# What is your primary use of FreeBSD? (poll)



## Deleted member 54719 (Jun 21, 2018)

Based on the content of many of the questions on the FreeBSD forums I would be very interested in the breakdown of the user base: percentage that are professionals, hobbyists, or students.  Please participate in the poll below.  No need for a lot of comments that may bias the results.


----------



## Crivens (Jun 21, 2018)

How do I mark multiple points?


----------



## Deleted member 54719 (Jun 21, 2018)

Crivens said:


> How do I mark multiple points?



It says "primary use".  Choose one.


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 21, 2018)

Hobbyist.

FreeBSD serves as my primary desktop OS and powers my .mp3 player.


----------



## ekingston (Jun 21, 2018)

While my primary (and currently only) use of FreeBSD is as a hobbyist, I am a professional in the technology field and previously used FreeBSD in a professional capacity (it was the OS for our server and network monitoring system).

I said the above, because you may find that there are quite a few professionals who don't use FreeBSD professionally (at this time).


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Jun 21, 2018)

Web development company for two restaurant chains and a number of professional theatre and other entertainment companies.


----------



## k.jacker (Jun 21, 2018)

Hobbyist. No other OSes in my home  (ok, the router is still running OpenWRT)

I have a FreeBSD workstation, a FreeBSD file/music/webserver, a FreeBSD computer dedicated to music and watching TV with a good DAC and audiosystem connected, a laptop and soon a router (which isn't quite ready yet, still learning PF).

Since FreeBSD 4.3 I have had a computer runnning FreeBSD with MOC (music on console) to listen to music through a quality audiosystem. Only change is that, after almost 20 years, I switched from MOC to CMUS (finally understood how it works ).

I run two small businesses, though not in IT.


----------



## CyberCr33p (Jun 21, 2018)

Professional - using it for shared hosting and managed dedicated servers.


----------



## chrbr (Jun 21, 2018)

Hello tempest766,


tempest766 said:


> It says "primary use". Choose one.


that sounds unfair, but after some thinking it is not. I have checked "learning" because that was my intention when starting with FreeBSD. Luckily it is useful as well, therefore "hobbyist" applies as the second match which is off topic.


----------



## phoenix (Jun 22, 2018)

You're missing an "All of the above" option.


----------



## ShelLuser (Jun 22, 2018)

Sorry, but I think this poll is kind of flawed. I know you mentioned that you're after primary use but you _also_ stated "_percentages that are hobbyists, professionals, etc._". So it's not just primary use, you also seem to conclude that someone is a hobbyist or a professional solely based on their primary use, and that's flawed reasoning.

I get paid to administrate / maintain several FreeBSD systems. This takes up several hours per day. But I also have a FreeBSD server park of my own which I also spend time on. Free time obviously, but that includes part of my vacations.

So....  primary use is definitely personal because that's where I spend most time on. Maybe I'm a little too geeky here but I include the time when my personal server is working hard throughout the night in building my ports, something I sometimes verify first thing in the morning.

But how does that suddenly nullify my professionalism?


----------



## trev (Jun 22, 2018)

I started as a hobbyist moving from Mark Williams Coherent Unix to FreeBSD 2.05, while using SunOS and later Solaris at work before abandoning the commercial publishing sector and joining an ongoing university research project (free access to law online) using Solaris servers and a mix of Linux and Windows workstations. My first task was installing FreeBSD 4.9 on my Linux workstation  Now that I'm retired, I selected "hobbyist" for the poll.


----------



## aragats (Jun 22, 2018)

phoenix said:


> You're missing an "All of the above" option.


Also, "None of the above" (-;


----------



## Crivens (Jun 22, 2018)

aragats said:


> Also, "None of the above" (-;


That reminds me of the canadian guy changing his name to above nonofthe, and running for office. Now the ballot has a point called "Nonofthe, Above".


----------



## VladiBG (Jun 22, 2018)

Professional  - using it for postfix servers.


----------



## abishai (Jun 22, 2018)

Personal. I've planned to gravitate from Windows to Linux, but failed to install Gentoo, it was too complex for me. (Yes, I know there are user friendly systems, but I wanted to *understand* how it works). My first FreeBSD install was like Next -> Next -> Hostname -> Next -> Next -> Next -> Timezone -> Next -> Reboot.


----------



## aragats (Jun 22, 2018)

- Personal laptop (FreeBSD is the only OS)
- Workstation at work (FreeBSD is the only OS)
- Controller at work (BeagleBone Black)
- Personal VPS
- Company VPS


----------



## Deleted member 54719 (Jun 22, 2018)

ShelLuser said:


> Sorry, but I think this poll is kind of flawed. I know you mentioned that you're after primary use but you _also_ stated "_percentages that are hobbyists, professionals, etc._". So it's not just primary use, you also seem to conclude that someone is a hobbyist or a professional solely based on their primary use, and that's flawed reasoning.
> 
> I get paid to administrate / maintain several FreeBSD systems. This takes up several hours per day. But I also have a FreeBSD server park of my own which I also spend time on. Free time obviously, but that includes part of my vacations.
> 
> ...



Then I guess you have a choice to make.  Answer the question according to how you see yourself, or how you think I want you to answer.   Thus the problem with polls in general, when respondents try to read between the lines it usually invalidates them as part of the sample being collected.


----------



## michael_hackson (Jun 22, 2018)

Starting as a hobbyist, educating myself enough to be able to work with it (or general server management) professionally.


----------



## Oko (Jun 23, 2018)

"*Research (in support of university sponsored research)*" makes no sense at all. Either one does OS research and uses one of BSDs for that (IIRC the last truly academic paper written based on the research done on BSDs is McKusick, Marshall Kirk; Ganger, Gregory R. (1999). "Soft Updates: A Technique for Eliminating Most Synchronous Writes in the Fast Filesystem" written almost 20 years ago or you invent a novel CS concept and use one of BSDs as a test bed.

Putting bunch of data used in academic research on the FreeBSD file server in a university setting is no different than putting porn pictures to run XXX related business.


----------



## sidetone (Jun 23, 2018)

Oko said:


> "*Research (in support of university sponsored research)*" makes no sense at all. Either one does OS research and uses one of BSDs for that (IIRC the last truly academic paper written based on the research done on BSDs is McKusick, Marshall Kirk; Ganger, Gregory R. (1999). "Soft Updates: A Technique for Eliminating Most Synchronous Writes in the Fast Filesystem" written almost 20 years ago or you invent a novel CS concept and use one of BSD as a test bed.
> 
> Putting bunch of data used in academic research on the FreeBSD file server in a university setting is no different than ..


Reminds me of the _FreeBSD Magazine_ issue Science, Systems and FreeBSD (September/October 2014). It stressed how UFS was great for storing data, and quick access (I know Hammer and ZFS come to people's mind). I expected more from it, like depth of science programs. That reminds me of how an analog storage tape holds data, even for MIDI instruments


----------



## Leveret (Jun 23, 2018)

Hobbyist. Having used Windows then Linux, I now use FreeBSD as my primary OS. What was simple curiosity has turned into an appreciation of the configuration necessary just to get a simple desktop installed and permissions set. FreeBSD encourages learning. I happen to enjoy that.


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Jun 23, 2018)

Oko said:


> Putting bunch of data used in academic research on the FreeBSD file server in a university setting is no different than putting porn pictures to run XXX related business.


Based on your experience orrrrr......


----------



## Oko (Jun 23, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Based on your experience orrrrr......


Actually yes I do run FreeBSD file servers for a premier AI research group at a major research university and I do have a schoolmate (childhood friend) who was for a while in business of putting XXX pictures on line back in Europe before switching to being full time iPhone app developer. We started on his Amiga 500, 30 years ago. I got him into the BSDs shit 15 years ago. His Porn cites did run of FreeBSD powered servers. He made good money from porn.


----------



## masayoshi (Jun 23, 2018)

Hobbyist. I would like to use FreeBSD at company. But I can not use it  because my coworkers could not read English messages. Luckily they can not find where I spend my spare time. Yeah!
In addition, there are many "*linux" in the world. So I only use FreeBSD because I don't need to think which *linux I should use. (Finding my *linux may be time-consuming.)


----------



## sko (Jun 25, 2018)

Professional - all our infrastructure runs on a mix of FreeBSD (storage servers, lots of jails, gateways/routers, mail- and webservers), illumos (smartOS for VMs and lots of zones) and OpenBSD (firewalls/gateways/routers and mailservers). Our client systems are also being migrated to FreeBSD in the form of TrueOS, which is great for automated deployment of a fully-fledged OS with a DE.


Although, all of this essentially came out of my personal interests/hobby and the fact that I'm a one-man-show for all our IT. So I choose whatever fits the task and is the easiest to manage/automate for me - which after a while completely ruled out Linux especially since "something" happened...
My home Network/Lab now runs a mix of FreeBSD (storage; jails for all network services) and OpenBSD (Firewall/Gateway/VPN). I'm also running an external server and some DigitalOcean Droplets with FreeBSD for my small business as well as for my personal mailserver or other services.
A few weeks ago a Sun T1000 found its way into my rack which will run illumos/Tribblix and OpenBSD in logical domains as soon as its noise-level is reduced to more bearable levels   I'll intend to use this system mostly for getting a bit more in-depth knowledge with both OSes and eventually run some gitlab-runners for smaller build jobs on it if I get that to work (LX-zones maybe...)






Oko said:


> Putting bunch of data used in academic research on the FreeBSD file server in a university setting is no different than putting porn pictures to run XXX related business.



"And over here we have a huge file-server for our students, mostly filled with pictures for uhm.. 'research'..."


----------



## fernandel (Jul 4, 2018)

I was long time in the genetics research and I use some apps DNA,RNA, protein related for "real work", the same as Python (science). We have many Lixux and OS X at work and minority was Windows.
Now I am using FreeBSD as desktop (after DOS, OS2, Linux) for playing with graphics (GIMP, Blender) and all the timI star WM with startx.
Am I a hobbyist? I think so...


----------



## Deleted member 54719 (Jul 5, 2018)

The results of this question were not surprising to me.  I cannot call it a poll because it only allowed one question.  A few folks read too much into it, which could invalidate them as part of the statistical sample.  I also asked that folks NOT post comments about it in the discussion, as that could further skew the results.  really the sample size isn't large enough get numbers with a high confidence interval, but it does seem to indicate the "hobbiist" nature of the project.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Jul 5, 2018)

Most professional/enterprise users (probably the vast majority) are on IRC and mail lists, not in here.


----------

