Seven years of running FreeBSD on ThinkPads alongside Linux — lessons I'd give my younger self

<https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1tedyva/seven_years_of_running_freebsd_on_thinkpads/>

＂I daily-drive Linux at work and FreeBSD on my personal ThinkPads (T480 & P52 currently). Both laptops and both operating systems, every day. I'm the kind of person who reads freebsd-update output and Phoronix benchmarks in the same hour.

＂Recently saw the "is FreeBSD really that goated" thread and it brought back the timeline of my own journey. Started with a rough —call it version 0.9 — build that barely had X11 working, evolved through five iterations, landed on something I'd call "production-stable personal desktop" around version 2.0 on FreeBSD 15.0 with a heavily customized MATE, ZFS boot environments, BastilleBSD jails for microservices, WireGuard tunnels and PF.

＂If I could send a packet back in time to my earlier self, here's what I'd put in the payload: …＂

The image here is for <https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1tedyva/comment/om1t5mg/> because we can all agree that em dashes make scintillating conversation.

#goated #X11 #Wales #FreeBSD #BSD #Linux #ZFS #OpenZFS #Beastie #daemon #MyLittlePony #unicorn #dolphin #rainbow #IBM #Lenovo #BastilleBSD #WireGuard #AI #purple

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My prompt to ChatGPT: Draw a unicorn that has been genetically combined with a dolphin. The creature is flying across a rainbow whilst a gentle rain falls on lush green Welsh meadows beneath the rainbow. The sky, in the background, is an unnaturally vivid shade of purple. Below the rainbow: a quaint cottage with a person stood at the front door. The person is the mascot for BSD (Beastie). On the lawn in front of the cottage: a badly broken old IBM ThinkPad. In the sky, to the left of the rainbow: instead of a golden sun, place the FreeBSD logo (a red orb with horns).