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Personally, I see Linux as a major attack vector. Binary blobs are a big skeleton in Linux's closet. One reason why big business got behind Linux is their abili

Personally, I see Linux as a major attack vector. Binary blobs are a big skeleton in Linux's closet. One reason why big business got behind Linux is their ability to have closed source, binary firmware blobs baked into device drivers. You can choose instead to use Linux-libre, of course, but your user experience will suffer about as much as it would by choosing any other *nix with poor proprietary driver support.

spijdar 6y ago
FreeBSD is comparatively more friendly to proprietary blobs, as it maintains a stable kernel ABI within major releases. [0] Even choosing to ignore any blobbed drivers, Linux will still have better software compatibility, and still generally superior hardware compatibility. Certainly not worse hardware support. Linux supports more classes of hardware like wifi adapters, while FreeBSD is stuck trying to bring up newer standards. It also requires the same firmware blobs that Linux does -- in the end, whether on Linux or FreeBSD, if you dislike binary blobs in your drivers, you just have to limit yourself to hardware that doesn't require them. [0] https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=284199+0+/usr/local/www/mailindex/archive/2015/freebsd-hackers/20151101.freebsd-hackers https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=284199+0+/usr/...
pjmlp 6y ago
Big business like Sony and Apple prefer BSD exactly because of not having to provide everything to upstream.
- nix23 6y ago
  Google prefers linux on the servers because of not having to provide everything to upstream.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    That's a bit of a different case, though. Google isn't distributing it to end users the way Apple is with Darwin.
    - nix23 6y ago
      True, but in the end it's the same, you don't get access to the google nor the sony "magic" development. BTW: Darwin is opensource: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

spijdar 6y ago

FreeBSD is comparatively more friendly to proprietary blobs, as it maintains a stable kernel ABI within major releases. [0] Even choosing to ignore any blobbed drivers, Linux will still have better software compatibility, and still generally superior hardware compatibility. Certainly not worse hardware support. Linux supports more classes of hardware like wifi adapters, while FreeBSD is stuck trying to bring up newer standards. It also requires the same firmware blobs that Linux does -- in the end, whether on Linux or FreeBSD, if you dislike binary blobs in your drivers, you just have to limit yourself to hardware that doesn't require them. [0] https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=284199+0+/usr/local/www/mailindex/archive/2015/freebsd-hackers/20151101.freebsd-hackers https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=284199+0+/usr/...

pjmlp 6y ago

Big business like Sony and Apple prefer BSD exactly because of not having to provide everything to upstream.

nix23 6y ago
Google prefers linux on the servers because of not having to provide everything to upstream.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  That's a bit of a different case, though. Google isn't distributing it to end users the way Apple is with Darwin.
  - nix23 6y ago
    True, but in the end it's the same, you don't get access to the google nor the sony "magic" development. BTW: Darwin is opensource: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu