> Why doesn't BSD have a greater market share? I just set up an openbsd firewall and loved it. Plus I have experience with zfs on FreeBSD-also loved it. Lawsui

> Why doesn't BSD have a greater market share? I just set up an openbsd firewall and loved it. Plus I have experience with zfs on FreeBSD-also loved it. Lawsuits and subpar driver support in the 90s, basically. https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths > This is a problem faced by all operating systems - even new versions of Windows. Most of the time, users don't care about the total number of drivers, only if drivers exist for their hardware. There are some omissions in terms of driver support, but FreeBSD supports a wide range of network cards (including an increasing number of 802.11n chipsets), most sound cards, and AMD, Intel and nVidia GPUs. > Device support is a constantly moving target because we can't tell hardware makers to just stop releasing new hardware for a few years while we catch up. New devices do take some time to support, although some manufacturers do provide drivers themselves, for example nVidia provide drivers for their GPUs, and Intel for their newest network and storage controllers. Other manufacturers provide significant help to FreeBSD driver writers, including Broadcom, JMicron, HP, Mellanox, Chelsio and Solarflare. If you find a device that isn't supported, please let the project know and also notify the manufacturer: the only thing that motivates hardware manufacturers to support any operating system is the knowledge that their customers want it. This is much, much less of a problem now than it used to be but I remember building a hobby box in the 90s when I wanted to run FreeBSD and I had to be very, very careful about what hardware I put in it so I ended up installing Debian. (Anecdotal and likely possibly coincidence, but Debian had all the correct drivers.) The net result is no one really switched back to BSD once those issues were (mostly) resolved since too many Devs were bringing out software for Linux by that point. Driver support still lags on the BSDs (although nowhere near as badly as it used to!) so its just easier to use Linux for most people.