0. preface (a bit of background)

I want to explain a bit where I'm coming from (spoiler: it's linux).

prehistoric

Growing up on an Amstrad CPC464 I jumped straight to PC hardware. Starting with a 286, I think on MSDOS 5, I took the classical route, DOS+Win3, Win3.11, later Win95. By that time I had usenet access and read a lot of groups (after all, dialing in to pull batches was way cheaper than staying dialed for WWW...) I learned about Linux being a thing, people praising it, and by '97 I got a boxed copy of SuSE.

linux

I repurposed my 486DX to try Linux, installed SuSE, broke it, reinstalled, broke it, ... fun times! Don't know how many times it took, but along the way I figured out how to repair the installation instead of reinstalling, got more confident, and finally dualbooted my main machine between Windows and Linux (and switched to debian along the way).

I booted windows less and less, but kept it around a few years for gaming.

(my) early BSD

The BSDs piked my interest, along the way I played a bit with Free, Net and Open. I stuck with NetBSD for my router / ISDN gateway, don't clearly remember why, but I think it supported my hardware best. What I do remember is the community being the most welcoming of all three. Later on I got a used Ultra 5 which ran NetBSD 1.6, but I didn't use it for much more than running remote X from my linux machine. I gave up both boxes when I moved out of my flatshare and didn't take them with me, ending my journey into BSD.

present

Now, for the last 20 years I linuxed for a living, and privatly don't really own a machine running anything else (apart from the playstation). Somehow the memories came back to mind, and I'm curious if I can use BSD for my workstation. Well, of course technically I can, I mean if I can use it comfortably. I did try FreeBSD (doesn't support my usb-sata-adapter right, I'll get to that) and OpenBSD (had other weird points) until I got back to Net, which at the same time gives me a warm familiar feeling and leaves me be a clueless newbie, so that's really enjoyable :)

thoughts?

you can reply to my post on the fediverse or shoot me a mail

https://bsd.network/@pickles/107434513546940104
pickles@tilde.pink
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