After 5 years running FreeBSD and Xfce on my laptop I cannot imagine using anything else. I have a few Windows machines in the house and I am always flabbergasted how slow, ad-ridden and convoluted they are. To each his own, of course, but Unix desktop is absolutely freaking awesome today.

Share your sentiments about Windows, but I'm curious about what the benefits of FreeBSD are over GNU/Linux. How is the hardware compatibility?

Sorry, I think I've just responded on this in the thread above.

Indeed! I've been using the same setup for 20 years - FreeBSD + XFCE, and I love it. I toyed around with different window managers and desktop environments, but I think the developers of XFCE and I have the same philosophy. If it's not broken, don't fix it.

Not much has changed how I use my computer network over the last two decades, only small improvements, and the introduction of ZFS(a game changer).

While in my corporate job I am forced to use Windows, and for every year that passes, somehow it has gotten worse. The start menu was replaced by some horror show. The settings I used to easily change in the control panel in the Windows NT/2000/XP era are now all over the place, and always changing. And now recently, I have to go through the Microsoft app store to download software for my HP printer??

I've had similar experiences with Linux, where things are changing for no good reason. One day, ifconfig was replaced with ip????

While in FreeBSD, it's the same old configuration files as it always was. There is one thing I miss though, and that is functioning bluetooth. The wifi is not the best, but I get by using wifibox, a tiny virtual linux machine with pci passthrough for my wifi network interface.

Despite this, I still prefer FreeBSD over any other operating system. OpenBSD is great, too.

With the BSDs, I am in control of my hardware, not some profit driven mega corporation.

end rant

Yeah, this covers my feeling pretty well. Just navigating the Control Panel in Windows 10 and, especially, 11, is an exercise in sadomasochism. I think 7 was the last sane version for me. Generally, the feeling is that you no longer own your computer. The user interface is a bazaar with a circus. Everything's walled by default to keep you inside the garden. Default Windows settings make sense for a granny who has never ever used a computer before.

With FreeBSD I think I've started with Gnome 2, tried some tiling WMs like dwm (which are pretty cool!) but found myself finally at home with Xfce and Plank. It just gets the stuff done. An old FreeBSD computer feels much faster and responsive than newer machines running Windows or MacOS. With BSD I have to choose the hardware to fit the OS, and not vice versa, so, yeah, it's sort of an asana to run one, but once you get it, it feels good.

I like Linux too, but found FreeBSD to be more coherent and better documented, and I'm ready to sacrifice some hardware compatibility for that. If there were no BSDs I'd probably be running Debian. I also didn't like the shift to ip and systemd, but that's just conservative me. Stuff changes in FreeBSD too, but at a slower pace. Love OpenBSD for its purity, too.

What I currently don't like in FreeBSD is that you have to keep up with its release schedule. It's not that bad, but once in a while you have to do the major version upgrade. While it has never broke on me (I still run the same install I did originally 5 years ago), sometimes some things change unexpectedly as third party packages get forcefully upgraded. And if you don't upgrade you loose the ability to install binary packages eventually, as nobody maintains them for older FreeBSD versions, or you need to create your own repository. I don't think this concept works well for a desktop user, but what you gonna do - the resources are limited. I am very grateful to all the developers and folks maintaining the repository.

That lawsuit proves that had AT&T been allowed to sell UNIX from day one, history would have taken a different course, and C might not have been relevant outside Bell Labs.