I was amazed how close this article describes my overall experience with computers. I am 29, so I am old enough to remember DOS, and actually had a PC with a Intel 80286 processor as my first computer when I was 5. This PC we used (referred to as the 286 in our house) was actually my father's college computer that he used to learn to program in BASIC and COBOL( I think anyway, if memory serves me correctly). He let me use it from time to time to play different computer games when it was too old to do much else of importance. Much of the '90s were spent playing Doom and Quake on PC and Donkey Kong, Tetris on my original Game Boy (which I still have!).
Fast forward to 1999... I was never interested in playing video games on console. I've always felt that console game controllers make gaming too easy. This is about the time I started playing counter strike, and later, the Medal of Honor series. When I was about 13-14, I started learning to program in C/C++ in order to make my very own cheats (wall hacks, aim bot, camo skins, etc) for each of my favorite First person shooters. A few years of hacking away (until 2002, and 16 yrs. old) in Windows opened my eyes up to how limited Windows users really are. This is about the time I really became interested in Linux.
Ah, the nostalgia! I dabbled in a little of each major GNU/Linux distribution, and finally set my sights on Debian in 2004.
Fast forward another 11 years to 2015.... After the whole systemd drama in the Linux world, I decided I had had enough of the spastic changes occurring every year or two. As a long time Debian user (2004-2015), I was disappointed by the massive changes systemd brought upon my favorite distribution. I was frustrated enough to consider switching from Debian to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, to a different GNU/Linux, or to go buy a Mac.
I spent about a month tinkering, learning, hacking FreeBSD and OpenBSD in virtual machines. I found that *BSD is extremely stable, simple to administer (though time consuming), and just plain different from Linux in a few key aspects. My findings were not far off from what Carlos Fenollosa discussed in his article.
Most of my efforts were focused on exploring FreeBSD, and I ultimately considered PC-BSD as my final choice. PC-BSD because I intended running it on a laptop. I found it had the best hardware support, with minimal effort, out of all the *BSDs. As much as I enjoyed learning all about *BSD, it all proved to be too large a time sink to run on a work laptop that required more productivity than tinkering.
As a result of my experiments, I
tasted the goodness of K.I.S.S as I remembered it when I first started using Linux in 2002. So I searched Google using the following query: "The most unix like linux". The third link down in the
search results was:
The Slackware Linux Project: General Information.
In the end, I settled on Slackware. For its K.I.S.S principle, easy installation process, excellent hardware recognition, variety of available software, and because I could remain completely productive.
The article was a very good read. It informed me of the other intricacies regarding *BSDs (servers in particular) that proved that my choice to remain a Linux user was the right one.
