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Comment by foomer | Hacker News Reader

That's a neat technical challenge solved, but I'm surprised by how much effort is being put in for these operating systems that basically no-one uses.

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Basically no one uses FreeBSD? Last time I checked, companies like Netflix, Sony, Yandex and more uses FreeBSD for most of their services, not sure I'd put those in the bracket of "no one".

Also, Hacker News runs FreeBSD, for what it's worth :)

Distrowatch too...it's kind of hilarious ;)

Why is it hilarious that a website covering Linux Distributions and Berkeley Software Distributions is running on FreeBSD?

Because they changed to linux and then back to freebsd, bit like sdf.org.

SDF had some Unix, then Linux, got hacked, and then NetBSD.

Yes...point was switched from Linux to NetBSD.

Lots of people and places use freebsd like netflix. I only see the popularity of freebsd increasing as linux moves more and more away from unix.

I'm slowly switching over for server-side, and next time I try a free OS desktop it'll probably be freebsd. Only thing I miss is docker, which I mostly just use as a package manager and service manager so I don't have to screw with distro-specific trivia for those things, and that's less of a problem on FreeBSD anyway.

I've long tolerated Linux but never loved it, and it's moving away from anything I'm interested in with each year, it seems (the competing mostly-bad image-based app distribution systems and the way Wayland's going are... yikes). Glad FreeBSD's there as an alternative.

On FreeBSD, I would recommend looking at jails and something like CBSD as a way to manage jails.

https://github.com/cbsd/cbsd

Right, I'm familiar with them, but a huge part of the benefit of docker is that it's basically a cross-distro (and, to some degree, cross-platform) very up-to-date server-oriented package manager. There are some efforts to create something like that for Jails but AFAIK none of them have gotten very far. Docker's benefit is that ~everyone uses it so there's usually an official docker image for anything one might want to run, kept in step with releases, plus a substantial history of images for rollbacks and testing and such.

It turns "how do I install and run this?" from a bunch of platform- and distro-specific instructions into `docker-compose up` for everything, with the bonus that the compose file also tells you exactly where data & config for the service live, so it's also concise, guaranteed-accurate, and extremely useful documentation. Old LTS Ubuntu? Can run the same version of a service, with the same command, as on bleeding-edge Arch. On Arch, exact same command. Debian, Red Hat? Same command. MacOS, if you've got docker set up, same command. Windows, ditto. The latter two, non-natively, sure, but it works. Learn docker, and you can use it everywhere, unlike becoming proficient with, say, dpkg/apt or portage or pacman. It can even kinda save you from having to worry about how a given platform's init system and process management works, at least for simple use cases.

Again, if you're doing most or everything on FreeBSD, development and hosting both, those benefits mostly vanish. But the reality is many workplaces or even personal dev+hosting environments are mixed, and docker suits those better than anything else I'm aware of—but if FreeBSD is in the mix, it's the odd-man-out. It's good not (only) because of its kinda-Jails-like isolation, but because of the excellent coverage of the image repository.

True the lack of docker support is a pretty big deal breaker if you use docker a lot. Freebsd jails have been a unique selling point for freebsd for years but I think linux containers have caught up and dockers ease of use and community support is unmatched.

I don't use docker much so its not an issue for me. I could probably setup jails for the stuff I use docker for but I'm lazy so I have a debian virtual machine running on bhyve that runs any docker stuff I want. My preference is freebsd but im not precious ill use what ever tool fits the job best.

FreeBSD's license causes it to be used in lots (lots!) of places where GPL isn't suitable - most are probably not super famous, but still ubiquitous. But as others have mentioned in their replies to you, there are many rather high profile use cases as well.

So - your premise is wrong - but even if it wasn't, why be surprised? Some stuff is just fun to hack on, people have passions and interests too.

It's funny to see peoples in such a deep bubble. For example in japan you hear *bsd as much if not more than linux.

Also many firewalls use freebsd/openbsd, from pfSense to opnsense to genugate.

there's japanese ISP's that use NetBSD in their hardware correct?

Yes i heard something too.

And Apple used it for their Apple AirPort:

https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html

Both comments are exaggerated. *BSD is used in some Japanese embedded devices like router or PlayStation, but generally Linux is far more popular. Embedded engineers aren't actively publish information like web/app engineers, so there are less information for BSD usage on internet. Still Linux is far more popular in general.

>Still Linux is far more popular in general.

I pretty much had the opposite experience.

For example, let's see how much articles posted for them. Though newbies tend to use Linux and matured BSD devs tend to not post on Qiita, still it's over x20 difference.

https://qiita.com/tags/linux https://qiita.com/tags/freebsd https://qiita.com/tags/netbsd

Maybe i talked just with really old "matured" dev's like my self..

You might not hear about them publicly but *BSD boxes usually run the backbone of network infrastructures - DNS servers, firewalls, file servers, etc.

A predictable release schedule and praised upgrade paths mean companies can plan product updates long into the future.

I thought also Apple regularly cherry-picks interesting stuff to integrate into macOS/iOS

I believe when Apple used to make the Airports, it was pretty much NetBSD on those.

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