I’m back with my periodic bout of illness.

A few days ago, for no practical reason, I set up a FreeBSD machine. It’s a very small machine with only 1GB of RAM, given my current pocketbook. But if I need to do something, I cat get something like Ubuntu or Amazon Linux, so why FreeBSD? Ten years ago, I could have come up with my own little reasons, but now I can’t. To be honest, the two OSes were close back then, but now the convenience of Linux is just overwhelmingly superior. It’s not like I have a lot of time to spare or nothing to do, but I feel pathetic that I’m doing this again where I have to spend hours setting up equipment, but what the heck, it’s an incurable disease.

Anyway, after completing the basic setup, I started installing packages in earnest. However, since it is not a rolling release system, old packages appeared. If it’s a Linux device, there is no problem because there are many user-mode package managers such as brew and asdf instead of system package managers these days, but it’s unthinkable in FreeBSD. Maybe it’s because I don’t know what’s going on in the BSD world, but in any case, all I can think of now is /usr/ports, that is, installation through source compilation.

“Oh yeah. I forgot, that’s why BSD sucks.”

When I was younger, I would have gone to the trouble of compiling the source and installing the package, even if it took hours. If I couldn’t compile it on a small machine, I would cross-compile it on a big Linux machine to get the version of the package I needed. But I’m too old for that now. I don’t have the disk space for a port system, and more importantly, I don’t feel like spending the time to do it. At best, I might as well blow up my FreeBSD rig and go back to using Linux, especially since I now know that source compilation is a carbon emission, and I shouldn’t do it unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even on my local machine at home, whenever I compile source, the sound of the fan running is like noise between floors.

I’d rather just use what someone else has already created, why reinvent the wheel?