1 Year Linux Challenge: Contemplation Edition

[tkoham]

Ooga Booga, where the forum badges at?

Linux Challenge: Extreme Edition -- Creating a secure desktop for a working journalist atop FreeBSD

I've been using linux (and BSD, windows, OSX) for years. They work for what I need them to do, and I've formulated an environment that works well for me. Linux and FSF-Only environments are a lot like Veganism: no one cares, and the people participating are overwhelmingly pale, obnoxious dullards with a special brand of smugness that permeates them to their cores. I'm obnoxious, and pale six months of the year, but I try to leave the other things at the door. So: in a purely-spontaneous-and-not-motivated-by-forum-badges display of curiosity, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and try something new, in the spirit of the challenge. a little over 22 months ago, I started to get bored of linux for productivity. My personal setup works well enough, but I'm not using my work machine for any intense computation or programming (I have a deep learning and ML rig for that) and it seemed to me that an opportunity had arisen -- an opportunity to do something I just hadn't gotten to for entirely too long. I was going to build a secure BSD machine for my day-to-day work. I had three main requirements: does word processing and web browsing, manages email/RSS is secure enough to comfortably communicate with sources won't shit the bed on me or lose my data I'll admit the going was rough at first, security and data retention were the easiest parts by a mile, but the UX on ghostBSD was horrendous at the time, OpenBSD felt like using a decade old system, and TrueOS didn't exist in the workable form it does today. I settled on a heavily customized installation of FreeBSD, and wrote an automated installer in case I ever had to use the nuclear option. Eventually I had a system that was passable as a daily driver, but it wasn't all cream puffs and rainbow enemas. I was lucky Wi-fi worked at all (things are different now, mind you) but I could only interface with it via command line. Learning init, and purging all of what I now consider bad habits took far longer than I ca…