I have been in IT since the mid-80s, first doing satellite communications in the military, then getting in to Unix after that. I have been a Unix sysadmin since about 1993, starting with SunOS, and have also adminned Digital Unix/OSF1, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, and FreeBSD.
I did my first linux install in March 1995, Slackware 2.2.0.1. Later, I made my system, an i386/33, dual boot Slackware and RedHat 3.0.3, with shared /home and /usr/local. When I lost a drive (the system had a 10 and 20MB MFM drive), I had to flip a coin and ended up sticking with Redhat.
I stuck with RedHat until 6.0 in 1999. At that point, the quality control seemed to go downhill a bit, and I had a Debian Developer and the DPL working on my team, and they assimilated me. I was a DD myself for 10 years, though the last several of these I was inactive.
Fast forward to 2014. The days of Peak Debian were behind us, Redhat had become RHEL, and systemd was storming onto the scene. I, having been doing Unix since college and being a sysadmin for 20 years, was not a fan of it, especially since it was very poorly coded. Several things happened at about the same time...Debian (Bdale Garbee, specifically) made a "command decision" to implement systemd in Debian (which really felt a tiny bit ham-fisted), my existing fileserver was getting very long in the tooth, and the BSD Now podcast hit the internet, and I became "BSD-curious." So I replaced my aged single-drive fileserver with a 4-drive FreeNAS 9 server, with 4 3TB drives and running ZFS. That server has grown to 6 10TB drives running TrueNAS Core and is currently running the initial release of zVault. I personally agree with the zVault team that FreeBSD is the perfect platform for running ZFS...With linux, the devs do not like it, and are afraid that if it goes into the kernel, oracle will paradrop a legion of lawyers on to the linux foundation's roof.
So in the intervening 11 years, I have converted most of my homelab/home network from Debian to FreeBSD. My homelab consists of, at the time of this writing:
- Personal desktop and laptop (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Wife's desktop and laptop (Devuan Daedalus)
- 2 NAS boxes (zVault 13.3)
- Firewall (pfSense 2.7.3 planned upgrade to 2.8.0)
- 3 jails and/or bhyve servers (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Secondary DNS running on a RPi 3 (FreeBSD 14.2/ARM)
I also have the following jails running:
- Primary DNS (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Zabbix monitoring server (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Git server (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Plex server (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Internal mail server (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Mediawiki server (FreeBSD 14.2)
- Ansible server (FreeBSD 14.2)
So I have pretty much gone wholesale FreeBSD, though my desktop dual boots FreeBSD with Devuan, because there is a linux version of Kerbal Space Program, which is a game I love.