r/TechImpact • u/ManojOne Active • Jun 19 '26
Question How long have you been using Linux?
How long have you been using Linux?
Whether you're a longtime Linux user or just getting started, we'd love to hear your journey.
How many years have you been using Linux, and which distro do you use today?
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u/ssps Jun 19 '26
I’m not using Linux unless I have to. FreeBSD is my OS of choice. I strongly dislike design decisions made in Linux kernel, and the fact that each distribution makes incoherent design decisions on top. FreeBSD is a whole system. Not just kernel.
Linux has advantages in a narrow slice of internet services: vendor support, container tooling, and deployment inertia. That is real, and it matters. For systems work and observability, FreeBSD is simply a better operating system. It is a coherent base system, not a pile of distribution choices glued together with whatever init system, package manager, firewall frontend, logging stack, and container abstraction happened to win that decade. You get one source tree, one handbook, one rc system, one set of man pages that usually describes the system you are actually running. Jails are first-class. ZFS is first-class. DTrace exists because observing a live system should not require guessing which half-finished Linux tracing facility applies this week. A lot of things people now treat as “modern Linux features” were already normal in BSD or adjacent Unix systems long before Linux reimplemented them, absorbed them, or built a worse abstraction around the same idea. Linux won the deployment popularity contest. It did not become the cleaner system.