Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

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I'll say that the reason I have been considering switching is more of an ideological, not bragging rights, but after years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine it pushes me to want to take some sort of stand. It may not be much but least I am doing something.

The only other big thing holding me back was the tooling but now that I've switched most of my workflow to Emacs, the option of choosing FreeBSD is becoming more and more appealing.

EDIT: Just be clear, I have been using Ubuntu as my daily driver since 2012; however I don't love all the decisions Canonical has made, I don't like how the entire ecosystem has grown to a level of complexity that makes it hard to understand what the hell is happening under the hood, and I am beyond peeved about the havoc systemd-resolver has wrought on my system.

EDIT 2: If anyone has any other suggestions for a better more free distro that I can use I'd love the advice, the thing keeping me form Hurd is worrying that it won't have full driver support.

Why FreeBSD and not Linux?

Based on the subtext of GP's comment, I'm guessing they're either offended by RedHat, Canonical, and/or Microsoft's various involvements, things like systemd or snapd, and think it taints the whole linux ecosystem.

I'm curious how they would feel about Bell Labs. Sounds like a proprietary OS that happened to be open source wouldn't go over well either.

> "years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine"

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

And how is upstreaming things an attack?

Personally, I see Linux as a major attack vector. Binary blobs are a big skeleton in Linux's closet. One reason why big business got behind Linux is their ability to have closed source, binary firmware blobs baked into device drivers. You can choose instead to use Linux-libre, of course, but your user experience will suffer about as much as it would by choosing any other *nix with poor proprietary driver support.

FreeBSD is comparatively more friendly to proprietary blobs, as it maintains a stable kernel ABI within major releases. [0]

Even choosing to ignore any blobbed drivers, Linux will still have better software compatibility, and still generally superior hardware compatibility. Certainly not worse hardware support. Linux supports more classes of hardware like wifi adapters, while FreeBSD is stuck trying to bring up newer standards. It also requires the same firmware blobs that Linux does -- in the end, whether on Linux or FreeBSD, if you dislike binary blobs in your drivers, you just have to limit yourself to hardware that doesn't require them.

[0] https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=284199+0+/usr/...

Big business like Sony and Apple prefer BSD exactly because of not having to provide everything to upstream.

Google prefers linux on the servers because of not having to provide everything to upstream.

That's a bit of a different case, though. Google isn't distributing it to end users the way Apple is with Darwin.

True, but in the end it's the same, you don't get access to the google nor the sony "magic" development.

BTW: Darwin is opensource:

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

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