bsd will never be popular

Submitted by twovests in just_post (edited )

sorry bsd users, but it will never take over linux. unix operating systems will never win because "unixlike" is the natural way of things.

sorry! don't be a sore demon. and don't say "my router runs bsd", that doesn't count

btw things that do not count:

  • Every iPhone, Mac, etc. Apple product is based on BSD (~billions)

  • Every PS3, PS4, and PS5 is based on FreeBSD (~250 million)

  • Nintendo Switch runs FreeBSD (140 million)

  • Your router (probably)

  • those ~<1% of supercomputers not running linux. it might actually be just one. i've only heard of one BSD HPC in the world

  • KaiOS? awh no. that's linux

things that do count as BSD:

  • linux (inspired by BSD)

  • haiku OS

  • every now and then a network security academic uses mininet running a few dozen miniBSD distributions. and that's on thin ice already

All jokes aside, BSD really is an "underdog" and while I am convinced "BSD > Linux", I would never put in the time to see if that were true or not. I was just surprised to learn that BSD is actually more widely used than I thought it was. If you count Apple's OSes as BSD, then BSD really does come up to stand along with Linux and Windows in terms of install numbers. Wild.

If any of you find a few million HaikuOS installs out there, let me know

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hollyhoppet wrote

i mean does anyone want bsd to be more popular?

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flabberghaster wrote

i kind of do, but only because i think it's probably not good for there to be basically two OSes, windows and linux. And then there's mac but you can't just install that on any old commodity hardware so I don't really count it.

Diversity in technology is good.

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flabberghaster wrote

It has the same problems as Linux did in the 2000s, namely small userbase and small developer base mean there's very poor driver support. Finding hardware that will work is not easy.

In my case there was a driver issue with my network card. The working driver had the same name as the broken driver so I had to rename the kernel module and copy my working one in. Not a good user experience.

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twovests OP wrote

This is the big thing blocking me from trying it even in passing curiosity.

That, and AFAIK the only feature I'm sold on (jails) doesn't have nearly the same support as Docker.

With jails I could probably become a BSD VPS provider in a few weeks of work, but I couldn't do any of the things that I'm liking about Docker.

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flabberghaster wrote

There is somebody making an OCI implementation for BSD that uses jails instead of Linux containers. There is in principle no reason you couldn't use docker (I call it dorker) or something else like it that would just work roughly the same except that no one has finished implementing it.

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