Hacker News Reader

Comment by csdreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

It is really difficult to suggest or even use a BSD myself. The hardware support is years behind Linux; Linux is often a year or behind Windows for new hardware, but much more for more niche things. Linux drivers, at least Intel and AMD graphics drivers, do tend to mature faster than their Windows counterparts in my limited experience.

Then you go into development work where the GNU version of many command line tools have more features than the BSD counterparts. Systemd offers very nice unification of a lot of previous disarrayed scripts. Wayland is the future, wish it was smoother and more unified, but people should not be using Xorg as it just does not handle things that well, such as different refresh rate monitors or screen tearing.

The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back. This harms the community. The GPL was very important for establishing a somewhat sustainable open source ecosystem.

View on HN

> The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back.

This isn't true. Looking at the last year of git commits I see significant contributions from a large number BSD-using companies and organizations. Looking at the top of the list (roughly sorted by commit count) we have:

  The FreeBSD Foundation
  Netflix
  Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
  Klara, Inc
  Juniper Networks, Inc.
  Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
  NVIDIA Networking
  Chelsio Communications
  DARPA
  AFRL
  NetApp, Inc.
  Arm Ltd
  Axcient
  Microsoft
  Intel Corporation
  Amazon, Inc.
  vStack
  UKRI
  Innovate UK
  Stormshield
  Modirum MDPay
  iXsystems, Inc
  Instituto de Pesquisas Eldorado (eldorado.org.br)
  Citrix Systems R&D
  Dell EMC Isilon

There are a couple of (admittedly high-profile) companies that use FreeBSD in their proprietary products with limited contribution to the community, but they are very much in the minority.

NetBSD runs on basically anything. They even fully support the Sega Dreamcast in the year 2023, and has great drivers support in the kernel. If you meant the latest and greatest niche GPU drivers, then sure your point stands.

> The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back

The single largest install of NetBSD is by SDF.org who absolutely gives back to the NetBSD community.

Supporting the Dreamcast is cool... if I wanted to do my computing on a Dreamcast, and if I wanted to do something like that for some reason it would make more sense to use a PS2 instead since it's the most popular console ever, but that has PS2Linux available already which has more software... so there's really no incentive to run BSD.

>The only orgs that tend to use BSD tend to not want to give back.

Isn't this the main reason they chose it over Linux? Like Sony for the PS?

Also check the IoT space, it is no wonder that there are a couple of POSIX FOSS alternatives with non-copyleft licenses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com