My Journey to FreeBSD

The other day I saw a post about someone's journey into FreeBSD, and I really appreciated the sentiment and story. So I figured it was high time that I report on my journey to FreeBSD.

TLDR; FreeBSD makes sense as a server and a desktop, so I have been using that for quite some time now.

In the beginning, I had been a Linux user since I was about 15 years old. My dad was a home-teacher (now called "ministering", it's an LDS thing) to our neighbor down the road, and this neighbor was a major computer guy. He would give me advice and tell me things like, "only learn Java, it's the future." One day he gave me a set of installation CD's for SuSE Linux 9. I think that's the right version. This was over two decades ago :-) I happily took them and started messing around on the old computers I somehow had at home (one time I found an old tower in a garbage can, and utilized that for a while).

At some point I started using Debian. There was this amazing website called aboutdebian.com (it seems defunct now) that had step by step instructions for setting up a web server and other useful things. I was able to setup and host websites from my parents basement! I learned how to use those systems decently well. Then, when I was in high school, I was just about the only person who had ever really heard of and used Linux. Gone are those days, since Linux is a common name now!

After finishing high school I had this thought process that computers were just too nerdy for me. I didn't want to do computers for the rest of my life. I went on an LDS mission, taught the restored gospel of Christ, and then returned home, ready for my next step in education. Long story short, I ended up studying software. I avoided it for as long as I could, but that is what I finally chose and completed a degree in. I have the paper to prove it.

I worked for Bluehost for a while, and during this period of time I continued to solidify my Linux knowledge. Our workstations used Xubuntu, and the servers were all CentOS. I was a full on Linux user, and within a few years I was doing Linux system administration as well.

Then one day, two things collided that changed me. First, my spirit has a strong sense of preserving the things of the past, especially where it makes sense and can help make things better. And second, at work we were needing a new firewall at my workplace, and pfSense came onto the radar. Having learned that pfSense is FreeBSD based, and that FreeBSD has a closer lineage to the Unix that came out of Bell Labs, I was sold. I started little by little into FreeBSD, and although it had some oddities at first, I realized that it was a complete system that worked well, provided a great filesystem, and it just made sense.

Actually, there was a third reason. The way my mind works is that I like to find a different solution. I hope that some of my readers can relate to that. I just don't want to do the popular mainstream thing. I want to forge my own path, where I can. I have respect for the trail that has already been blazed, but I'm curious what my own God-given talents and experience can produce.

And now that I think about it, there is a fourth reason: privacy. At some point I found that systemd's default/failover DNS option was 8.8.8.8...Google. I don't like to be tracked or spied on, and I definitely did not want my operating system to fail-over to what I consider the world's largest spy agency on the history of mankind. I realize that FreeBSD may have something within the source that may not exactly match my preference, but at least on the surface level, leaving systemd and the other intrusions of modern Linux behind was a big deal.

And so it goes, I had become disenchanted with systemd in the Linux world. I saw it as something that was essentially taking over the entirety of Linux distros. Every distro was falling prey to this new init system. This is demonstrated by systemd having grown in size and scope year after year. This goes against not just the Unix philosophy, but my own personal constitution. Don't get me wrong, I found systemd useful, and it worked well, and adding new service files wasn't too painful, but I just didn't like the direction things were going.

Even though I greatly appreciate the free market, and that everyone has the ability to change and alter open source software as they need and as they like, I just didn't feel compelled to continue distro hopping on Linux. I liked the Debian-style distros the most, but I always felt left out if I wasn't using Fedora or something RedHat based. Then there was always the nagging feeling that if I wasn't using Gentoo, then maybe I wasn't keeping up like I wanted. FreeBSD helped me subconsciously check all those boxes.

On that note about Gentoo, there was a period of time in there where I switched over to Gentoo Linux, but I found the need to compile literally everything to be exhausting.

So FreeBSD just made sense to me, and it fell into place. I installed it on my primary workstation for the day job, and I haven't looked back yet. I sort of did one time, but I solved the issue with an Alpine Linux VM. In FreeBSD, the flow of things just made sense. The packaging system made sense. The port system made sense. The variety of firewall options made sense, although I have only used pf. The bootloader made sense. The uniformity made sense. And best of all, pfSense was deployed and worked flawless for a long time.

As for the privacy, I felt my FreeBSD was much more privacy-respecting. Upon installation, the user is asked if they want to enable the NTP (time syncing) daemon. To me, this is a huge huge win. An operating system that even bothers asking? That is incredible. Because most people probably don't even know that their computers are sending outbound packets frequently. And changing the DNS resolvers via the /etc/hosts file was already something I was doing, so I don't mention much about that.

I should mention at this point, then along this journey I picked up some OpenBSD skills as well. I use a pure OpenBSD install for my firewall, and I found that OpenBSD works quite well on laptops. So I actually use a mix of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Sometimes there is troubles when doing modern front-end development or mobile app development, so there is other systems I involve into my workflow when needed. And my company servers are FreeBSD, using ZFS and jails. Whenever I consider if I should move back to Linux, I feel a bit like Peter in the New Testament. When Jesus see's that some people are offended by him, he turns to his disciples and asks, "will ye also go away?" Then Peter responds, "to whom shall we go?"

Valete!

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