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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

I remember a fellow student in the late 2000s who suggested she was being recruited by IBM to do kernel work, presumably on AIX.

I wonder. Is there any enterprise that looks to shift work into non Linux, non windows, in 2023?

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In the industrial manufacturing world, the documentation, stability, and relative smallness and comprehensibility of FreeBSD are attractive. A public facing example is Beckhoff, who moved from WinCE to FreeBSD. https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-too...

Yep, can confirm. I spoke with some folks from Beckhoff in Vienna during EuroBSDCon 2022.

> I wonder. Is there any enterprise that looks to shift work into non Linux, non windows, in 2023?

Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count?

There might be organisations looking to move some workloads to *BSD (for instance storage or networking - famously Netflix run FreeBSD for their networking).

With regards to Windows, is there anyone switching workloads to Windows? I was under the impression that doesn't really happen anymore, Windows Server being kind of a legacy product (MS retired the slimest deployment, Nano, and features in new releases are nothing special), Azure supporting Linux well and .NET Core supporting Linux well.

There is still a fair amount of small business dotNET software being written that kind of require windows server but that's mostly targeting standalone desktop application or spreadsheet abuses, but for anything that needs high end servers and advanced storage in order to meet performance Linux is pretty much all of the market right now.

There is some niche's in the network space where xBSD plus custom asic's plays a role, due to licensing concerns but more and more vendors are finding a way to do something similar with linux.

And as FaaS/CaaS in practice depends on a set of Linux kernel API's those deployments are still Linux clusters underneath all of the obfuscating complexity layers that 90% of people don't actually need, nor benefit from.

    Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count?

I'm not sure it does, because the servers that "serverless" programs run on are overwhelmingly Linux.

That's a good question. I think it's fair to call some of the true cloud native services an OS, in that you are loading programs into a framework, which stores state in a particular cloud-specific API database, and storing data in cloud-specific API objects (S3).

I was thinking more about the lower level though; that is, the OS of the bare metal.

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