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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

> the fact that nobody cares about BSD

I am quite certain that you would be shocked if you learned how many people use it. I've worked at two companies where more than 95% of servers ran FreeBSD, and these are absolutely companies that you have heard of. 10s of thousands of servers at each when I worked at them, and likely 5x that amount, now.

lots of people care about FreeBSD. they just aren't known for crapping on Linux, like Linux users are known for crapping on everything that is not Linux.

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Well to be fair, most people using FreeBSD are also Linux users, save people indirectly using/'benefiting' from BSD, i.e in a work environment as you mentioned. Of course discounting Mac users (I honestly think that's a hilarious joke). It also strikes me that many companies use BSD simply to save money in an area where time =/= money, as BSD is very secure and very stable, there are some licensing issues with many big Linux distros, etc. I very much doubt that anyone in the year 2022 are using BSD servers or workstations to improve their performance yield unless you're working retail or construction or something and are looking to implement a RTOS platform based on BSD because your boss severely capped your department's budget lol

there was a time when freebsd's networking stack was pretty trendy for use in high performance networking settings.

it was frequently used to implement things like software load balancers. quite possibly because of its (pre-linux-cfq) superior resource scheduling.

there was also a time before it was trendy to complain about the GIL in python where SMP in freebsd suffered from the BKL. only one processor could be in the kernel at a time.

So who are these companies? I hear references to them constantly, but pretty much the only ones willing to stick their head above the parapet are Netflix (in a single use case) and a few storage/network vendors using proprietary forks.

I would scream if I ever saw a dude in a suit give some 70's looking NEET permission to base their company's entire IT platform on FreeBSD specifically. It'd be like switching all your office workstations from MacOS to Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

why? it's a valid decision to make.

Linux is turbulent and uncoordinated. FreeBSD is the opposite of that.

Because it's not worth the hours when it inevitably breaks, which corpo server setups always do. At least in my view, that is. If it's running GNU/Linux or, God forbid, Windows, honestly as the head of a larger company I can just make a guy or another company fix it asap, whereas with BSD you'll be reliant on a handful of people at the very most, and no one is going to help you. They'll help you to help yourself, but 2 hours spent on something where I could've just called up another big company and have them do it, is a waste of money. Also whilst Linux can update without reboot (I believe you even do kernel updates now?), as far as I know BSD is a lot more fond of rebooting. BSD as a whole is more turbulent and uncoordinated than GNU/Linux, honestly. It's the individual distros up against each other that makes BSD the more stable party, i.e BSD vs Debian. But sometimes, being coordinated and calm just means "not innovative". BSD is probably the furthest you can get from progress and innovation imo.

FreeBSD is not some esoteric thing. it's actually a UNIX whereas Linux is not.

for someone with only Linux experience, FreeBSD is a nearly trivial set of skills to pick up.

you're smacking on FreeBSD and I dont think you know it as well as you could when making these arguments.

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