FreeBSD Celebrating Its 30th Anniversary

[fitzie]

it's great that freebsd is still moving forward, and glad that there's lots of people and businesses still using it. I will say from what I see that they did win the licensing war. gpl has really been isolated to a few (but very critical) components, but more liberal licenses have won the day up and down the software stack. It will take a lot more perseverance for freebsd to stick around another 30 years, but I wish them all the best of luck!

[partcyborg]

Never said it wasn't on desktops, I said "eclipsed"... many desktop users are interested in goofy stuff like video games (Steam with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, etc) that wouldn't necessarily be available on FreeBSD, which is why Linux has eclipsed it there. But as a desktop OS for, ya know, actually getting work done... sure, it's on par. I remember liking things solely because they were niche, 25 years ago, when I was a young... now, being niche when all you need is something stable that meets your requirements isn't so alluring. ;-)

What on earth does nvidia have to do with any of this?

Regardless, nvidia releases drivers for freebsd as well as linux, so it is likely the better card choice for a freebsd box

[mercster]

What on earth does nvidia have to do with any of this?

Regardless, nvidia releases drivers for freebsd as well as linux, so it is likely the better card choice for a freebsd box

Ahh that's interesting, I'm glad Nvidia does that. Here's hoping something in ports provides an easy "plug'n'play" way to install them (it's been so long since I ran FreeBSD, I don't even remember if I had NVIDIA hardware at the time.) I made an assumption that binary blobs weren't available, but I guess I was wrong. At any rate, getting Steam/Proton working sounds like an uphill battle, so my point stands: aside from people using an OS as a productivity desktop, Linux will have advantages for most home PC users... that's the point I was trying to get across.

[cen1]

I wish FreeBSD well and many more years. Competition and choice are always good to have.

The issue I see with FreeBSD is that nowadays there is almost no advantage to running FreeBSD vs Linux unless you care about the license. Less driver support, jail wrappers have advanced somewhat but still don't have the ecosystem scale of docker, they lost the ZFS advantage etc. If you get into problems you are less likely to find a solution on the internet because there are thousands more resources available for Linux. Even iXsystems who are presumably experts in FreeBSD chose to base their new hyper distro on Linux, I think that tells you something..

So other than feeling unique and cool, when spinning up a new server I can't find a particularly good reason to choose FreeBSD over Linux nowadays.

[mercster]

I wish FreeBSD well and many more years. Competition and choice are always good to have. [...] So other than feeling unique and cool, when spinning up a new server I can't find a particularly good reason to choose FreeBSD over Linux nowadays.

Not sure it's a matter of "competition" at this point. However... technologists, engineers, IT managers, hackers, and anyone else needing to make use of a server operating system make a wide array of choices and decisions, often involving a bevvy of considerations not readily apparent, than neither you nor I could possibly conceive of. In the Real World, it's not necessarily about competition, or "feeling unique and cool", but a complex web of requirements, environments, and circumstances that is impossible to make sweeping statements about.

Let's just leave it at this: FreeBSD is still being developed, people use FreeBSD (for whatever reason, despite your declaration), and that is a Good Thing.

EDIT: At the very least, lets not forget that FreeBSD code is present in some form in MacOS (as I previously understood it, much of the userland was adapted from FreeBSD to work with XNU, which itself was based on Mach.) Maybe FreeBSD is good for things we don't know about, hmm?

[grahamperrin]

NVIDIA graphics

… hoping something in ports provides an easy "plug'n'play" way to install them (it's been so long since I ran FreeBSD, …

Packaged; https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#NVIDIA_graphics

NB the call to test nvidia-drm