FreeBSD Fridays: The Writing Scholar’s Guide to FreeBSD
Channel: FreeBSD
Date: 2021-10-25

Lifelong computer geek and Ph.D. candidate in Church history Corey Stephan has found that FreeBSD satisfies everything that he desires in a desktop operating system for his multisource historical research and writing. As Stephan suggests in his recent FreeBSD Journal article “FreeBSD for the Writing Scholar,” these needs coalesce around three themes at which this particular OS excels: documentation, stability, and security. In this talk, Stephan answers the question with which that article is likely to leave the reader–namely, ‘I see that FreeBSD has what it takes to be a superb backbone for my scholarly workflow, but what should I actually do with it?’ From building a portable set of dotfiles with ancient language legibility (through long hours of study) in mind to working with little-known but powerful command-line interface tools, Stephan cheekily explains (almost) everything that he has found to work best in FreeBSD for his unusual use case(s). Stephan hopes to inspire other academics to become Unix geeks while showing more typical FreeBSD project contributors that their labors yield fruits beyond the server and enterprise usage scenarios that tend to dominate FreeBSD’s various discussion zones. Newcomers to FreeBSD who might like to learn about using it as a desktop operating system, Unix graybeards who are hoping to learn about tiling window manager usage for the first time, FreeBSD kernel developers who would not mind receiving a metaphorical pat on the back, and anyone interested in this internally consistent descendant of primordial Unix should appreciate what Stephan has to say.