Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

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> Technical superiority doesn't win ecosystem wars. Linux won through a combination of fast decisions, the viral GPL licence, and strong enterprise backing from Red Hat and IBM. Then Google, Facebook, and Amazon happened — hungry for datacenters, developing tools to manage growing infrastructure at scale. They set the direction for the entire industry.

In the mid 1990's the hardware driver support on Linux was much broader.

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.

> FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.

I broadly agree, even as a FreeBSD fan myself; things have converged a lot over the decades. But still, I generally feel that while you can get the same work done in both, FreeBSD does things better (and/or cleaner, more elegant, etc) in many cases.

The overall feeling of system cohesion makes me happier to use it, from small things like Ctrl-T producing meaningful output for all the base OS tools, to larger and more amorphous things like having greater confidence core systems won't change too quickly over time (eg: FreeBSD's relatively stable sound support, versus Linux's alsa/pulse/pipewire/..., similar for event APIs, and more).

Though I totally feel your pain about latest-and-greatest hardware driver support. Has gotten better since the '90s, but that gap will probably always be there due to the different development philosophies.

I hope FreeBSD never gets too "Linux-y"; it occupies it's own nice spot in the spectrum of available options.

> I hope FreeBSD never gets too "Linux-y"

What would that mean?

Partly what I mentioned above: a higher rate of development "churn" — incorporating new systems or technology before it's well-baked or well-integrated with the rest of the OS, only to be replaced a few years later with something else. The kerfuffle over WireGuard in FreeBSD 13 (ultimately backing it out of that release) is, I think, one recent-ish example of the FreeBSD devs taking a stance to demand a certain quality bar for such things.

Another aspect for me is documentation. I've been disheartened recently by how some faster-paced changes to the FreeBSD ports system aren't well-documented, so 'man ports' and the handbook are a bit out-of-sync with reality. Being able to read the handbook and the manpages to get an accurate education on the OS has always felt right to me, and the Linux ecosystem doesn't do it nearly as well, I feel.

I think generally it's a cathedral-vs-bazaar sort of difference. I hope FreeBSD stays more cathedral-y than Linux.

> FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.

That's pretty much it. A lot of the people I see using a BSD these days do so because they always have and they prefer what they know, which is fine, or they just want to be contrarian.

Realistically, aside from edge cases in hardware support, you can do anything you want on any modern *nix. There's not even as much of a difference between distros as people claim. All the "I want an OS that gets out of my way" and similar reasons apply to most modern well-maintained distros these days. It's more personality and familiarity than anything objective.

I went from Slackware in 1994 to Red Hat in 1998 to Fedora when they split into Fedora and RH Enterprise. Every 2 or 3 years I will install a different distro in a VM and see "Okay, now I see what it's about." But I have no interest in switching as long as Fedora does everything I need. I don't really understand the people that distro hop. I just assume they are really young and I have work to do and a family to take care of.

I get that. I stopped using Slack around...not sure, maybe 2007 or so when I tried to do my normal minimal setup and mplayer wouldn't run without Samba installed, and the community was hostile to anyone who didn't do the recommended full install. I never wanted it a a feature complete desktop but that's the market they tried to focus on.

Took me a while to settle on Alpine after trying Arch and Void, but I can't imagine why I would ever leave unless they change something drastic.

I mean… at this point Linux is nothing like the 90s. It’s just big corporate Unix. Every change is in the interest of massive cloud providers.

Not even remotely true. Some of the biggest changes recently have been driven by people trying to use Linux on their Apple Silicon. Or to play games. Or RISC-V chipmakers.

You're right - they allow additions of things like drivers that sit in isolation. But what about decisions with a tradeoff that favors one application or the other?

> they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.

Big chuckle there, so good. Hey, at least they had a sense of humour.

But I agree the hardware support could be much better even to this day.

My feeling at the time was that BSD developers and many users were at least 30 years old or much older and had professional jobs and money.

The Linux community felt like college students with no job and not much money. That included Linus Torvalds himself who developed the kernel while in college and wasn't rich. DEC basically gave Linus an Alpha to get him to port the kernel to it.

Very true in the beginning.

Your prof loved BSD/386 while the students were rocking a shared server cobbled from a 386 the science department threw out.

The story is pretty simple.

Linux got early commercial interest. That led to far better hardware support. The snowball continues to get bigger to this day.

When FreeBSD would have been getting corporate interest, when it was both free and clearly superior technically, BSD was being sued by AT&T and BSD looked risky. The lawsuit resolved and FreeBSD was born but not until after Linux was in the wild. It was too late.

We will always get these articles from those that prefer FreeBSD. It will never get enough attention to break the cycle started in the 90’s.

*BSD was also under lawsuit threat from 1992-1994 while Linux took off.

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