In 2019 while I was having a holiday I delved into FreeBSD and its rather ancient digital beauty. After a bit of fiddling around and getting a feel for it I was stuck in a past I thought most had escaped decades ago. It is a beautiful clean operating system that I think makes a lot of sense as a server. You get complete control over every little detail and it is a wonder to see this OS in all its glory.

In early 2022 I have taken the FreeBSD Raspberry Pi version for a spin and I love it but couldn’t see it being a desktop option. For one there are still a lot of apps missing from the repository and it is like using Linux decades prior in that there is a way to do things but not with the ease and lazy abandon of Debian based Linux distributions. You have to do things the BSD way or the highway.

In some kind of alternate fantasy world in my mind’s eye, I could see myself having at least one FreeBSD system just to see the cogs turning in a direct descendant of the UNIX canon. Yet not on the Raspberry Pi at this stage, I have an old piece of hardware which is already annoying and pretty useless so I could while away a few hours on this digital junket as I sail down UNIX memory lane. The point is that I am a man who can traverse the wild terrain of digital obscurity.

Most don’t have time for these leisures, a journey that is fraught with misgivings at every turn, a world that cares only for precision so exact that to do the most simple task in these times on other platforms is a world of complexity so astonishing that nobody will believe it is so difficult. Yet difficulty and obscurity is a right of passage only for the great as only the great walk alone! Heave ho, down the digital mines I go!