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