When Windows 10 came out it bothered me enough that I immediately stopped using
it as my daily driver and went to FreeBSD. I won't go through all the details
again. If you're interested you can read the 2018 phlog entry on this site, 'I
installed OpenBSD on a gaming computer'.

Since then I moved from OpenBSD back to Linux. Linux was comfortable, and some
of the things that I couldn't quite get to work under OpenBSD (and, to be
honest, there weren't that many) 'just worked' under Linux without any real
effort on my part. I made some upgrades to my gaming computer and the idea was
that if I got the fastest processor that this motherboard could support and
maxed out the RAM and put a nice video card in it, then I could get off the
upgrade treadmill, at least for a lot longer than I usually do.

I love to tinker with computers. I like selecting parts and putting systems
together. The problem is that I usually don't have any idea what I want to do
with them once I have them together, so I play with them for a few hours or a
couple of days, and then put them away or part them out and sell them (usually
at a significant loss thanks to the value of computer hardware usually falling
like a stone once it's been used). But that's an expensive hobby, and I needed
to stop spending so much money on it.

I also still entertained the notion that I played a lot of games on my computer.
When, in reality, that turns out to not be the case. I still play games, but not
nearly as many as I used to in my heyday. I didn't really realize this until
after I went back to the warm embrace of Linux.

When I installed FreeBSD the first time I spent a lot of effort installing WINE
and Steam. It worked, sort of. I could play a few games in my library reasonably
well, but it crashed a lot. Processes got stuck and it was a generally
unsatisfying experience. I used it less and less until I finally switched to
OpenBSD. OpenBSD is a whole different beast. There is no WINE port for OpenBSD,
so Steam is out of the question, but there are some games in the OpenBSD
repository. Some pretty good ones, even. But I had a lot of trouble with sound
under OpenBSD (the sound daemon would just stop working randomly and could not
be restarted until the system was rebooted. I think it might have been an issue
with the onboard audio not behaving well with the drivers, there's an open bug
on the OpenBSD mailing list that doesn't seem to have been touched in over a
year that describes it perfectly). And, since I do enjoy having sound once in a
while, I reluctantly went back to Linux.

When I went back to Linux, I did the normal stuff (at least for me): I installed
the software that I wanted, including Crossover and Steam. I installed a bunch
of games. I even splurged and bought a fancy-pants new video card so I could so
many more frames per second than I had previously. 

But something was different. 

It had been over a year since I had used Steam on anything resembling a regular
basis, and the few Windows games I installed under Crossover didn't do much for
me. It was like my self-imposed exile from those ecosystems had changed the part
of my brain that craved their stimulus. I had, it seemed, broken an addiction
that I didn't really know that I had. 

I tried to get back into those things, I really did. I bought a few games on
Steam that looked interesting and installed them. Some of my friends are big
into Overwatch, so I got that working and played that with them. But it just
wasn't the same. It just wasn't scratching that itch any more. I'm not even sure
that I had that itch to scratch any more. 

I also was tired of jumping through hoops to make these things work. Crossover
is a great project and they put a lot of resources into the WINE project proper.
But getting something to work in Crossover is not as easy as it should be. Heck,
even getting Crossover to install properly is not as easy as it should be. Steam
mostly works okay, but it's pretty clear that most of the 'Linux' games on that
service are just the Windows games running under a compatibility solution rather
than running natively, and it absolutely shows. Performance is usually rotten,
wasting resources and heating up my room just so I can sub-par experience at
whatever game I'm playing. 

I get it, though. People want to play games, and when it comes to PC games, that
almost always actually means, "I want to play Windows games". There's nothing
wrong with that, exactly. If that's what you're into, that's what you're into.
But I find that that's actually a crutch. It's a crutch for people who say that
they want to explore other operating systems because they say that they dislike
Windows for some reason, but darn it, any other operating system just doesn't
run their game library, so they just can't run anything but Windows, no matter
how much they say that they don't like it. Or, worse, they *do* make some kind
of effort to switch and they somehow got it into their head that Wine or Proton
or whatever is supposed to give them 100% compatibility with all their Windows
games and software. It doesn't, they have a bad time because they had
unrealistic expectations, and they have a bad time, and go back to Windows. 

I used to be that person.

And I accepted that getting Windows games working under Wine on some other
operating system was difficult (though, to be fair, it's getting easier all the
time), and keeping drivers up to date for video cards is a thorough pain. It was
all stuff that I kept telling myself that I liked to do, but it turns out that
once I got away from doing that kind of thing for a sufficeintly-long amount of
time I didn't miss it as much as I thought I did. 

When I switched back from OpenBSD to Debian Linux, everything Just Worked(tm),
which was nice. I installed the games that I thought I had missed and then
proceeded to ignore them almost completely. I did this for almost exactly one
year. 

It was completely unintentional, but almost exactly one year from the date I
purchased a fancy-pants video card to start Linux Gaming(tm) again, I backed up
my system, formatted my drives, and reinstalled FreeBSD again. I didn't install
Wine this time, so I didn't install Steam, either. I've had a lot of fun
checking out the repositories and discovering a lot of great games that I've
overlooked (and a lot of garbage, too).

I decided several months ago that if I want to play Windows games, I should use
a Windows computer, so I'm keeping my old one around for that (I realize that
not everyone has that luxury), even though it doesn't get turned on much these
days. 

It turns out that installing, running, and learning about FreeBSD (and also
OpenBSD, if I'm honest) is a lot of fun. And that's what computing should be. At
least recreational computing. 

Now, I'm not saying that you should run FreeBSD. I'm not saying you should run
anything. You run whatever operating system on your computer you want. The only
advice I can offer to you is this: The next time you sit down at your computer,
and you're not doing work, ask yourself if you're having fun or if you're just
passing the time. It's sometimes hard to tell. 

I decided a while back that I wanted to minimize the things I was doing merely
to pass the time and instead focus on things that I enjoyed. And playing around
with FreeBSD is currently that thing. That thing could change a month or a year
from now, and if it does, that's fine. But I've reached the point in my life
where I'm minimizing the amount of time I spend killing time.