But I don't like Linux. I use it daily, but I don't like it. I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.
No, the success Linux has had is because it ran on the machines people had at home, and was very easy to try out.
An instructive example would be my own path into Linux: I started with DJGPP, but got annoyed because it couldn't multi-task (if you started a compilation within an IDE like Emacs, you had to wait until it finished before you could interact with the IDE again). So I wanted a real Unix, or something close enough to it.
The best option I found was Slackware. Back then, it could install directly into the MS-DOS partition (within the C:\LINUX directory, through the magic of the UMSDOS filesystem), and boot directly from MS-DOS (through the LOADLIN bootloader). That is: like DJGPP, it could be treated like a normal MS-DOS program (with the only caveat being that you had to reboot to get back to MS-DOS). No need to dedicate a partition to it. No need to take over the MBR or bootloader. It even worked when the disk used Ontrack Disk Manager (for those too young to have heard of it, older BIOS didn't understand large disks, so newer HDDs came bundled with software like that to workaround the BIOS limitations; Linux transparently understood the special partition scheme used by Ontrack).
It worked with all the hardware I had, and worked better than MS-DOS; after a while, I noticed I was spending all my time booted into Linux, and only then I dedicated a whole partition to it (and later, the whole disk). Of course, since by then I had already gotten used to Linux, I stayed in the Linux world.
What I've read later (somewhere in a couple of HN comments) was that, beyond not having all these cool tricks (UMSDOS, LOADLIN, support for Ontrack partitions), FreeBSD was also picky with its hardware choices. I'm not sure that the hardware I had would have been fully supported, and even if it were, I'd have to dedicate a whole disk (or, at least, a whole partition) to it, and it would also take over the boot process (in a way which probably would be incompatible with Ontrack).
Many people and organizations adapted BSD to run on their hardware, but they had no obligation to upstream those drivers. Linux mandated upstreaming (if you wanted to distribute drivers to users).
Probably GPL was indeed a factor that made device makers and hackers to create open source drivers for linux. I am not convinced that it was a major one.
Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640
The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
The sound card was another issue.
I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
Apparently many here are unaware of the history and story as to what stalled FreeBSD in a long lawsuit involving ATT. You need to read up on that. Copyleft had nothing to do with it.
Some users of FreeBSD prefer more freedoms than GPL offers. The contributors must not be put off by providing more freedoms.
Places I've worked have contributed changes to FreeBSD and Linux, mostly for the same reason ... regardless of any necessity from distributing code under license, it's nicer to keep your fork close to upstream and sending your changes upstream helps keep things close.
> I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.
Well The BSD's were embattled with a lawsuit from AT&T at the time Linux came around, so it got a late start as it were, even if it's a lot older.
> Anything that makes it easier to use GCC back ends without GCC front ends--or simply brings GCC a big step closer to a form that would make such usage easy--would endanger our leverage for causing new front ends to be free.
I don't. That would break everything I love about it. If it was as big as Linux there would be a lot of corpo suits influence, constant changes, constant drive to make it 'mainstream' etc. All the things I hate about Linux.
I have zero interest in tinkering with my operating system. I mostly want it to just get out of my way, which Linux does well 95% of the time.
FreeBSD has always required far less tweaking or maintenance than Linux, though.
It did take a while to set it up but then it runs fine. I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works. I don't want to have to trust a commercial party to act in my best interests, because they don't. The current mess that is windows, full of ads and useless ai crap, mandatory telemetry, forced updates, constantly trying to sell their cloud services etc is a good example. FreeBSD doesn't do any of those things.
Most Linuxes don't either but there's still a lot of corpo influence. I feel like it's becoming a playing ball of big tech. You only need to see how many corp suits are on the board of the Linux foundation, how many patches are pushed by corp employees as part of their job etc. I don't want them to have that much influence over my OS. I don't believe in a win-win concerning corporate involvement in open-source.
FreeBSD has a little bit of that (netgate's completely botched wireguard is and example) but lessons are learned.
This is one of those things that mom-Linux people think but isn't really true. I can think of two episodes in the last decade (systemd and Wayland) that constituted controversial changes but frankly there are people who make "not using systemd" their entire identity and it's just so much cringe.
Even on a rolling release bleeding edge distro like Fedora things really don't change that much at all.
>I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works.
FreeBSD doesn't afford you any more or less control over how the system works than Linux.
And yet, I'm constantly patching and working around lib issues on Linux (on the desktop), but never with FreeBSD. That's the point being made. Linux is a lot of stuff mashed together to make a system, and it works really well, but FreeBSD is a collection of components carefully curated and maintained as one and works very, very well most of the time.
If Linux works for you, use it. No one is trying to convert you.
non-Linux, obviously. Can't edit.
Personaly I think Intel's early investment in linux had a lot to do with it. They also sold a compiler and marketed to labs and such which bought chips. So linux compatibility meant a lot to decision makers.
AMD the underdog went more in on Linux compat than NVIDIA. Which may have been a business decsion.
I dunno, maybe the GPL effect was more a market share thing with developers than a copyleft thing.
Nota Bene: I do love copyleft and license all my own projects AGPL
It's enthusiast tinker fantasy talk.