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Comment by 866-RON-0-FEZ | Hacker News Reader

Oh my god this lady should be running a pet shop. She's had this role since 2005 and is only now dogfooding the software for 10 minutes a day? Stunning and brave.

Imagine Linus Torvalds or Theo from OpenBSD using Windows out of convenience. Unthinkable.

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There was a bit of a controversy a few years ago when people realized that the head of the Linux Foundation was using Mac OS to give a presentation at a conference (especially ironic considering the presentation was about using Linux on the desktop). If the FreeBSD Foundation is similar to the Linux Foundation (which seems to be the case from looking at their site), it's mainly intended as a vehicle so large companies can fund aspects of the system they want developed rather than an ideologically driven organization like the FSF. From that perspective, an executive actually trying to run FreeBSD is a nice thing to see. It's been a running joke for years that when you look at a FreeBSD conference you'll see all the developers running it in a VM on their MacBooks, so if they're treating bare metal as more of a priority I think it's a positive development.

If only the Linux Foundation was primarily funding development of Linux, it's hard to describe what it is they are doing exactly, but it's a bit like a social club for Middle Managers and other insignificant people, building ecosystems^TM, connections and synergies^TM, and of course the Linux brand. Starting initiatives and such.

Gaze upon a premier Linux Foundation project:

https://www.canton.network/global-synchronizer

Thanks for pointing that out, I had no idea the Linux foundation was in the blockchain grift. Case studies like this one is such a bad look: https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org/case-studies/establishi...

Like, seriously, try to read this page content and understand what it is about.

CEO of Take-Two Interactive (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption 2, Borderlands, NBA2K) doesn't play any games.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/06/ceo-take-two-interactive-soft...

The CEOs of big US tech companies don't let their kids use screens (or curate it to a high degree).

i believe you. link me

He looks like he plays a lot of golf

Really setting the bar low there aintcha? If Torvald's Linux use is the benchmark then we're doomed. Aren't there ample quotes from him by now where he basically says he only cares about coding and doesn't have strong opinions about GUIs? Is Theo any better in that aspect?

IIRC, he cares about not breaking userspace, because he is runing the bleeding edge in his main computer and any bacward incompatible change breaks linusspace.

It's possible she used it on a server. But yeah...

I knew people running FreeBSD on the desktop back in 2003. If it was good enough for them then... Could they not scrounge up enough cash for a Thinkpad in the last 20 years?

I tried FreeBSD on tower pc in 2003, it's not that it was completely unusable it but compared to Linux it was like night and day. Now it's still not perfect, more like midnight and evening.

I used FreeBSD on a laptop 2008-2010 and it was usable, other than needing a USB Wifi adapter. Definitely not as usable as Linux, but I was able to do 18 credit hours per semester. Quite a lot more than 10 minutes a day.

Notably, you and I aren't FreeBSD Foundation Executive Directors.

I ran it on my desktop at that time and only had to switch to Linux because FreeBSD 5.0 wasn't compatible with my machine anymore.

this. I have been running FreeBSD for over a decade, but not on my laptop.

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