A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.

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A personal retrospective spanning over two decades of using FreeBSD, starting from a 2002 experiment on a Sony Vaio laptop. The author contrasts FreeBSD's stability, documentation quality, and coherent design philosophy with Linux, highlighting specific features like jails, ZFS with boot environments, bhyve hypervisor, and predictable network interface naming. Beyond technical merits, the piece emphasizes the BSD community's culture of genuine passion and competence, the FreeBSD Foundation's effective but non-domineering role, and the project's commitment to serving users rather than chasing trends.

Why I Love FreeBSD