[lifeisstillgood]

I ran a whole company on top of FreeBSD back in the day (2005 ish). It was great, and ran all my personal pcs the same way (hell, refusing to install windows to try out this bitcoin idea is even now a good idea).

But somehow Linux still took over my personal and professional life.

Going back seems nice but there need to be a compelling reason -docker is fine, the costs don’t add up any more. I do t have a real logical argument beyond that.

[adrian_b]

In the early years after 2000, FreeBSD 4 had a much better performance and reliability in any networking or storage applications in comparison with the contemporaneous Linux and Windows XP/Windows 2000.

However, in 2003 Intel introduced CPUs with SMT and in 2005 AMD introduced multi-core CPUs.

These multi-threaded and/or multi-core CPUs quickly replaced the single-threaded CPUs, especially in servers, where the FreeBSD stronghold was.

FreeBSD 4 could not handle multiple threads. In the following years Linux and Windows have been developed immediately to take advantage of multiple threads and cores, while FreeBSD has required many years for this, a time during it has become much less used than before, because new users were choosing Linux and some of the old users were also switching to Linux for their new computers that were not supported by FreeBSD.

Eventually FreeBSD has become decent again from the PoV of performance, but it has never been again in a top position and it lacks native device drivers for many of the hardware devices that are supported by Linux, due to much fewer developers able to do the necessary reverse engineering work or the porting work for the case when some company provides Linux device drivers for their hardware.

For the last 3 decades, I have been using continuously both FreeBSD and Linux. I use Linux on my desktop PCs and laptops, and in some computational servers where I need software support not available for FreeBSD, e.g. NVIDIA CUDA (NVIDIA provides FreeBSD device drivers for graphic applications, but not CUDA). I continue to use FreeBSD for many servers that implement various kinds of networking or storage functions, due to exceptional reliability and simplicity of management.

[whizzter]

The FreeBSD threading was perhaps behind but in general, but the big things in Linux VS FreeBSD was always the 4.3 licensing lawsuits that gave Linux a momentum that BSD never caught up with.

The real difference during that early 00s was that momentum bought 2 things that made FreeBSD a worse choice (and made even more people end up using Linux):

1: "commercial" support for Linux, firstly hardware like you mentioned, but in the way that you could buy a server with some Linux variant installed and you knew that it'd run, unless you're an CTO you're probably not risking even trying out FreeBSD on a fresh machine if time isn't abundant.

Also software like Java servers comes to mind, came with binaries or was otherwise easy to get running on Linux, and even with FreeBSD's Linux layer VM's things like JVM and CLR often relied on subtle details that makes it incompatible with the Linux layer (tried running .NET a year or two ago, ran into random crashes).

2: a lot of "fresh" Linux developers had a heavy "works on my machine" mentality, being reliant on Linux semantics, paths or libraries in makefiles (or dependencies on things like systemd)

Sure there is often upstream patches (eventually) or patches in FreeBSD ports, those last are good for stable systems, but a PITA in the long run since stuff doesn't get upstreamed properly and you're often stuck when there is a major release and need to figure out how to patch a new version yourself.

[adrian_b]

The copyright lawsuit was the first moment in time when FreeBSD and the other *BSDs were left behind, while Linux was free to advance.

Nevertheless, after this initial setback they had recovered and almost a decade later, around 2003, they had become the best solution for many server applications, even if they were not so widely known as Linux, which had spread a lot during the years when *BSDs were tied in lawsuits.

The slowness of their evolution towards multi-threading, which was caused by having much less developers than Linux and less corporate support, was what has propelled again Linux in front of them and this handicap has never been recovered later.

The 2 points listed by you are of course correct, by they are linked to the continuous reduction of the number of FreeBSD users that has started in 2003 and which has lasted for several years, which was caused by the fact that even when you were already an experienced FreeBSD user and preferred it over Linux, it was pointless to install FreeBSD on any new state-of-the-art computer, because FreeBSD could not harness its power.

[dijit]

Yeah, I have a similar situation; FreeBSD is a great operating system, but the sheer amount of investment in Linux makes all the warts semi-tolerable.

I'm sure some people have a sunk-cost feeling with Linux and will get defensive of this, but ironically this was exactly the argument I had heard 20 years ago - and I was defensive about it myself then.. This has only become more true though.

It's really hard to argue against Linux when even architecturally poor decisions are papered over by sheer force of will and investment; so in a day-to-day context Linux is often the happy path even though the UX of FreeBSD is more consistent over time.

[flipped]

Never understood why satoshi was a prime windows user.

[earthscienceman]

I know this comment is effectively a side tangent on a side tangent. but that was always the strangest thing to me as well. I remember in 2012 when I was debating fiddling around with Bitcoin. that was one of the things that turned me off. I was sure that there was no way something as brilliant as this was supposed to be was developed by windows user.

Which surely says something about all these ideological purity tests

[dijit]

Windows developers (like sysadmins) are of two kinds in my experience.

People who don't understand shit about how the system behaves and are comfortable with that. "I install a package, I hit the button, it works"

.. and

People who understand very deeply how computers work, and genuinely enjoy features of the NT Kernel, like IOCP and the performance counters they offer to userland.

What's weird to me is that the competence is bimodal; you're either in the first camp or the second. With Linux (+BSD/Solaris etc;) it's a lot more of a spectrum.

I've never understood exactly why this is, but it's consistent. There's no "middle-good" Windows developer.

[whizzter]

The (install package, press button, it works) is great when you just want a boring OS since the interest is elsewhere rather than an itch on making the machine as perfect extension of onself.

The machine and installation is just fungible.

I think I've had Linux as a primary OS 2 times, FreeBSD once and osX once, what's pulled me back has been software and fiddling.

I'm on the verge of giving Linux or osX another shot though, some friends has claimed that fiddling is virtually gone on Linux these days and Wine also seems more than capable now to handle the software that bought me back.

But also, much of the software is available outside of Windows today.

[anthk]

Unix is easier to understand than the NT mess and everything it's in the open and documented, so you can achieve a good level of knowledge in the middle. OTOH in order to understand NT deeply you must be a reverse engineer. Also, on the other side, crazy experts under Wine (both ways, Unix and NT) OpenBSD and 9front do exist on par of these NT wizards. It just happen with Unix/9f you climb an almost flat slope (more in the second) due to the crazy simple design, while with NT the knowledge it's damn expensive to earn.

With 9front you OFC need expertise on par of NT but without far less efforth. The books (9intro), the papers, CSP for concurrency... it's all there, there's no magic, you don't need ollyDBG or an NT object explorer to understand OLE and COM for instance.

RE 9front? Maybe on issues while debugging, because the rest it's at /sys/src, and if something happens you just point Acid under Acme to go straight to the offending source line. The man pages cover everything. Drivers are 200x smaller and more understandable than both NT and Unix. Meanwhile to do that under NT you must almost be able to design an ISA by yourself and some trivial compiler/interpreter/OS for it, because there's no open code for anything. And no, Wine is not a reference, but a reimplementation.

[whizzter]

That's kinda true for older/integrated parts of Windows, lots and lots of functionality that people have come to rely on over the years, but also huge black-boxes that you need to not be intimidated at probing into to solve weird issues (that often becomes understandable if you have enough experience as a developer to interpret what the API surface tells about the possible internal implementation).

[salvesefu]

Probably bc, Windows users live in walled knowledge domains that tend to reinforce levels of competence (or lack of competence).

Gamers tend to be somewhere in the middle though.