@[email protected] Thanks :) It's a great meme

It has been my daily driver for over 7 years at this point. I do all of my music production and work stuff on it, it handles my email stuff, i host my site and vpn stuff on it, and a bunch of other things. I essentially learned C, audio processing, networking, threading, graphics and a myriad of other programming topics through it all. Your questions are difficult to answer in two words, but to give you an equally loaded answer, out of all of the linuxes, bsds, windowses and other stuff I've tried, it's the only OS that doesn't piss me off and that I don't have to constantly nurse to do actual work on it. I guess to add to that, it's unique in spirit and in the fact that it's easy for anyone to modify in any way and to shape to one's needs. Even an idiot like me can just sit down and write a device driver. There's no 30 layers of abstractions and subsystems, everything is laid bare, readable and accessible. What's more it's trivial to share your work and seeing these contributions ending up in the system is actually easy. For a C programmer, it's probably the best existing environment to work in and with. I'm not the only one using it on bare metal, there are dozens of others or more, not counting the many more that use it through a VM. The thing is, it may look and feel like a weird niche hobbyist project, but it actually works, on current hardware, for real world applications, right now. In fact I'm replying via mothra, the default 9front web browser. The community is relatively small, there are things missing, but the list of available stuff keeps growing. It's just easy to do things; some personal examples: http://nopenopenope.net/posts. The fqa (http://fqa.9front.org) has a brief overview of some of the history and available stuff, in the style of the openbsd handbook. There are a bunch of other docs out there if you're interested. Hope that makes it clearer...