FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BSD-2010-Highlights

[kylew77]

The decade was not kind to those FreeBSD distros. Debian/kFreeBSD basically died. The Arch FreeBSD hybrid pacBSD seems to be dead. Followed the links on the UbuntuBSD spin and their twitter page last post was from 2016. PCBSD turned into TrueOS which abandoned the desktop. We still have GhostBSD and NomadBSD as well as the newly announced FuryBSD, but it seem the best path to a FreeBSD desktop in 2019 is installing vanilla FreeBSD 12.x version and following a guide on getting Xorg and your DE of choice installed.

[jaypatelani]

Looking forward to more BSD related technical news and articles.

[Britoid]

Year of the BSD desktop?

[Volta]

Year of the BSD desktop?

Together with Gnome.

[k1e0x]

The decade was not kind to those FreeBSD distros. Debian/kFreeBSD basically died. The Arch FreeBSD hybrid pacBSD seems to be dead. Followed the links on the UbuntuBSD spin and their twitter page last post was from 2016. PCBSD turned into TrueOS which abandoned the desktop. We still have GhostBSD and NomadBSD as well as the newly announced FuryBSD, but it seem the best path to a FreeBSD desktop in 2019 is installing vanilla FreeBSD 12.x version and following a guide on getting Xorg and your DE of choice installed.

Distros take a difference sense of the word in FreeBSD than they do in Linux. FreeBSD is a complete OS and has everything it needs to run kernel, userland, compiler, apps, desktops and documentation pre-packaged. Just like you'd get from Microsoft or Apple. Linux is just a kernel so they need Distros to package it all.

And... idk about those GNU/BSD distros... pretty weird.. not sure what the benefit would be changing the userland.. and doing so seems pretty hard. BSD's kernel API isn't fixed like Linux's is.

[darkoverlordofdata]

I tried FreeBSD, and I really liked it... except the best OS is only as good as the available software. There is only a limited selection of software, and most of it is broken. So I stopped using BSD, and went back to Arch.

[Xisiqomelir]

Michael I actually switched 100% a while ago. I do enjoy the coverage so please keep it up!

[aht0]

I tried FreeBSD, and I really liked it... except the best OS is only as good as the available software. There is only a limited selection of software, and most of it is broken. So I stopped using BSD, and went back to Arch.

Curious as to what software you lacked? Commercial?
FOSS is usually ported over or usable "as is".

[edenist]

Greatly appreciate the BSD coverage. Thanks again Michael :-D