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My favourite work environment

My operating system of choice is FreeBSD. I’ve given it a try many years ago and enjoyed it a lot ever since. Compared to other operating systems I’ve used, it is quite stable, clean and easy to administer once you get the basics. It is also easy to adjust it to one’s needs, which is very important for me.

FreeBSD features

Several features I like about FreeBSD are:

• Base system is clean, simple and designed very well. Configuring most of the services boils down to putting correct definitions in the /etc/rc.conf file.
• Ports and binary packages, two sources of software adapted to work on my system.
• Jails, which make it possible to compartmentalise software. This is nice from security perspective, but also from overall system maintainability perspective. For instance, I’ve installed NextCloud in a jail to limit the impact on the rest of the system (and to be able to throw it away when I’m done, without having to track any packets installed as dependencies.
• ZFS, an advanced, self-healing filesystem and volume manager.

Some features that FreeBSD shares with other operating systems:

• Powerful command languages (shells) and command-line tools, including ability to chain those tools to form data-processing pipelines.
• Everything-is-a-file philosophy, making it possible to treat a WebDAV resource as a local filesystem.
• Developer friendly — there are numerous programming tools available under POSIX-compliant operating-systems.

All this power is available without running any graphical environment. This means I can easily get rid of any distractions, switch to a plain old terminal and focus on what I want or have to do.

Tools

Most of the time, I use:

• Either vi or GNU Emacs — two powerful text editors. I don’t use vim because I’m fine with my system’s default text editor. When I need powerful add-ons, I switch to GNU Emacs.
• Lynx, Firefox or Netsurf, in that order — to browse the web. Lynx is just enough most of the time, one just has to learn to read pages that were designed by web-developers of JavaScript-era.
• Mutt and MBSync — two mail programs: one to read and write email, the other to retrieve it from the server.
• Amfora — a Gemini client. It’s similar in spirit to Lynx.
• IntelliJ IDEA — the best Java integrated development environment I’ve ever tried. JetBrains obviously hire some of the best, because this software isd esigned so well, so stable and full of convenient features…

This work by Piotr Mieszkowski is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0