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>> From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day. I remember when FreeBSD w

by copperx 10y ago

>> From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day. I remember when FreeBSD was considered to be more mature than Linux for server use. What made Linux more exciting than FreeBSD? Why did FreeBSD lose ground?

itgoon 10y ago
I was a huge fan back in the 4.x - 6.x days. The problems, for me, were: - apps developed specifically for Linux. The shim wasn't 100%. - Hardware support. This wasn't too bad, but I always had to take it into consideration. - Virtualization. This was the killer for me. Yes, jails are fantastic, if your entire workload ran on FBSD. But if you needed even one Windows/Linux instance, for any reason, you needed another physical machine. With Windows and Linux I could consolidate everything into a single machine. Things have improved a lot, and I may try it out again, but unfortunately the mindshare is all Linux now.
lmm 10y ago
It took a long time for FreeBSD to support MS-DOS partitioning, so for a long time you couldn't dual-boot between Windows and FreeBSD without buying a second hard disk. So kids getting started tended to run Linux instead of FreeBSD, and they stuck with what they knew.
- emaste 10y ago
  DOS partition support was added to the FreeBSD installer over two decades ago: Tue Sep 7 12:02:11 1993 UTC (22 years, 9 months ago) Added DOS partition support and maybe badblock remappping. https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=408 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=408
  - mioelnir 10y ago
    I love that maybe in there.