For about these past 3 months or so (perhaps even more?) I've become increasingly umconfortable with using Linux as my main operating system - from the oversized package counts and Python-unfriendliness (when it comes to desktop usage anyway) of the Debian family to the obligation to run the absolute latest versions of every base element of your system and update every week if you don't want to spend entire days trying to fix your installation in Arch and everything in between, I have been increasingly wanting to move to a more coherent system, an operating system that would be structured properly as opposed to a bunch of basic tools that have been patched on top of each other and an OS that would allow me to customize my workflow with as little extra fluff as possible while simultaneously keeping a base system that won't change until the next major release.
...and from there, enter FreeBSD.
To be honest, this attempt at running FreeBSD on my desktop is not my very first actual contact with the BSD world. I actually tried switching parappa.party's server to OpenBSD at the very start of the year, but only to find out that I was running out of the measly 1.5GB of RAM that my Vultr server had while trying to keep the site itself, Dendrite (because Synapse would sure as hell not work with that much RAM) and Gtiea running simultaneously (the archiv wouldn't even work with OpenBSD!).
Following that, I started considering about trying out FreeBSD, given that I had yet to use it and after the not-exactly-great-but-still-rewarding experience I had with OpenBSD it was the next logical step to try out, with me considering to try it out once I got a server for all my datahoarding needs. ...Except that is definitely not happening anytime soon, and since I first switched to Devuan from Arch-based distros after trying out Debian on a VPS and noticing how easy it was to use on server (and to Devuan since systemd is a fuck for anything where you don't have to constantly start and stop services aka. a server) I decided to go the other way around by replacing my Linux desktop with a FreeBSD one in order to see if it's good enough of an operating system to use it on my future media server.
At the start, I thought I could just go cold turkey and immediately replace my Devuan install with a shiny, new FreeBSD one... only to realize that I still needed Linux for the occassional dabble on AI stuff (which is why I keep around a small EndeavourOS partition in my SSD, although I'm planning to get a separate SSD for it in the future), which led me to just make a UFS partition for FreeBSD-Linux dual booting instead.
For now I'm just installing stuff out through binaries and figuring out how FreeBSD works and what differs compared to Linux, but I've already tried out how ports and Poudriere work from my previous cold turkey attempts and I'll start wrestling with ZFS once I put a larger hard drive onto my PC.
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