Hello, BSD fellow! I have fond memories of it from 4.11 to 7 eras. Sadly desktop never really happened to unixlikes to the extent I could be satisfied with, and vps options were limited to ubuntu and few others, so I had to move on. But FreeBSD was a greater experience nonetheless.
Very fond memories of those days for sure. In my job back then I was a C developer working on IRIX day to day. I had heard about FreeBSD so bought a walnut creek book with a FreeBSD 3.4 CD and started from there. I still have the book but the CD is long gone.
The FreeBSD aesthetic, documentation, code base, are so clean and well written, and most important -- the adherence to the principle of least surprise, particularly across releases. This is a complaint I have with many Linux distros.
