http://devio.us/services

which also offers free accounts on request. They seem like pretty cool people. I haven’t used my account much yet, though…

That, and the fact that it’s the only OS I know that has a planetarium program by default (the unfortunately named scat).

It’s a pretty fascinating project. I never really got much beyond “boot up Plan9 … poke around … get frustrated by the monstrous difference of it all … log off”; however, that says more about my own weaknesses than the weaknesses (or strengths) of Plan9.

For those hungering for something different, I highly recommend the experience.

Not sure if this counts as evangelism but http://sdf.lonestar.org/ offer shell accounts on machines running NetBSD. (disclaimer, I’ve been a member of sdf for over a decade).

Some people turn to BSD because of its solid Unix heritage and its less chaotic development process. I hear a lot of comments about Linux’s half-baked drivers.

As for what you can do with BSD, well, almost everything you can do with Linux. FreeBSD has an especially large ports collection.

The biggest shortcoming that people complain about seems to be its Flash support. (I personally don’t care about that. I hate Flash anyway.)

It’s interesting that imgx64′s experience with FreeBSD was to ask “Now what?” once he got it installed. That’s been my experience with every Linux distro I’ve tried. Once I get it installed and configured for all my peripheral devices, it sits idle for a few months and then gets wiped off the drive.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, I’ve kept on using since I first installed it almost five years ago. I can’t really explain why. It just felt right somehow.

backdoors are always interesting –if for no other, than for academic purposes

I am a little ashamed that it’s been a year and a half since I took a lengthy look at a BSD (has it been that long?! time flies … ). I liked it when I tried it, but I need to dig in a little deeper.

I guess it wasn’t all that different from Linux since he never wrote about it again.

I’m personally interested in trying *BSD some day, for exactly the same reasons as kmandla (“… things that look interesting, and I haven’t the slightest idea why”). I tried downloading the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ISOs and installing them in a virtual machine. But then the installation finishes, and I end up thinking “now what?” and never doing anything interesting there. Maybe I should read some *BSD evangelism for interesting things to do…