After playing with FreeBSD from time to time on VMs and occasionally on the Raspberry Pi (I’ve got plenty of them, nevermind), eventually the time was ripe for joining the party for (hopefully) a little bit longer. With this end in view and without much hesitation I ordered cheap (550 PLN = $150) used 13" MacBook Pro (early 2013) with Retina display.
After changing the battery (a twelve year old factory one was swollen) and dumping system info from ancient macOS High Sierra, it was the right time to boot FreeBSD from USB flash drive and wipe the ancient SSD with Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 controller.
Installing FreeBSD on this quite old, but well-built machine was a breeze. Initially I was wondering about dual-boot, but anyway… I’m not interested in half measures so now macOS is entirely gone. One could say that I undertook an apostasy from The Church of Mac and 10 commands (⌘) no longer apply to me.
I’m not gonna lie that it is totally new experience for me, so I will not praise all of the advantages of FreeBSD. But after years of playing with various Linux distributions I can’t just move along without noticing how consistent this system really is.
Terrible Linux fragmentation on every system level:
- init system (systemd vs OpenRC/s6/runit),
- libc (glibc vs musl),
- GUI toolkit (GTK vs Qt),
- or the whole desktop environment (GNOME vs KDE)
makes you actually love FreeBSD for that consistency.
No init system wars. No desktop environments fights. Just pure BSD experience.
This is my first FreeBSD post so stay tuned!
