My first experience with *BSD was shortly after I had found Linux. Around the time of RedHat Linux 5.2 roughly 1999, I installed my first OS that wasn't a Microsoft product. Redhat 5.2 was successfully installed on my 150Mhz Pentium Packard Bell Desktop. I looked into Linux and found this stuff called Distro's, I also found some other similar OSes, called *BSDs. (Perhaps from distrowatch.com ?) The mascot for one particular BSD, FreeBSD, really stood out to me. As an artist and animator, characters can get my attention and well Beastie got my attention over Tux. I found out later that it was designed and drawn by none other than John Lasseter of Pixar fame, which only deepened my love of BSD.
I created my internet persona based on the mascot, thedaemon. I was originally groovy_daemon but chose thedaemon for simplicity. When someone has used my nickname, thedaemon for a registration I use thedaemonofid. Not that that's too relevant to my BSD usage, but I guess it gives you context.
Now, back to FreeBSD. I started using FreeBSD and Linux pretty regularly, then off an on through time till now, 2023. I made a commitment a couple of years ago to move away from Windows, so I haven't ran it at home in years. I did run Linux for a bit on my newest PC, as my state of the art GPU was not yet supported on FreeBSD. (I was running GhostBSD at the time, so I basically rushed way too into it.) I installed Kubuntu, yeah yeah no comments I am aware of the statuses of the various Distros. Then, after I found out drm-515-kmod in 14.0 works for my 6750 XT, I installed it. It's been a journey with some rough patches of the GPU driver, but I'm doing well and getting everything I need to do, done on FreeBSD. Which is: writing, 2d art, 3d art, media serving, programming, reading, & tinkering. If you like to tinker, I find FreeBSD, a great OS for it. You can really dive in and learn how things work when you set it up. Then after you set it up, for better or worse, you can forget it all and it just keeps on working.
