Recently started a web design and IT consulting company called Opacity Tech with a simple goal, reasonable prices, and handwritten code. No AI agents writing bloated code, no template based site builders. Just real humans, writing real, optimized, fast code, using experience and knowledge, like the old days. Art used to be what we created with our hands, not what robots hallucinate for us. This from scratch attitude means we can charge less because we dont have to rent platforms or pay subscriptions for services or licenses. Real servers in house too, no cloud overlords.

Pretty poor OpSec in my opinion for a payment processor to fall prey to ransomware.

Why choose Free/OpenBSD instead of Debian, CentOS, or any other distro?

For FreeBSD, given that it fulfills the tasks required:

* Ease of management - more holistically designed.

* Rock solid parts that fits together - more holistically designed.

* ZFS, jails, bhyve, dtrace, ports.

* If it works today, it works tomorrow.

* A more approachable community (which AMD says is the reason why they are developing for FreeBSD before Linux now).

* Transparency and simplicity of how it works - if you can understand it, you can manage it and fix it.

* Documentation.

* Fun! Linux is not fun.

What makes Linux not fun?

Whats the difference between FreeBSD ports and Debian packages?

FreeBSD is a complete OS, while debian is a distro, i.e the Linux kernel + a lot of programs including the utilities from GNU. So almost everything in debian comes from a package while in the BSD world, there's a split between the system utilities (called base) and the third-party projects (called ports). The port system itself is a collection of recipes to build those projects.

But the nicest thing about the software in the base is that they are developed in sync with the OS, so their code can be simpler.

FreeBSD ports are more up to date. Debian packages are famously out of date - their claim to fame is stability not staying up to date. Arch is a better comparison here if you care about this you would be asking about Arch not Debian: that you are asking about Debian implies you want this out of date.

The other major difference is FreeBSD ports lets you chose the build options - the defaults are normally good, but if you don't like how Debian (Arch...) choose to build your packages you are not stuck. Ports even mixes with binary packages so you can choose the defaults for some things and build others yourself and the system will track everything and when things need to be updated. This is something you rarely need, but when you do FreeBSD soundly beats everyone else just because the effort is so much less (again though, most people never need this in the first place - and Debian has pushed less need of this on applications which is a good thing)

Ports is a meta build system, from which packages are created. Gives a lot of convenient power and flexibility. For ready built packages, the FreeBSD equivalent of dpkg or whatever five different package commands Debian is using now would be pkg.

Less churn -> the OS respects the time you invest in learning the system, and the time people have invested in documenting the system.

One is a full cohesive OS. The other is just a kernel with all the other bits packaged together by other groups of people.

And it shows.

What do you use Linux for?

IDrac often demands that the PC connecting to it be on the same network however, an rkvm like this let's you skip the pc-in-the-middle step.

Fine for one or two machines, but if you're dealing with a rack or more, an extra machine for management tools is no big deal.

I just came to mention that I really enjoy the UI of this website. That is all.

Me too. I miss a lot when the web used to look more like this.

The movie Idiocracy comes to mind almost every day for me as of late.

Emacs isn't a browser though

As a sibling mentions, ewe is pretty decent, but if you want all mod-cons then you can use EAF's browser, or even better use EXWM to embed Firefox (or Librewolf or whatever).

M-x eww