For me, it was Gentoo. I was a little bit lost after a bad time in the public school system, and not sure what to do with my life after that. I was fascinated by Linux, but never really got the hang of it. Used SuSE, which was fine, but I never really knew what I was doing. And then I get into Gentoo. Messed up some stage3 installs until it all started to click for me and I had the correct mental models for stuff and how it all fit together to form a complete system. That basically kickstarted my career as a Sysadmin, and I'm still a Gentoo user to this day (but only on the desktop, too much compiling for my laptop...).
I feel very, very grateful to all the folks involved. Of course to all the people behind Linux, but Gentoo especially. In a way, it saved my live. Not sure where I would have landed w/o Linux.
I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.
NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything.
No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.
I was a fan of FreeBSD over NetBSD; far more driver compatibility in the 1990s. It was nice to play with. Way too hard to use for much (well, online) now, due to the shrinking number of software packages (eg browsers) these days. I still remember how good it used to feel installing NetBSD on (now long long dead) laptop in the early/mid-90s.
I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :)
I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.
Yeah, NetBSD definitely had Sparc compatibility. I wonder how many OpenSolaris and NetBSD machines on old Sparc hardware are still on the internet (like ones that aren't doing it just to say they are).
The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.
As to why, Gary didn't say.. or even contribute again, so we could surmise it was a made-up name to make sure the company he worked for wasn't identified, but some of the replies to his mail went into more detail about why they did, you can find them here
freebsd = utility: performance, gnu software compatibility, drivers, closest thing to useful as a desktop (still not very), but almost x86 only
openbsd = security: internet exposed services
netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.
I'm considering initiating a campaign to influence a community space that I'm a part of into running NetBSD on some low-risk infrastructure that we may adopt.
I have been wanting to do this for a while. I have used FreeBSD and OpenBSD in server or embedded environments, but never as a desktop. And I have zero experience with NetBSD or DragonflyBSD but want to play with those too.
I enjoyed the time I spent browsing the web and reading ebooks while running OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. The same goes for hosting a web page on a VPS I used to rent. I found that what people say about it is true: the documentation is great. To the extent that I needed to tinker I gained a fair amount of coherence about how things worked. This is sort of what I want the guys in my community to experience for themselves.
i've used FreeBSD, and sometimes NetBSD and OpenBSD after they were
forked from the Jolitz's 386BSD release.
I think that all 3 of the BSD's have matured into GREAT server
operating systems.
My work environment has for many years used FreeBSD as file servers, both with
UFS / and most recently with ZFS. excellent performance!
of minor related interest, at the Santa Clara California restaurant
'Empress of India', both the original NetBSD development team and some of
the Linux folks (Linus particularly, who lived a couple of blocks away),
would dine at that same restaurant in the 1980's and early 1990's...
...The NetBSD folks would sometimes wear a shirt with a BSD daemon 'buttf' the Linux penguin from behind...
Linux has also matured into an impressive OS.
I personally think that the principle *BSD/GNU/Linux crews all deserve
to share in a Nobel peace prize for their impact on the world... Much more
positive impact on the world than that gates-crap DOS/DimDoze.
The way it's written is ambiguous as it could also just mean the peak demand rate, not a capacity peak. I was doing some benchmarks for something recently and noticed how tricky it is to capture all the nuance of a test in prose.
I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.
No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.
I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.
The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.
Two things:
1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).
2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?
Glad you got the spend more time with the family!
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/
openbsd = security: internet exposed services
netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.
I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.
I think that all 3 of the BSD's have matured into GREAT server operating systems.
My work environment has for many years used FreeBSD as file servers, both with UFS / and most recently with ZFS. excellent performance!
of minor related interest, at the Santa Clara California restaurant 'Empress of India', both the original NetBSD development team and some of the Linux folks (Linus particularly, who lived a couple of blocks away), would dine at that same restaurant in the 1980's and early 1990's... ...The NetBSD folks would sometimes wear a shirt with a BSD daemon 'buttf' the Linux penguin from behind...
Linux has also matured into an impressive OS. I personally think that the principle *BSD/GNU/Linux crews all deserve to share in a Nobel peace prize for their impact on the world... Much more positive impact on the world than that gates-crap DOS/DimDoze.
even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.
It was a different time.