2024-06-21
A friend noticed that I mentioned that I had been mentioning that I #RUNBSD, and asked about my motivations for switching from Linux. My answer seemed reasonably coherent, and so I've cleaned it up a bit and documented it here.
These days, my faffing about in the arcane arts of technical jiggery pokery are purely a hobby. Beyond having a few things which I take care of to keep a houseful of clowns happy, I am able use whatever tools please me to get the tasks related to computer touching sorted.
Something on the order of twenty years ago, I made a similar journey when I migrated from Windows to Linux. It was not a popular decision at the time, and I've experienced the growing pains and dramatic changes as the project evolved from misfit experiment to a properly grown up and legitimate computing platform.
I am also something of a misfit experiment. I suspect some part of my desire to explore elsewhere was my lack of ability to properly appreciate the shiny slickness that time and so much passionate work brought to the project.
That professional polish also brought with it a ton of complexity, which I found overwhelming at times. I like to understand, even in a vague sense, how my tools work. Black boxes make me nervous, and I tend to adhere to the principle that simple tools break less.
There's also the fact that software is written by people. Those people inevitably form communities, and those communities inevitably have problems. This is human nature, and getting a chance to step back so I could figure out how I felt about some of those things seemed like a valuable experience.
I can't remember what initially put the BSDs on my radar. What I do remember is that their world seemed smaller, quieter, and lot more like the formative days of my free software experience. While it was different, and different things are sometimes scary, I decided to start exploring.
FreeBSD was my first attempt, and I quickly felt the same overwhelming feeling that comes from having too many knobs to twiddle. As a project I think it's a terrific set of tools, however it was not what I was looking for at the time. I left with a positive impression, and have plans to wander back down that path in the future.
After a bit of reading, I gave OpenBSD a try on an old laptop. I immediately liked a lot of what I found there. Things were well thought out, and those thoughts were well documented enough that I could learn my way around the system quickly. Rather than scouring the internet for forums and blogs with random potential solutions to my problems, I could rely on the curated official documentation to point me in the correct direction.
In those rare moments where my half-baked ideas were so convoluted that there was no official solution, I found a community filled with lovely people who were willing to help me learn. Those people might be busy technology wizards, but without fail they were always kind and willing to take a moment to point me at answers when I got stuck.
When I finally had a problem with a piece of hardware that was not of my own making, I got 1 on 1 help debugging it from the person who wrote the driver.
I kept learning, and recently a few other members of that community held my hand as I learned to package software. Thanks to their willingness to help me help myself, I'm now maintaining a couple of ports. Being able to help a project like that was new for me. Despite my lack of experience or credentials, I was never kept from trying to help.
This sort of human scaled computing experience resonated deeply with me, and so I stuck with it. Slowly OpenBSD worked its way onto all of the machines I manage, and it has served my needs really well.
Day to day, it's delightfully boring. Things work, and stay out of my way so I can focus on more interesting things.
As I still intermittently suffer from brain fog due to long covid, being a "boring" solution has been an unexpectedly helpful bonus: I'm convinced that I have been able to keep everything spinning along through my less mentally together days is because I switched everything critical over to a set of tools which are less likely to break when left only minimally attended.