It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.

A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.

In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still) Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem? Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).

And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.

My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing.

And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.

And for fifty years, language theory has made progress. While C, brilliant as it once was, has given us never ending problems with security and reliability. The software world is saturated anyways. It's time to revise rather than just layering new junk in chase of profit.

> This article does not aim to dismiss Zig. Its focus is on the fact that C never stopped evolving.

It didn't stop but it certainly slowed down to glacial pace. There's plenty of fundamental issues that will never be fixed.

That said. I wish the software world would just keep its cool and not commit to Rust so fast. Rust was the first in a trend of new low level languages. It snowballed and now we may not get to make an informed decision on how the future of low level programming should be. I personally like Zig a lot more. Unfortunately people seem to be neither adequately scared of complexity nor sufficiently impressed by simplicity.

Please let me have some of your cocaine.

* Ease of management - more holistically designed.

* Rock solid parts that fits together - more holistically designed.

* ZFS, jails, bhyve, dtrace, ports.

* If it works today, it works tomorrow.

* A more approachable community (which AMD says is the reason why they are developing for FreeBSD before Linux now).

* Transparency and simplicity of how it works - if you can understand it, you can manage it and fix it.

* Documentation.

* Fun! Linux is not fun.

* PF was imported into FreeBSD from OpenBSD, maybe it had problems at first.

* Both implementations have been actively maintained, further developed, and diverged.

* There is now collaboration in the development of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD implementations.

* PF is the shit. Even though IPFW is the "invented here" firewall.

And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.

My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depends on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.

PF seems to me like pretty much the most well regarded firewall there is - with a nice, sensible DSL for config. If you don't like like it, you can use use IPFW or IPFILTER, which are alternative, built-in, firewall front-ends.

- In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks

Maybe you have built your routine around a system that have reinvented the wheel? I think FreeBSD knowledge degrades more slowly than that of Linux distros.

- I'm just not an OS dev.

That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world. Do you think my life revolve around keeping up with this shit? :)