| Having used continuously both FreeBSD and Linux, wherever they are best suited, since around 1995 until today, I disagree. In my opinion the single factor that has contributed the most to a greater success for Linux than for FreeBSD has been the transition to multithreaded and multicore CPUs even in the cheapest computers, which has started in 2003 with the SMT Intel Pentium 4, followed in 2005 by the dual-core AMD CPUs. Around 2003, FreeBSD 4.x was the most performant and the most reliable operating system for single-core single-thread CPUs, for networking or storage applications, well above Linux or Microsoft Windows (source: at that time I was designing networking equipment and we had big server farms on which the equipment was tested, under all operating systems). However it could not use CPUs with multiple cores or threads, so on such CPUs it fell behind Linux and Windows. The support introduced in FreeBSD 5.x was only partial and many years have passed until FreeBSD had again a competitive performance on up-to-date CPUs. Other BSD variants were even slower in their conversion to multithreaded support. During those years the fraction of users of *BSD systems has diminished a lot. The second most important factor has been the much smaller set of device drivers for various add-on interface cards than for Linux. Only few hardware vendors have provided FreeBSD device drivers for their products, mostly only Intel and NVIDIA, and for the products of other vendors there have been few FreeBSD users able to reverse engineer them and write device drivers, in comparison with Linux. The support for non-x86 ISAs has also been worse than in Linux, but this was just a detail among the general support for less kinds of hardware than Linux. All this has been caused by positive feedback, FreeBSD has started with fewer users, because by the time when the lawsuits have been settled favorably for FreeBSD most potential users had already started to use Linux. Then the smaller number of users have been less capable of porting the system to new hardware devices and newer architectures, which has lead to even lower adoption. Nevertheless, there have always been various details in the *BSD systems that have been better than in Linux. A few of them have been adopted in Linux, like the software package systems that are now ubiquitous in Linux distributions, but in many cases Linux users have invented alternative solutions, which in enough cases were inferior, instead of studying the *BSD systems and see whether an already existing solution could be adopted instead of inventing yet another alternative. |
The first mistake was that all BSD core teams flatly refused to provide native support for the JVM back in its heyday. They eventually partially conceded and made it work using Linux emulation; however, it was riddled with bugs, crashes and other issues for years before it could run Java server apps. Yet, users clamoured to run Java applications, like, now and vociferously.
The second grave mistake was to flatly refuse to support containerisation (Docker) due to not being kosher. Linux based containerisation is what underpins all cloud computing today. Again, the FreeBSD arrived too late, and it was too little.
P.S. I still hold the view that FreeBSD made matters even worse by dropping support for non-Intel platforms early on – at a stage when its bleak future was already all but certain. New CPU architectures are enjoying a renaissance, whilst FreeBSD nervously sucks its thumb by the roadside of history.