5 ms·

On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?

by mikece 2mo ago

isx726552 2mo ago
*BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin… But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
- bigfishrunning 2mo ago
  FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
  - throw0101d 2mo ago
    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
    - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
      If it were a GPLv3 OS, it's likely that they would have chosen something else.
      - JackSlateur 2mo ago
        Would that have been a bad thing ? Between a proprietary OS on which we cannot do anything and an opensource-based OS on which we cannot do anything .. I'd argue that making the company paying the bill would be more healthy
        bigfishrunning 2mo ago
        The two arguments against that 1) People writing BSD licensed software want people to use it, and don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) 2) "the company" never pays the bill. It is always passed to their customers in one way or another.
        rbanffy 2mo ago
        > don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) Also don’t care about their users having the same rights they enjoyed getting software written by someone else (for free!) and making some changes before their customers could pay to use it.
        bigfishrunning 2mo ago
        Yes! if they did care about that, they'd use some copy-left license.
        JackSlateur 2mo ago
        Yes If we think a bit more, that may help the customers: companies like Sony would have to choice between either implement their own OS (increased cost, increase end product prices) or use opensource software The topic would become a competitive (dis)advantage, not just a random topic for legal people My take is that BSD-like licences are bad for humankind, but as a short-sighted person with no impact whatsover, it does not matter
bigfishrunning 2mo ago
As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!
- jjav 2mo ago
  Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
  - asimovfan 2mo ago
    how so? could you please elaborate?
    - felixgallo 2mo ago
      As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communicate with some linux desktop nonsense that wasn't even installed, and there were a bunch of extremely poorly configured timeouts (!) (!!!) which eventually caused ssh to hang. Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee. This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.
naturalmovement 2mo ago
No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  > As enshittification encroaches onto Linux What enshittification? > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
- sitzkrieg 2mo ago
  linux userspace has always sucked ass
  - setopt 2mo ago
    In what way? Do you have concrete examples?
- einsteinx2 2mo ago
  > As enshittification encroaches onto Linux This is a ridiculous stretch of the term > With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines. > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole. This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
- vinceguidry 2mo ago
  When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.
coaksford 2mo ago
As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.

On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?

by mikece 2mo ago

On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?

*BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin… But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.

bigfishrunning 2mo ago
FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
- throw0101d 2mo ago
  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
  - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
    If it were a GPLv3 OS, it's likely that they would have chosen something else.
    - JackSlateur 2mo ago
      Would that have been a bad thing ? Between a proprietary OS on which we cannot do anything and an opensource-based OS on which we cannot do anything .. I'd argue that making the company paying the bill would be more healthy
      - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
        The two arguments against that 1) People writing BSD licensed software want people to use it, and don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) 2) "the company" never pays the bill. It is always passed to their customers in one way or another.
        rbanffy 2mo ago
        > don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) Also don’t care about their users having the same rights they enjoyed getting software written by someone else (for free!) and making some changes before their customers could pay to use it.
        bigfishrunning 2mo ago
        Yes! if they did care about that, they'd use some copy-left license.
        JackSlateur 2mo ago
        Yes If we think a bit more, that may help the customers: companies like Sony would have to choice between either implement their own OS (increased cost, increase end product prices) or use opensource software The topic would become a competitive (dis)advantage, not just a random topic for legal people My take is that BSD-like licences are bad for humankind, but as a short-sighted person with no impact whatsover, it does not matter

bigfishrunning 2mo ago

As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!

jjav 2mo ago
Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
- asimovfan 2mo ago
  how so? could you please elaborate?
  - felixgallo 2mo ago
    As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communicate with some linux desktop nonsense that wasn't even installed, and there were a bunch of extremely poorly configured timeouts (!) (!!!) which eventually caused ssh to hang. Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee. This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.

naturalmovement 2mo ago

No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.

matheusmoreira 2mo ago
> As enshittification encroaches onto Linux What enshittification? > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
sitzkrieg 2mo ago
linux userspace has always sucked ass
- setopt 2mo ago
  In what way? Do you have concrete examples?
einsteinx2 2mo ago
> As enshittification encroaches onto Linux This is a ridiculous stretch of the term > With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines. > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole. This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
vinceguidry 2mo ago
When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.

coaksford 2mo ago

As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.