[MrArthegor]

I’m agreeing with your description.

The mains issues with Linux is it’s just the kernel, and anything is developed in their corner without taking account of the rest. Also, I tend to think the Linux folk in general seem to want to reinvent the wheel every 6 months, where FreeBSD and BSD in general have tendency to make things better from previous work in comparison

[tuna74]

Linux is "just" an OS kernel. If you want to compare FreeBSD to something you can compare it to Fedora, Debian or Arch etc.

[MrArthegor]

Yes I know, but maybe my initial message wasn’t clear enough.

But for me the fact Linux is just the kernel doesn’t make the previous criticisms invalid. The first concerning the development of the different components in sort of echo chamber where no one seem to communicate with each other is directly taken from the Linux Kernel philosophy, the maintainer have expressed in multiple time they don’t care what happen outside of the kernel, in contrast with FreeBSD developers for example

The second point is more towards distribution I admit

[LeFantome]

To make my long-winded point more concretely, the core diference is really just that there are "so many" Linux developers.

Linus has a pretty firm hand on the tiller of Linux evolution. I counter "don't care what happen outside of the kernel" with his many, many public "never, ever break userland" rants. And many kernel devs and maintainers are employees of companies like Intel, Red Hat, Google, IBM, and AMD that absolutely care about coordinating kernel dev with the bigger picture.

Something like 250 devs contribute to FreeBSD each year. For just the Linux kernel, the number is closer to 5000. There are just way more people working on way more stuff. It is not a surprise to see a more significant halo of chaos around Linux. Coordinating the Linux kernel is herding cats and, even when everybody eventually lines up, there are going to be periods where it seems like everybody is talking past each other.

And while the Linux kernel does have a "release early, release often" mantra, it also touts "trust but verify" and has a strong meritocracy and hierarchy. So I am not sure "no one seem to communicate with each other" is fair. Not just anybody can drop whatever they want into Linux. We also need to remember that shipping the Linux kernel is not the same as shipping a Linux distro (operating system). Actual Linux distros bring kernel versions in according to the philosophy of the distro. Many are very stable and conservative. Others are a whole lot less so (but that is users choice).

[nmz]

Isn't this more telling though? that with vastly less developers they've built a system comparable to linux? This is what happens when you have direction.

[cperciva]

I think less direction and more design. And 40+ years of history doesn't hurt either.

But yes, it's impressive how well FreeBSD does considering the relative size of the developer communities.

[LeFantome]

"The mains issues with Linux is it’s just the kernel, and anything is developed in their corner without taking account of the rest."

I hear this a lot when people talk about FreeBSD but I am not sure about it.

A LOT of the core Linux ecosystem comes from Red Hat developers for example. If I look at RHEL as an operating system, they have a definite vision for the OS, they take a long-term view, and they invest in development to get it there. My guess is that Red Hat alone employs more devs than work on FreeBSD.

Red Hat contributes heavily to the kernel, the core C library (glibc), the userland (GNU utils), the system supervisor (systemd), the compiler (GCC), the desktop environment (GNOME), the GUI framework (Wayland now, Mesa, etc), the sound system (pipewire), the hypervisor system (KVM, libvirt), and the container system (podman and Flatpak). Red Hat heavily influences the direction of all this stuff with a common vision and they work to implement it as a cohesive expression in their distro. This is a broader swath of what makes the operating system than FreeBSD considers its scope and it is all built to work together.

If you use RHEL, you know it is very stable (static). When Red Hat makes changes, they tell you about them years in advance.

I honestly do not think you can say that FreeBSD is more cohesively developed or better documented than RHEL. FreeBSD arguably has less control over key aspects of the OS than Red Hat does.

I am not advocating for Red Hat here by the way. I am not even a RHEL user. I use Chimera Linux which rejects quite a lot of the Red Hat vision including SystemD and pretty much the whole GNU system (userland, glibc, gcc).

My point is that Red Hat is truly a maker of their own destiny and their distro reflects their vision. They want to move to SystemD. They introduced DRM and KMS instead of the traditional Xorg driver model. They want to move to Wayland. They have heavily embraced the OCI container model. It is all part of their vision and design.

Pragmatically, FreeBSD has to create tools like Linuxulator. FreeBSD is adding support for OCI containers. FreeBSD is adding Wayland support and, as popular desktop environments abandon X11, may have to move to Wayland as the preferred display server. Even the FreeBSD utils have added many options over the years to be compatible with the userland that Red Hat developed. Was 'ls --color=auto' a FreeBSD design? In other words, the Red Hat agenda drives the evolution of FreeBSD (but not much the other way around).

So sure, FreeBSD is more stable and cohesive than the universe of Linux distros. But even BSD has fragmentation. GhostBSD is close to FreeBSD but not quite and would be more different if they had more devs. DragonFly BSD certainly has its own agenda (and again, is held back more by bandwidth than solidarity). The free-for-all in the Linux world is an expression of its size and collective innovation. But how much of this you want as a user is up to you. As many have said, you don't use "Linux", you use a Linux distro.

Again, my main distro is Chimera Linux. The whole point of the name is that it pulls together things never designed to work together (including the FreeBSD userland on Linux). And yet, the Chimera Linux dev team has a very strong vision of what they want their OS to look like and they work very hard to build that into a cohesive implementation. This includes keeping the system and the code small and understandable. It is a goal that you can sanely build the entire system from the ground up. That is why Chimera uses a BSD userland and does not use SystemD. But while they want to keep things simple, they also want "modern" features.

They choose components that fit their vision. Where changes are required, they make them. Where they deem good options not to exist, they invent them (eg. Turnstile, cports). As a user, I get that "solid, cohesive, well-designed, intentional, and heavily curated" experience that FreeBSD users talk about. More to the comment above, Chimera reeks of "looking to preserve tradition while striving to make things better". Of course, it is also still a niche distro with a tiny community (at this point). As somebody said above, FreeBSD may be a better choice for this and other reasons. But Chimera Linux is still Linux and that has its advantages. The box I am typing on uses bcachefs and Distrobox. For me, it is perfect.

Anyway, I apologies for the length. When you talk about FreeBSD vs "Linux", you really have to choose a specific Linux distro for the comparison to be meaningful. Depending on which one you pick, the statements made by @MrArthegnor may or may not hold. At least, that is my view.