck at some of his big-kid C/C++ files before me and and my friend went to tinker with our kiddie QBasic. But something about that ingrained in me a fascination with FreeBSD at an early age. I just thought it was so incredibly cool. It ran so lean and cleanly. It was made by passionate nerds like my friend's big brother, volunteers driven by a desire to do things correctly, clearly, and simply. Something about it just seemed so awesome and right. But I didn't have a computer of my own to run it on. Years later I went on to be a Linux user but have often wondered about diving into FreeBSD due to some strange form of nostalgia and sentimentalism.

[grumpyprole]

I remember being a new Linux user in the mid-90s at university. I was told by more than one computer science nerd that FreeBSD was more mature and reliable, which was probably true back then. But Linux just seemed to be where the excitement was (it even had coloured ls output!).

[nix23]

>was more mature and reliable, which was probably true back then.

Those two points are still true compared to linux.