That threw me for a loop when I realized the last time I used FreeBSD was in the 4.x days - on a desktop, no less. That was actually something of a glory period

That threw me for a loop when I realized the last time I used FreeBSD was in the 4.x days - on a desktop, no less. That was actually something of a glory period, at least for the hardware I had at the time... Soundblaster OSS drivers that actually did hardware mixing, the proprietary Nvidia driver that actually gave working 3D acceleration on the card I had at the time (Geforce 2 GTS maybe?) - this was at least a year or two before that driver was released for Linux. I think it even had working Java. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to Linux at the time because it was a coherent, engineered, documented system. When you didn't always have reliable internet (and at least for me, even when I did have it was something like 128K DSL), it was a huge deal to have well written man pages, where as on the linux half the time time the man page woud just tell you to scream into the void, err, run gnu info. This was still in the period when the GPL scared off corps.