First, welcome to my blog. I'm The BSD Girl, a person who uses BSD and wants to share her experiences and thoughts on the topic in this blog. I hope you enjoy the article.

Today, in a telegram group, one of my friends shared a banner. The banner was something like "national FreeBSD day" and I decided to write an article to celebrate this day. What's better than an article as a celebration?

Anyway, in this article I will tell you :

• Why I use BSD?

• Why FreeBSD?

• FreeBSD on desktop (my personal experience)

and maybe a bit more. but those three topics, are really what I'm going to cover in the article.

Why BSD?

It's a bit odd reason, but the truth is that I always was (and am) an active part of free/open source software community, and I started at an Ubuntu forum. The whole thing, just got shitty. I couldn't tolerate topics like "It's GNU, not Linux" or "Call this GNU+Linux, you idiot" or other wars about different things, such as Linux distributions or text editors. One guy said "Ubuntu sucks", the other said "Void Linux rocks", the girl said "Just Arch Linux" and things like this, drove me crazy!

I did a bit of research to find a better solution, before giving up and returning back to Microsoft Windows, and I found Berkley Software Distribution or BSD. I found these operating systems are great, they're closer to the Unix itself and they're free software as well. So, what was my excuse to not testing at least one of them?

I didn't have a good internet connection, but there was a website where you could find CD's and DVD's of Linux or BSD operating systems. So, I ordered a FreeBSD 9.0 DVD and when it arrived, I was really happy. I put the DVD in my laptop's DVD-RW  and booted. I actually failed at starting the graphical interface, because of my ignorance. I didn't know it has no GUI pre-installed. By the way, I joined a BSD forum, there I found these :

• BSD's are not distributions of a single kernel or operating system and every single one of them is an independent operating system.

• BSD's are great!

So, after that, I tried to use one of them as my main operating system and the story begins here ...

Why FreeBSD?

So, I needed a good choice among the others. I remember I searched this on the internet :

How to have a desktop on BSD

and in the results, a person had explained how to have GNOME desktop on FreeBSD. I remember it was like this :

pkg_add -r xorg

pkg_add -r gnome

Then, I had to edit /etc/rc.conf and add these :

hald_enable="YES"

dbus_enable="YES"

gdm_enable="YES"

gnome_enable="YES"

And then, reboot! After the reboot I was a bit disappointed. Why? because it had GNOME 2 and I had GNOME 3 on my Linux (I think I had Fedora back then). So, I tried to install another DE, and I thought to myself what about a Window Manager? So I removed GNOME completely and installed openbox instead. It was a great experience but I had problems with my NVIDIA graphics and some connections in my network.

This disappointing moments such as not having GNOME 3 and problems with my hardware, made me use the Linux again, but BSD remained a good choice for me in everything except the desktop ...

The End!

This was my story on using BSD. What's yours? Why you use BSD? please tell me in the comment section :)