It's Official But Sad: TrueOS Is Over As Once The Best Desktop BSD OS

[xeekei]

That's a very distance third.

I might be sleepdeprived, but wouldn't BSD being behind 3 other OSes make it fourth?

[oiaohm]

Android is Linux, merely using BSD-licensed userspace components, whereas the iOS/macOS/… kernels use proper BSD code.

No it not BSD license on iOS/macOS kernels.

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/master/LICENSE

The license of those OS kernels is Apple Public License that make GPLv2 restrictions look quite mild in fact. BSD usage in commercial setting is very limited. Even sony with the playstation 4 has own licensed what they added without using the BSD license.

[jacob]

The FreeBSD userbase is also larger than most individual Linux distros. It also has more developers than Linux Mint for example and that seems fairly popular and well liked.

Have you got any data on this? Admittedly I don't but I very much doubt that FreeBSD is even within the same order of magnitude as Ubuntu, RHEL etc. Now of course if you compare against the likes of Alpine Linux, Devuan, Slackware (which was once the dominant distro!), that's another matter, but also I would say a totally irrelevant one; it's like saying that it's much more useful from a practical point of view to learn Bulgarian because more people speak it than Albanian. No disrespect meant to our Bulgarian and Albanian friends, of course!

That aside, I don't feel that FreeBSD needs desktop distros. It is trivial to type 1 pkg install command to get a full desktop environment so it is a waste maintaining an entire distro just for that.

That is a self-defeating mindset. Linux - and to a much larger extent still, BSD - stands virtually no chance on the desktop until they realise that a desktop OS is not a text-based server OS where you can optionally install an afterthought UI (but where a great many tasks still involve editing text files using vi).

Open-source software can never die. Even TrueOS can be forked and maintained

That's the beauty of open source. But TrueOS' problem is that apparently it never had that many users and developers to begin with.

[zexelon]

jacob Yup, pretty much nailed it there. BSD to me is pretty much like this XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/191/

[andyprough]

Have you got any data on this? Admittedly I don't but I very much doubt that FreeBSD is even within the same order of magnitude as Ubuntu, RHEL etc. Now of course if you compare against the likes of Alpine Linux, Devuan, Slackware (which was once the dominant distro!), that's another matter, but also I would say a totally irrelevant one; it's like saying that it's much more useful from a practical point of view to learn Bulgarian because more people speak it than Albanian. No disrespect meant to our Bulgarian and Albanian friends, of course!



That is a self-defeating mindset. Linux - and to a much larger extent still, BSD - stands virtually no chance on the desktop until they realise that a desktop OS is not a text-based server OS where you can optionally install an afterthought UI (but where a great many tasks still involve editing text files using vi).



That's the beauty of open source. But TrueOS' problem is that apparently it never had that many users and developers to begin with.

Linux is not an OS, it is merely a kernel. And ChromeOS, which uses the Linux kernel, is doing very well in terms of laptop popularity. Better than Google ever expected, I would imagine.

[jacob]

Linux is not an OS, it is merely a kernel. And ChromeOS, which uses the Linux kernel, is doing very well in terms of laptop popularity. Better than Google ever expected, I would imagine.

That's basically what I meant. ChromeOS and Android get it right and are doing very well. Ubuntu and Fedora (and their derivatives) are moving in that direction with wayland, systemd and other projects that eliminate the old *nix cruft and automate and "APIfy" the OS to look more like a modern desktop OS should. I was reacting to the idea that BSD is supposedly just fine for the desktop because you can install a port of a desktop environment on it. It's not and that's not what a desktop OS means. This concept failed for Sun/OpenWindows, it failed for A/UX, it failed for CDE, it failed even for NeXTStep and it is failing and will always fail for pseudo-desktops based on FreeBSD or some of the major Linux distros.

[waitman]

I use FreeBSD and Debian. One feature I like in FreeBSD is the installed user applications do not mess with the system. On Debian and other GNU/Linux distributions everything is co-mingled. FreeBSD ports are generally kept up-to-date, so you're running the latest available version of most programs. The source code, to me, is clear and well-documented. So if you want to add some functionality to Bluetooth, for example, you can dig in and hack on it pretty easy.

[jacob]

I use FreeBSD and Debian. One feature I like in FreeBSD is the installed user applications do not mess with the system. On Debian and other GNU/Linux distributions everything is co-mingled. FreeBSD ports are generally kept up-to-date, so you're running the latest available version of most programs. The source code, to me, is clear and well-documented. So if you want to add some functionality to Bluetooth, for example, you can dig in and hack on it pretty easy.

I tend to agree with this. I use Ubuntu but for the reasons that you say, I tend to install everything that is not part of the core OS (which of course includes the desktop) using snap or flatpak packages to keep it separate. As for customising the source code, other than the Linux kernel itself I use some own hacks in Nautilus and libvirt and in both cases the source code is pretty straightforward.

[pal666]

BSD is maybe third most used OS (after Windows, iOS, Linux)

maybe you have issues with counting to 4 lol. and your list is garbage. linux is the most used os for several years already thanks to android

[pal666]

The FreeBSD userbase is also larger than most individual Linux distros.

freebsd has to count its userbase separately because *bsd are incompatible. linux distros on the other hand are just distros of one os, they have to be counted together(i.e. in billions)

It also has more developers than Linux Mint for example and that seems fairly popular and well liked.

lol. i have no idea how many developers some ubuntu reskin has, but it's ridiculous to even consider such metric. all of freebsd has fewer developers than one linux kernel