I still remember AJG vividly to this day. He also once told me he was a FreeBSD contributor.
My journey with FreeBSD began with version 4.5 or 4.6, running in VMware on Windows and using XDMCP for the desktop. It was super fast and ran at almost native speed. I tried Red Hat 9, and it was slow as a snail by comparison. For me, the choice was obvious. Later on I was running FreeBSD on my ThinkPad, and I still remember the days of coding on it using my professor's linear/non-linear optimisation library, sorting out wlan driver and firmware to use the library wifi, and compiling Mozilla on my way home while the laptop was in my backpack. My personal record: I never messed up a single FreeBSD install, even when I was completely drunk.
Even later, I needed to monitor the CPU and memory usage of our performance/latency critical code. The POSIX API worked out of the box on FreeBSD and Solaris exactly as documented. Linux? Nope. I had to resort to parsing /proc myself, and what a mess it was. The structure was inconsistent, and even within the same kernel minor version the behaviour could change. Sometimes a process's CPU time included all its threads, and sometimes it didn't.
To this day, I still tell people that FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) feels like a proper operating system, and GNU/Linux feels like a toy.
My journey with FreeBSD began with version 4.5 or 4.6, running in VMware on Windows and using XDMCP for the desktop. It was super fast and ran at almost native speed. I tried Red Hat 9, and it was slow as a snail by comparison. For me, the choice was obvious. Later on I was running FreeBSD on my ThinkPad, and I still remember the days of coding on it using my professor's linear/non-linear optimisation library, sorting out wlan driver and firmware to use the library wifi, and compiling Mozilla on my way home while the laptop was in my backpack. My personal record: I never messed up a single FreeBSD install, even when I was completely drunk.
Even later, I needed to monitor the CPU and memory usage of our performance/latency critical code. The POSIX API worked out of the box on FreeBSD and Solaris exactly as documented. Linux? Nope. I had to resort to parsing /proc myself, and what a mess it was. The structure was inconsistent, and even within the same kernel minor version the behaviour could change. Sometimes a process's CPU time included all its threads, and sometimes it didn't.
To this day, I still tell people that FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) feels like a proper operating system, and GNU/Linux feels like a toy.