On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee.
This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.
Just to be clear, you’re not entirely wrong. Linux is not about being simple and comprehensible anymore because that only serves a small subset of users. As the userbase grew, the needs and demands grew with it and so did the solution. But your problem isn’t a sign of “becoming shit” more than finding some hardware not fully supported by *BSD or middling performance optimizations justify some rant about its developers.
Just for the sake of it I whipped up a Devuan VM, SSH worked as expected.
Big distros like Ubuntu become ever more complicated though, they run a ton of stuff by default, like Windows. OpenBSD is, first of all, very small in comparison. Then, it's obscure enough that most online attackers do not target it.
A full honest answer is too long for a HN comment, could write a long article about it but won't do that.
I need an OS which is fully comprehensible and fully configurable to my exact taste and fully diagnosable at all levels. So basically the exact opposite of windows which is a massive blob of obscurity. Mac OS has been great for a couple decades, but the enshittification accelerates. As a tiny example, dtruss doesn't even work on newer Mac OS. That kind of nonsense is unacceptable.
An OS is supposed to be a platform & toolkit to enable me to use and diagnose the computer any way I need. Linux is still that, sure, but enshittification is creeping in. Wayland/systemd/gnome/etc is all movement in the wrong direction.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD are a breath of fresh air.
I still really like Linux, but I think it's healthy to have multiple viable open source operating systems.
But if you want tighter integration of userland and kernel, I suppose what RedHat is doing is closer to that. They pursue a non-Unix way though: an immutable distro, ideally only running systemd and podman in the userland, put everything into containers.
Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
What enshittification?
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together
Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
This is a ridiculous stretch of the term
> With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer.
ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines.
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
1) People writing BSD licensed software want people to use it, and don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software)
2) "the company" never pays the bill. It is always passed to their customers in one way or another.
Also don’t care about their users having the same rights they enjoyed getting software written by someone else (for free!) and making some changes before their customers could pay to use it.
If we think a bit more, that may help the customers: companies like Sony would have to choice between either implement their own OS (increased cost, increase end product prices) or use opensource software
The topic would become a competitive (dis)advantage, not just a random topic for legal people
My take is that BSD-like licences are bad for humankind, but as a short-sighted person with no impact whatsover, it does not matter