# Journey into the Darkness

## Ch. 6: Daemonic Posession

During the Delah Tux period, there were some very brief experiments with the BSD family of unix-like operating systems.  By brief I mean none of them were installed for more than a week because I didn't have enough experience (nor motivation) to really give them a chance.  In light of the issues I was having with Linux, it seemed the time had come for a more proper evaluation.

The logical first step was to try NetBSD since it's been said to support more platforms than anything else (aside from Linux, of course).  Unfortunately this experiment lasted for all of two seconds because it wouldn't even boot from the flash drive.  Frustrated and lacking patience, I moved on without further investigation and never tested it with the Raspberry Pi.  If I remember correctly, there was no support for networking on the Pi Zero W, so it didn't even seem worthy of the effort.

OpenBSD was interesting because it seemed to have a sensible project goal and often gets high praise from its users, but my own experience was far from good. While it did boot up and install on the T430, the apparent lack of colored text and an unusually sluggish keyboard repeat delay was most uncomfortable to use.  While I'm sure there must be a way to change this, the experiment never lasted long enough to find out.  Seeing the command 'ls' lacking the option for colored output was particularly disturbing, especially since I'd gotten used to directories and executable being color-coded to differentiate them from ordinary files.  One thing which caught me by surprise was the initial shock of certain commands missing entirely, one of those gotchas for unsuspecting users. This would last for a few hours as I learned some of the command differences between BSD and Linux, but the one thing I could not move past was a complete lack of proper documentation.

Here we have someone with just over a decade of Linux use but only a couple of years involving system administration, suddenly thrown into this foreign and somewhat unforgiving environment where the familiar commands do not behave as expected, if they even exist at all.  Sure, we get man pages for every tool on the system, but from what I saw the man pages are often quite terse and more confusing than their equivalents on other systems.  This is in stark contrast to the claim made on the website that they have "superior documentation"... The conclusion at the time was that OpenBSD can only be loved by those who are intimately familiar with BSD (or UNIX in general) and actually know what they are doing.  I had no clue what I was doing and wasn't sure I wanted to learn, so in less than a day this experiment was terminated again.

The next logical step was to try FreeBSD, which has excellent documentation for idiots like me.  Even years earlier when I first tried it, this seemed like a decent operating system that I could use on a daily basis for most tasks. Booting and installing was fairly painless, as was setting up the network. Reading the documentation was probably the most pleasant experience out of any operating system I've ever used, and within a few hours the machine was all set and ready to go.  Hardware support on the T430 was also better as the volume keys and brightness controls worked out of the box from within the console, and battery life was about 7.5 hours after tweaking some settings. Something about the layout and overall configuration of the system felt like it made more sense than Linux, certainly more cohesive and refined. There were man pages that I'd never even seen on Linux such as 'man hier' and 'man tcp', among others.  These would later be added to Void, much to my delight.

After more than two years in the Void it would take a lot to pull me out. Up to this point no other operating system I knew about was capable of doing this, regardless of what packages were available that Void didn't have. It was the one OS which would end my distro hopping for six years solid. Despite this, I liked FreeBSD enough to have it installed on its own SSD in parallel with Void, mainly because Calf plugins wouldn't work under FreeBSD for reasons I could not figure out.  It just crashed on startup.

I'm nearly deaf to everything above 1kHz and hearing aids are ridiculously expensive, so I've always relied on equalizers to try and compensate. I could never find a suitable equalizer which could run globally and provide the right capabilities, but Calf allowed me to set up a signal processing chain which included a 12-band parametric equalizer and 4-band compressor. Using Jack Audio, I could then route the audio output from a program into the processor and connect that to the headphone jack.  It could even be started from the console without ever starting an X session, making it that much better.  To this day I have yet to find anything which can match Calf's ability to help me hear what I'd been missing.  In fact, were it not for that one requirement, I might have deleted Void entirely and kept FreeBSD as the daily driver.  I did try to use the bhyve hypervisor to run Void inside FreeBSD, but I couldn't get it to work.

Eventually I got tired of dual-booting and quit using Calf to try and preserve what was left of my hearing, at the expense of being able to really enjoy any music with complex percussion.  I'd stop booting into Void altogether and spend an entire year in FreeBSD, getting more comfortable with the closest thing to a real Unix descendant that I could get my hands on.  When I got sick of music without Calf I'd come back to Void and find that the differences between the two systems were far more clear.  I was torn between FreeBSD's sensible config and stability compared to Void's sheer speed and up-to-date packages. I kept Void as the daily driver in spite of the problems, thinking I could always go back to FreeBSD whenever I wanted.  As fate would have it, I would soon be cut off from both Calf and FreeBSD for some time to come.

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