Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by crote 486 days ago
How does "lots" quantify, though? There are billions of desktop Windows users. There are tens of millions of desktop Linux users. I expect desktop BSD to go beyond the thousands, but does it reach the hundreds of thousands?

I've always felt like from a purely user perspective desktop BSD doesn't really distinguish itself from Linux. The software stack is essentially the same, and they're both FLOSS so that's not a reason to switch either. Maybe I'm wrong, but the Linux/BSD choice looks a lot less relevant than the Windows/Linux choice.

So if people use desktop BSD because it essentially gives them slightly fuzzier feelings, and they are essentially a rounding error in their user base, is it really fair to criticize Linux developers for not focusing on portability? You can only spend your time once, so do you use it to work on something benefiting your tens of millions of existing Linux users, or something benefiting your thousands of potential BSD users?

1 comments

Does it matter?

The question was if anyone uses BSD as a desktop and the answer is yes people do.

> You can only spend your time once, so do you use it to work on something benefiting your tens of millions of existing Linux users, or something benefiting your thousands of potential BSD users?

I couldn’t care less how the Wayland devs decided to prioritise their time. But it is worth pointing out that Wayland was architected from the ground up to be agnostic. That’s why it’s the polar opposite to the the “batteries included” design of X.

And as others have pointed out, Wayland is available for some BSD already.