[junk_disposal]

That's the FreeBSD line, but I don't think it's so simple. The lawsuit ended in 1994. That was before RedHat, and one year into Debian.

At that time, the majority of Unixen were proprietary, so if you wanted your programsto run, you couldn't assume GNUisms or Linuxisms.

[phicoh]

I think the big difference in culture accounts for more than the lawsuit.

FreeBSD moves very carefully. New features are introduced when they are quite mature. For major changes, the old way of working is maintained for quite some time.

Early nineties that showed in hardware support. If you wanted to have a real system, you got yourself a SCSI card. There were some really crap IDE controllers out there and in the FreeBSD community nobody cared for them. So resources is one thing, but basically the FreeBSD community didn't want to spend time getting completely broken hardware sort of working.

(For a long time, partitioning was also a twisted maze. The BSD partitioning scheme was somehow combined with the MBR in weird ways. No problem for a system dedicated to FreeBSD, tricky if you want to shared with Windows).

The Linux community was way more trying to run on everything.

In the same way, the Linux community is much more into shiny, new. Color ls, that would famously break scripts because it also output escape sequences if you send the output to a pipe.

By and large a FreeBSD system looks less cool than a Linux. So FreeBSD attracts the users who know they want stability above everything else.

[junk_disposal]

>The Linux community was way more trying to run on everything.

In contrast to some opinions, I like this sometimes.

For example, would the world come to an end if FreeBSD came with neovim?

If the prompt out of the box showed pwd?

I know that some things are controversial (ahem systemd), but when learning a new system, little things matter and make your system popular.

(And, as a side rant, in contrast to some who like to use haskell on nixos (Which I actually like!) running on an obscure chipset, popularity is good. If someone asked me what Unix should he learn, I'd send him to Linux and not FreeBSD, since it's going to be much easier to find noob help online. Then, this noob will go on to become a sysadmin, he'll recommend Linux because he knows it and will be able to find others who do.)

[phicoh]

That's a bit like asking Debian to be more like Ubuntu. And I have seen plenty of software that only works on Ubuntu, on other Linux distros you are on your own.

For an end-user friendly BSD you may want to look at TrueOS (https://www.trueos.org/). They take FreeBSD and then add more sauce to provide a better user experience.