While I was at BSDCan, I had an idea that I shared with @dgoodkin and would like to quote in one of my upcoming talks and/or articles. Many young people aren't familiar with the BSDs, and we could try using a bit of psychology to pique their curiosity.
Something like: "Hey, consider investing some of your time in FreeBSD. Maybe you'll become an adopter or a dev. After all, Windows is (probably) powering your PC at school, while FreeBSD is powering your PlayStation and Netflix. Maybe you can do without Windows, but what would life be without the other two?"
@stefano @dgoodkin This is a good idea, BSD systems deserves the clout for running very interesting stuff.
As someone who was drew towards Unix since a young age (the spark was lit when I was 12 and saw Solaris in a server/workstation in the movie Tron: Legacy) I'd like to add a couple of things:
- BSD systems would be a better as an introduction to Unix than Linux is. When I tried Linux as a newbie I found it pretty opaque and unwelcoming. The lack of a comprehensive documentation made hard for me to evolve to a skill level where I was able to do actual troubleshooting and not just rely to googling error messages and pasting stuff in terminal. Running BSD helped me a lot in that regard and made me better with Linux too.
- emphasizing the community aspect of Unix systems (sharing data, sending messages, seeing "who" is online, making silly broadcasts with "wall"...) would make these even more fun to use. If I was in charge of a middle/high school computer science course I'd run it on a multi user BSD system using the individual computers more like dumb terminals.
@emilianosandri it is unrelated to the original suggestion, but I found very inspirational this blog post
