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Comment by cfallin | Hacker News Reader

It's good to see the DRM (graphics) stuff more up-to-date in 11.0. FreeBSD is frustratingly close to natively-just-works on my 2014 Asus Haswell ultrabook (support for scrolling with the touchpad, of all things, is the main thing missing; also volume/screen hotkeys). I hope the laptop hardware support keeps improving!

Anyway, I really appreciate the simplicity of rc.conf and the well-curated config/boot infrastructure in general; pkg(ng) just works; ZFS is insanely cool; LLVM-as-system-compiler is nice... I sometimes wonder where we'd be if the BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago.

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> BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago

Linus said he wouldn't have written Linux if he had 386bsd at that time, which took longer. What that means is up for speculation, but Linux became wildly popular as a host for Apache and Samba before anything else. Similarly, if Oracle hadn't closed off Solaris, maybe FreeBSD wouldn't be the best compromise between hardware support and ZFS+DTrace availability.

PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally available next year.

> PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally available next year.

Do you have link for that? XFS supports metadata checksumming already and cp --reflink IIRC but I've never heard about data checksums and "real" COW e.g. snapshots?

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html

Great news! Thanks!

Nicely said! *BSDs are amazing systems and I try to recommend them to a lot of people, colleagues and friends. Many of them were Linux fans, but after they tried FreeBSD, they were asking themselves why is that system so underrated.

> I sometimes wonder where we'd be if the BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago.

BSD would be at the same place as today! People love to bring up the AT&T UNIX lawsuit like it did damage to BSDs popularity but never bring up the SCO Linux lawsuit which saw Linux grow and become more popular in spite of having a multi year lawsuit against it.

BSD is where it is in part because of the BSD license, and Linux is where its at because of the GPL.

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