[JCattheATM]

> FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.

That's pretty much it. A lot of the people I see using a BSD these days do so because they always have and they prefer what they know, which is fine, or they just want to be contrarian.

Realistically, aside from edge cases in hardware support, you can do anything you want on any modern *nix. There's not even as much of a difference between distros as people claim. All the "I want an OS that gets out of my way" and similar reasons apply to most modern well-maintained distros these days. It's more personality and familiarity than anything objective.

[lizknope]

I went from Slackware in 1994 to Red Hat in 1998 to Fedora when they split into Fedora and RH Enterprise. Every 2 or 3 years I will install a different distro in a VM and see "Okay, now I see what it's about." But I have no interest in switching as long as Fedora does everything I need. I don't really understand the people that distro hop. I just assume they are really young and I have work to do and a family to take care of.

[JCattheATM]

I get that. I stopped using Slack around...not sure, maybe 2007 or so when I tried to do my normal minimal setup and mplayer wouldn't run without Samba installed, and the community was hostile to anyone who didn't do the recommended full install. I never wanted it a a feature complete desktop but that's the market they tried to focus on.

Took me a while to settle on Alpine after trying Arch and Void, but I can't imagine why I would ever leave unless they change something drastic.

[groundzeros2015]

I mean… at this point Linux is nothing like the 90s. It’s just big corporate Unix. Every change is in the interest of massive cloud providers.

[LeFantome]

Not even remotely true. Some of the biggest changes recently have been driven by people trying to use Linux on their Apple Silicon. Or to play games. Or RISC-V chipmakers.

[groundzeros2015]

You're right - they allow additions of things like drivers that sit in isolation. But what about decisions with a tradeoff that favors one application or the other?