FreeBSD Celebrates 25th Anniversary
FreeBSD was my first real introduction to Unix and, even though I don&#x27;t use it anymore, I&#x27;m still very fond of it.<p>This was about 15 or 16 years ago, I think. That was back when hardware support, both in Linux and in FreeBSD (and in most other free operating systems) was very flaky, and FreeBSD was the only one that I could get my network card and RAID controller to reliably work on. I ran Linux for a while, but unreliably and with out-of-tree drivers running over strange Frankenkernels. One sleepless, outrageously hot summer night, I tried FreeBSD (4.1, I think? Or 5.0?) and it remained on my hard drive for a pretty long time.<p>I learned to properly use Emacs on it, after outgrowing NEdit and SciTE. I learned how to write portable (hah...) Unix code, learned about SSH and kqueue and ACPI and firewalls. I learned to use patch and wrote my first open source program from scratch, whose source code has been thankfully buried forever but for a summer or so, I wrote the worst Windows desktop clone you have ever seen (that was back when Qt 3 could deliver us from STL and everyone wrote their own window manager for fun and it had real artwork, not boring, flat themes).<p>I also learned ksh, having learned that bash is not the only shell in this world. I learned about OSS and could not quite stomach Alsa ever since.<p>I learned about the ports system and that was a whole new world for me and I&#x27;d spend <i>days</i> tinkering with programs I didn&#x27;t really need, just for the fun of it.<p>I mostly lurked on the mailing lists. I was thankfully past my script kiddie period and was comfortable admitting I didn&#x27;t know much about programming and system administration, so I was a little intimidated; I joined discussions rarely, and under a pseudonym, but I read the public mailing lists religiously, and learned a lot from them.<p>Unfortunately, using FreeBSD on a desktop <i>today</i> is a little harder for me, now that portability is considered more of a stone-age concept for old farts who haven&#x27;t yet  installed Arch Linux on their laptops. It&#x27;s certainly possible (I toyed with 11.1 a little and it&#x27;s great) but it requires a little more tinkering than I have time for. Admittedly, that&#x27;s mostly my fault; I chose a career path (embedded systems) that involves weird FPGAs and microcontrollers and the Linux bandwagon, so the little free time I have is spent getting up to date with stuff like Wayland. Sometimes I tell to myself I&#x27;m going to get a long vacation and work on something useful for OpenBSD or FreeBSD and maybe work my way into a job (or a consulting gig, and then another, and then another...) where I can use one of them, but then real life kicks in and I&#x27;m back to the Land of Useless Manpages.<p>I&#x27;ve long lost touch with FreeBSD development and don&#x27;t know too much about what&#x27;s happened lately. I&#x27;ve heard that the project has made a number of questionable choices in terms of development, and something about the security team being slow, but I really don&#x27;t know too much on the subject, so it didn&#x27;t get a chance to change my opiniong of this project. Granted, I don&#x27;t know if this is true anymore -- but back then, I thought FreeBSD&#x27;s pragmatism and clean approach to engineering was something to strive for, and I&#x27;m pretty disappointed that it hasn&#x27;t become more popular in the open source world.<p>Happy birthday, FreeBSD! Here&#x27;s for another 25 years of quality software.