How/when did your experience with BSD systems begin?

I started using FreeBSD in 2002, so it'd have been 4.6 or 4.7. I maintained using FreeBSD on my personal system until switching to macOS in 2009 (Snow Leopard). In between these, I used NetBSD on a couple of older systems and tried DragonFly. Over this time, I used various Linux distributions for my servers.

I switched to using OpenBSD on my personal systems in 2018 and FreeBSD on my servers in 2019. I've been extremely happy with this pairing.

I do most of my programming (in a variety of languages, though mostly C & Forth) under OpenBSD, then do test builds under FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly. (FreeBSD's support for running Linux binaries is helpful in testing.) FreeBSD's reliability & ZFS make it great for hosting my projects and various private resources.

@stefano Actually, my acquaintance with Freebsd started with Debian GNU/kfreebsd. The differences of opinion between the Linux kernel and the GNU infrastructure and the existence of alternative kernels (Hurd, kfreebsd) attracted my attention. I used Debian GNU/kfreebsd for a while, then development stopped and I switched back to Debian. I use and experiment with a wide range of programs and Debian is fine.

My first experience was sometime in the 90s, running NetBSD on an Amiga using it as a name server. I think it was an a1000, but don't quote me on that, it wasn't my hardware. Not sure which version we used, but I do remember /etc/passwd had passwords in clear text.

About 10 years ago. I browsed subreddit where people posted screenshots of their desktops. A French person would post regularly, and I was following the journey of how minimal their setup was. Eventually they moved to BSD. I had no idea what it was, but once I started reading into it I couldn’t stop. I installed it on an old Dell laptop that someone was throwing away and I loved how easy the OpenBSD installation was. Been running it on my laptops and servers ever since.

@stefano 2002, netbsd 1.6

I had a MicroVAX II with some upgrades (KA655 CPU, 16M memory, 2G DSSI disk...) running 4.3BSD around the year 2000. I used Ultrix to stage the OS installation. Such a cool computer. Loved it, but I finally said goodbye to it when simh added VAX support. I kind of miss that machine, now that I think about it.

I see lots of potential applications for the various BSDs today, but no place I've worked has really given me the latitude to use whatever I want. Most places have forced me to use RHEL for the support that's available. :-(

In the beginning of 2000's, read a linux mag, special edition dedicated to the bsd. I was on holiday, but 1st thing I did back home was to install a freebsd (desktopbsd in fact) on an old computer. It was already supporting cpu frequency management back in those days.

@stefano
First tech job in 2000/2001 was local isp. We had a FreeBSD shell server for IRC bots. I’d already been exposed to IRIX and was hacking on Slackware and redhat, but the ports tree really was an eye opener.

Was the beginning of a long relationship where I daily drive it on my main workstations and laptops, not to mention my personal servers and on AWS for work.