FreeBSD was my first real introduction to Unix and, even though I don't use it anymore, I'm still very fond of it.

This was about 15 or 16 years ago, I think. That was back when hardware support, both in Linux and in FreeBSD (and in most other free operating systems) was very flaky, and FreeBSD was the only one that I could get my network card and RAID controller to reliably work on. I ran Linux for a while, but unreliably and with out-of-tree drivers running over strange Frankenkernels. One sleepless, outrageously hot summer night, I tried FreeBSD (4.1, I think? Or 5.0?) and it remained on my hard drive for a pretty long time.

I learned to properly use Emacs on it, after outgrowing NEdit and SciTE. I learned how to write portable (hah...) Unix code, learned about SSH and kqueue and ACPI and firewalls. I learned to use patch and wrote my first open source program from scratch, whose source code has been thankfully buried forever but for a summer or so, I wrote the worst Windows desktop clone you have ever seen (that was back when Qt 3 could deliver us from STL and everyone wrote their own window manager for fun and it had real artwork, not boring, flat themes).

I also learned ksh, having learned that bash is not the only shell in this world. I learned about OSS and could not quite stomach Alsa ever since.

I learned about the ports system and that was a whole new world for me and I'd spend days tinkering with programs I didn't really need, just for the fun of it.

I mostly lurked on the mailing lists. I was thankfully past my script kiddie period and was comfortable admitting I didn't know much about programming and system administration, so I was a little intimidated; I joined discussions rarely, and under a pseudonym, but I read the public mailing lists religiously, and learned a lot from them.

Unfortunately, using FreeBSD on a desktop today is a little harder for me, now that portability is considered more of a stone-age concept for old farts who haven't yet installed Arch Linux on their laptops. It's certainly possible (I toyed with 11.1 a little and it's great) but it requires a little more tinkering than I have time for. Admittedly, that's mostly my fault; I chose a career path (embedded systems) that involves weird FPGAs and microcontrollers and the Linux bandwagon, so the little free time I have is spent getting up to date with stuff like Wayland. Sometimes I tell to myself I'm going to get a long vacation and work on something useful for OpenBSD or FreeBSD and maybe work my way into a job (or a consulting gig, and then another, and then another...) where I can use one of them, but then real life kicks in and I'm back to the Land of Useless Manpages.

I've long lost touch with FreeBSD development and don't know too much about what's happened lately. I've heard that the project has made a number of questionable choices in terms of development, and something about the security team being slow, but I really don't know too much on the subject, so it didn't get a chance to change my opiniong of this project. Granted, I don't know if this is true anymore -- but back then, I thought FreeBSD's pragmatism and clean approach to engineering was something to strive for, and I'm pretty disappointed that it hasn't become more popular in the open source world.

Happy birthday, FreeBSD! Here's for another 25 years of quality software.