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Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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