[tlb]

He's talking about research, so you have to look at the state of the art, not what the masses were still using. In 2000 I used FreeBSD, which was pretty good. It had jails [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail] by then, which a reasonable person might still prefer to modern Linux containers.

[kllrnohj]

Windows 2000 also existed at that time, was widely used, and was basically straight out of the future. It had:

NTFS 3.0 with file encryption support

Logical disk management for dynamic disks & expansion of a logical partition over multiple physical disks. Without a reformat.

Distributed file systems & hierarchical storage management.

MMC with group policy control, active directory, centralized event viewer for OS & application events, and system service management

Speaking of which, system services were a thing that actually existed and were managed (systemd fighting still continues, so Linux still hasn't "caught up" on this)

Plug & Play ACPI support (technically windows 98 was the first to support this but it was so broken it was a joke - Linux lagged by a few years and didn't really support it until 2.6).

User-mode print drivers

Network QoS

time service with SNTP support

[cperciva]

We had jails, but we didn't have virtualized network stacks, pluggable TCP congestion frameworks, or bhyve.

[feanaro]

FreeBSD jails have certainly not be a static concept since 2000, so the term "FreeBSD jail" does not denote a single, unchanged thing.