I think people are looking for new alternatives to tinker with. Linux is becoming new Windows and BSDs new Linux. I dunno what is Windows becoming, but it ain't good.
Generally people get more excited any time a major release of anything comes out. But FWIW HN has always had favorable front paging for anything related to FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Not disagreeing, but if the release was a few months ago, then the poster is quite correct - there is a recent "surge" of FreeBSD related posts. And these are not quite ... how shall I word it somewhat nicely ... not quite as fascinating to, say, a wider linux community as such. With that I don't mean "because we use linux, we are snobs", but that what the FreeBSD guys talk about, seems a little bit ... outdated. The heavy use of shell scripts for instance in this post here - I never understood that focus on shell scripts in general, including on Linux. I transitioned into using ruby (or python, but mostly ruby) to replace all shell script needs a long time ago. Every time I am assumed to have to write a shell script I wonder why I would want to cripple myself when I can use a better programming language instead. Many of these shown "innovations" are also not really groundbreaking. To me it seems as if there is a distinct lack of FreeBSD users out there compared to Linux users. As a consequence Linux simply has a lot more information and news (a lot of which is also low quality of course; I am not saying it is all pancakes and sunflowers in the Linux ecosystem either).
> The heavy use of shell scripts for instance in this post here...
There's exactly one in the post. It's ten non-blank/non-comment lines, and the author says of it
This is not well designed but it gets the job done.
My least favorite thing to see in the world is a Ruby, (worse) Python, or (much worse) Go program that could have been a very simple shell script.
When my sysadmin programs get more complicated, I reach for something more suited (like Erlang), but if the shell script is simple and only has deps on other standalone programs, then I write a shell program.
No conspiracy, I think it just happens. One person posts something, maybe someone else reads it and gets into a rabbit hole on a topic, or maybe someone sees an opportunity to throw more conversation pieces at something hot.