Plurrrr

I've used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it's so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can't go back to anything else. One the other hand, it's extremely complicated constantly changing software that requires configuration with the second-worst homegrown config programming language I've ever used.

Writing shell scripts used to be a major, major pain for me. I remember many frustrating sessions, where I tried to find a misplaced quote or a missing backtick. I cursed shell script and only used it as a last resort.

There are many alternative operating systems to Linux and the *BSD family is varied and complete. FreeBSD, in my opinion, today is the "all rounder" system par excellence, i.e. well refined and suitable both for use on large servers and small embedded systems. The other BSDs have strengths that, in some fields, make them particularly suitable but FreeBSD, in my humble opinion, is suitable (almost) for every purpose.

So back to the main topic of this article, why am I migrating many of the servers we manage to FreeBSD? The reasons are many, I will list some of them with corresponding explanations.