Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, January 12, 2024.
This post is going to be a bit of a stream of conciousness post.
I have switched my lab to FreeBSD and 1 Windows box from previously running mostly Linux boxes and one Windows box.
Why? Debian is way to out of date and Fedora-GNOME isn’t going in a direction I agree with.
Consequences:
FreeBSD supports ZFS and GPT now. This has vastly simplified the learning curve compared to last time I tried one of the BSDs several years ago.
I am using XFCE4 as my X11 environment now. While Plasma hasn’t coppied all of GNOME’s worst traits right now. They have switched to a more flat UI designed that I don’t appreciate. I am not getting older so I find the higher contrast of an older more classical Windows style of UI to be more useable.
One thing I don’t like about using FreeBSD right now is the number of bugs caused by differences between the FreeBSD Virtual Terminal system and Linux’s Virtual Terminal system. Vim and Neovim both tend to have redraw problems which makes files hard to edit. Wierdly Emacs has much fewer problems.
The other reason I am moving to Emacs is VSCode’s extension ecosystem doesn’t work well with FreeBSD. VSCode not working is a problem for me.
I am working on a few programming projects to migrate some functionaly I am missing on FreeBSD. I am writing some of the code in Rust and some in C. It has definitely been a learning exercise. The biggest difference right now between the two so far is where most of my thought process has been used.
C might be okay, but I much prefer Rust. The approachability of the two standard libraries is a huge chunk of the difference. Non ASCII string handling is a lot simpler in Rust than C.
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