Yeah, this covers my feeling pretty well. Just navigating the Control Panel in Windows 10 and, especially, 11, is an exercise in sadomasochism. I think 7 was th

Yeah, this covers my feeling pretty well. Just navigating the Control Panel in Windows 10 and, especially, 11, is an exercise in sadomasochism. I think 7 was the last sane version for me. Generally, the feeling is that you no longer own your computer. The user interface is a bazaar with a circus. Everything's walled by default to keep you inside the garden. Default Windows settings make sense for a granny who has never ever used a computer before. With FreeBSD I think I've started with Gnome 2, tried some tiling WMs like dwm (which are pretty cool!) but found myself finally at home with Xfce and Plank. It just gets the stuff done. An old FreeBSD computer feels much faster and responsive than newer machines running Windows or MacOS. With BSD I have to choose the hardware to fit the OS, and not vice versa, so, yeah, it's sort of an asana to run one, but once you get it, it feels good. I like Linux too, but found FreeBSD to be more coherent and better documented, and I'm ready to sacrifice some hardware compatibility for that. If there were no BSDs I'd probably be running Debian. I also didn't like the shift to ip and systemd, but that's just conservative me. Stuff changes in FreeBSD too, but at a slower pace. Love OpenBSD for its purity, too. What I currently don't like in FreeBSD is that you have to keep up with its release schedule. It's not that bad, but once in a while you have to do the major version upgrade. While it has never broke on me (I still run the same install I did originally 5 years ago), sometimes some things change unexpectedly as third party packages get forcefully upgraded. And if you don't upgrade you loose the ability to install binary packages eventually, as nobody maintains them for older FreeBSD versions, or you need to create your own repository. I don't think this concept works well for a desktop user, but what you gonna do - the resources are limited. I am very grateful to all the developers and folks maintaining the repository.