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<h1 class="title">Meeting the BSD Family</h1>
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<p>During this year I have been delving deeper and deeper in the BSD
realm. Switching my home server to FreeBSD, trying NetBSD and OpenBSD on
my backup machine, getting a cheap SSD to see how they’d all run on my
main one, all beaming with the joy of tinkering and learning.</p>
<p>As a nerd who delights in reading documentation, manuals and
handbooks, I feel like I have found a gigantic library to lose myself
in. And to me the delight of such reading is in that it’s never a
passive learning experience, but something you can act on and bring to
fruition yourself.</p>
<p>While Linux-based operating systems, with all the popularity they
have gained, have developed into a complex and extremely active
ecosystem, the BSD operating systems feel less bloated and more focused
on whatever their specialty is.</p>
<p>You can’t really complain about software availability, given the
amount of pre-packaged binaries you will find. When trying FreeBSD, I
could not miss anything I needed. More recently, on NetBSD, I also found
most of the tools I reached for.</p>
<p>Though I have a mostly text-driven workflow, doing almost all things
with a browser and a terminal alone – which certainly helps in making
your stack more portable – I do rely on some GUI applications for the
domains where they excel.</p>
<p>What you might experience is a slower pace of change for major
things, such as on Wayland adoption, which like it or not is coming for
all of us with X deprecation looming.</p>
<p>Running BSD is an incredible opportunity to really learn about
UNIX-like systems and operating systems in general.</p>
<p>Recently, I’ve been learning more about NetBSD after spending some
time with FreeBSD. And this inner diversity of fully-independent
operating systems with their own kernels and perks keeps multiplying the
learning opportunities.</p>
<p>If you already learned a lot about whatever OS you currently use, I’d
say particularly if that OS is Linux-based, when you start to play with
a BSD system you are able to realize what is similar and what is
not.</p>
<p>Whatever is different is likely teaching you the more portable, UNIX
way of doing things. Even if it isn’t, it’s teaching you how a different
OS is designed and behaves.</p>
<p>Things that are the same, which are not few, also offer learning
opportunities. You get to see what parts of a Linux-based OS perhaps
didn’t really originate there, or aren’t in any way an exclusive feature
of it.</p>
<p>Now, to lay any zealousness aside and not make this a saccharine
one-sided tale, I’d also like to mention a certain social phenomenon
that this endeavour reminded me of.</p>
<p>This is certainly not something specific to BSD, but because it has
such an engaged and savvy community, you definitely get to notice it
sometimes. I’m talking about the tendency to identify with and then
indiscriminately defend the software you use.</p>
<p>One common meme you’ll find is people complaining about lack of
hardware support, especially wifi. In response, I’ve seen people stating
with little nuance that any difficulty to getting your hardware to work
on &lt;insert a BSD OS here&gt; is to be explained by poor skills or
lack of dedication in reading the documentation.</p>
<p>I see that as denial. When everyone around is just defending
something to no end, no critiques allowed, it starts to feel… awkward,
to say the least.</p>
<p>Conversely, when I see people openly pointing out weaknesses in
something I value and that I can tell they also care for, I feel relief
and admiration for that person and that community at large. And
thankfully I have also found a lot of this among the BSD folks.</p>
<p>Because running a given operating system on a machine you rely on is
such a big commitment, it intensifies this phenomenon where users start
to identify with the software they use and defend it beyond reason.</p>
<p>It happens with frameworks, desktop environments and window managers,
but operating systems require you to commit even more because you can’t
just swap them as easily, so my guess is we identify to compensate this
sense of being tied to it. And from this identification comes an urge to
deny any defect.</p>
<p>If you are cognizant of the perils, identifying with something is not
necessarily a bad thing, though. To some extent, it is inevitable, and
being really into something, caring about it, nurturing immense
curiosity and a desire to discuss it, are all sources of pleasure I do
not excuse myself from.</p>
<p>Software wars aside, getting to know this family of operating systems
better has been a joy. It opened up whole new avenues and perspectives
to understanding operating systems as a whole, and how beyond
Linux-based OSs there are numerous other free and open source operating
systems that strengthen the diversity in this field.</p>
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<span class="date">May 20, 2024</span>
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