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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit curious as to who uses *BSDs these days. At one point I knew of at least a few with copies of FreeBSD, but these days most of my acquaintances, social & professional, use OSX or some Linux flavor. As far as servers go, I haven't seen one in the wild in quite some time.

This is of course highly anecdotal, but even on the distrowatch page hit rankings FreeBSD ranks below distros I've never even heard of (Zorin, SolusOS) at #19. OpenBSD is down in the 70's. On a complete tangent, I was also surprised to find Mandriva well in the 40's. [1]

What is the community & ecosystem like these days?

[1] http://distrowatch.com/

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The Apache Software Foundation (you might have heard of them ;) runs their servers on FreeBSD.

NetFlix runs some (all?) of their servers on FreeBSD.

Google uses FreeBSD for their network search applicance (for corporate intranets or whatever). They also just announced their funding of the Capsicum security framework project for FreeBSD (and later, a port to Linux).

The Weather Channel uses FreeBSD to power their network appliances that render the forecasts for local cable networks.

NetApp and Juniper Networks use FreeBSD for their networking gear.

There are more examples here if you want to read them:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/testimonials

The FreeBSD Foundation also has a list of donors:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors

The FreeBSD forums are reasonably active and very friendly, you should check them out if you want to learn more (or have more questions about *BSDs in general):

http://forums.freebsd.org/

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EDIT: I forgot one; VeriSign apparently uses FreeBSD enough that they just started their own BSD-related conference:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2013-Ap...

Also, Netflix and Yahoo are pretty big users. I used to use BSD on my personal machines just because I prefer their approach to things and the documentation. I now use Linux just because my day job practically requires it.

edit: And regarding GP's surprise about Mandriva - Mageia is a community fork and is #2 - the Mandrake users I knew all switched to Mageia.

Yahoo has been moving away from FreeBSD for a long time. In 2011 they said that 75% of their servers run on Linux, the rest on FreeBSD.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/yahoo-the-linux-compan...

Oh yeah, I remembered another one:

HN runs on FreeBSD! (At least, the old server was FreeBSD. I don't know what the new server is running).

To add to that list, there's also pfsense: http://www.pfsense.org/ a FreeBSD based distribution for building routers which uses the pf firewall, originally from OpenBSD. I know a number of small companies, my own included, which use it and there's even a book written about it!

I'd hazard a guess that there are similar projects based on BSD floating around for various other uses too.

At least all the Netflix web servers run on Linux.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2013/...

However their Open Connect network runs on FreeBSD.

https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

Linux popularity with IaaS and PaaS providers has a lot to do with it.

Support for the BSD crowd at AWS pretty much is non-existent (they are working on it and making progress, though, with FreeBSD). Rackspace has some support, but only for FreeBSD and with some limitations.

Most of the PaaS players use Linux under the hood because they rely on AWS under the hood.

I'd love to hear about IaaS or PaaS players who use BSD, though.

Distrowatch only counts distros that Distrowatch users click on, rather than actual popularity.

I wouldn't go on there and click Ubuntu or FreeBSD, because I know what they are and have no real need to view their Distrowatch pages. But my curiosity might lead me to click on Zorin or SolusOS because, like you, I've never heard of them.

I run freebsd or OSX, basically for the aesthetic. FreeBSD is the least annoying of the OS's I have run (never tried OpenBSD), and most of the stuff I want compiles on it, though not as well as Linux stacks.

I run FreeBSD on my data center servers. Works pretty well. I think with some adaptation I could run Ubuntu Server equally well.

I'm not sure what you mean by "these days". Most people used linux back then too. People who use BSDs are generally people who care about quality and simplicity, and who don't like having to learn a new replacement for a core component every few weeks.

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