5 ms·

I don't entirely understand why Linux took over and left BSD as an also-ran (except for Apple which uses BSD.) They're very similar in terms of core functionali

I don't entirely understand why Linux took over and left BSD as an also-ran (except for Apple which uses BSD.) They're very similar in terms of core functionality and there was even Debian/kBSD that ran the Debian userland on a BSD kernel. Was it the specter of lawsuits (which ultimately had no effect?) Was it the "cathedral vs. the bazaar" (which didn't really cause that much of a divergence between *BSD and GNU/Linux distros in terms of core functionality?) Was it GPL vs. permissive licensing (which seems like it would favor BSD in terms of adoption?)

joshbaptiste 5y ago
IIRC patent battles in court with AT&T and code removals from the source which kept 386BSD from getting off the ground quickly..
- musicale 5y ago
  NetBSD and FreeBSD came out in 1993, the same year as Slackware. The BSDs seem like pretty complete Unix systems and are still in use today, but they are also-rans compared to GNU/Linux.
  - hapless 5y ago
    FreeBSD had to reboot the project after some lawsuits -- FreeBSD 2.0 is a different codebase from FreeBSD 1.1 It was a huge setback for every kind of adoption
    - musicale 5y ago
      I didn't actually know that the FreeBSD project had to "reboot" - this is very interesting and adds to the "lawsuit" theory.
convolvatron 5y ago
i think it was timing personally. i was an old sun guy and really didn’t like the solaris shift. there was about a onetk two year gap where 386bsd was kind of half baked but you could get a .9 slackware install running pretty easy. when freebsd released i switched back. not sure if that’s actually correct, but is the way i remember it
- flomo 5y ago
  Yeah, the story I read was Jolitz went AWOL, so there was a contentious period when Net/Open/Free split and self-organized and started releasing again.
ggm 5y ago
For many years the BSD tcp/ip stack was by far the best. Linux lacked viable networks far into its infancy. So I too expected BSD to reign Supreme. For the life of me I cannot explain it, because the rise of distro carried Linux up the foodchain to mainframes and down to replace vxworks and ultimately dominate phones to spaceships. Maybe it was people more than software?
- musicale 5y ago
  Maybe it was Linus Torvalds' famously friendly personality. :)
  - IntelMiner 5y ago
    Devils advocate. He did realize (eventually) how toxic it was and has taken steps to better himself
    - afr0ck 5y ago
      People are overly sensitive. Linus was cool and very friendly and nice person most of the time on the mailing lists. Very very rarely he writes those furious replies, but honestly, it was very fun. I just don't understand why people are so much butt-hurt.
      - rnd0 5y ago
        It's literally a different generation; and people appear to bruise a lot more easily at this point in time. So yes, your first sentence answers your last one. :)
      - Tor3 5y ago
        The little interaction I had with Linus was friendly and technical (the only direct contact I had with him was a short email conversation where I provided some details about tape SCSI APIs. If there was more I don't rememember it). Anyway, I followed the Linux mailing list from when it started and for many years, and I read everything (including all the patches up to around kernel 2.3.51, if memory serves). I never saw anything I reacted negatively too, from his side. Quite the opposite.
derekp7 5y ago
My theory is it was a combination of things. From my experience, Minix was the first Unix-like system I was able to run on my PC. And Linux was sort of a spiritual successor of Minix. Then there was the fact that Linux was just a kernel, and needed a distribution to put together a working OS. Whereas BSD already was a full system. Now that would seem to favor BSD, however the userland for Linux was the GNU tools. Where BSD userland was mostly identical to other Unix systems (seeing as half of them were BSD based), GNU was (in my recollection) mostly an improvement over the standard Unix userland utilities. Furthermore since Linux was only useful if you had a distribution, a lot of distributions popped up. Now you could have a situation where BSD was more popular than any given Linux system, however the quantity of all the Linux systems ended up being more than BSD, with a lot more innovation from all the distribution creators. Each distro could specialize in a given area, you could have hobby-oriented ones, enterprise targeted, embedded... you wouldn't get that from any of the BSDs as they wouldn't have the resources to branch into all those competing specialties.
- chris37879 5y ago
  Exactly this, and then all those hyper specific pieces of Linux software would get picked between distros and eventually became common, and well, that's history. I got into Linux after it had beaten out BSD for popularity, but having ran into the BSD versions of some utils on macOS, yeah, the GNU variants are far superior in almost every regard. Darwin's variant of dd still doesn't even accept the status=progress flag(or any equivalent), for instance.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    That’s valid in many cases, but the dd example isn’t really fair, because you’re comparing modern GNU to ancient BSD. I don’t know how often macOS pulls from upstream FreeBSD, but I will say that relatively recently I saw a man page in macOS that still referred to ARPANet… Today’s FreeBSD does support status=progress as can be seen here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-dd-disc-clone.71958/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-d...
davidw 5y ago
It's difficult to say. In some ways, the GPL reassured anyone participating in the Linux ecosystem that no one company was going to make a play for the whole thing by hiring up key people and running with it as a proprietary system or some kind of "open core" thing where much of it was free but the fancy bits were proprietary.
- flomo 5y ago
  There was some crossover between open source *BSD and a closed source OS called BSDi. So this fear was not totally unjustified. Also people were still burned from the "Unix Wars", where closed-source BSD variants played a major role. So there was the feeling that GPL would discourage incompatible forks.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    As if modern Linux distributions are super compatible among themselves.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Aren't they? Not binary compatible, but you should be able to compile more or less the same software on any GNU/Linux unless you're missing dependencies.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Packaging, file locations, init systems, desktop stack in use, ...
loeg 5y ago
Yeah, the lawsuits hamstrung BSD right as Linux was taking off. It may have been a motivation for creating Linux in the first place.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  There's some perspective of Torvalds on 386BSD in this 1993 interview: https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html Applicable part: "when I started on Linux it [386BSD] wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." I don't think the lawsuit played an issue.
  - musicale 5y ago
    That explains why Linux was started, but not why it won.
    - Beltalowda 5y ago
      Yes, I just replied to "it [the lawsuit] may have been a motivation for creating Linux in the first place". As for why Linux "won"; I think the low bar to contributing in the earlier days helped a lot; BSD tended to be a lot more bureaucratic. And there was also some amount of drama and splits in the early 90s, which probably didn't help either.
flomo 5y ago
The answer might be it was easier to duel-boot DOS with Linux in the early days (something about partitioning). However the takeoff point probably wasn't until a few years later when Linux 2.0 was the first with SMP support. Many other reasons contributed.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  You could boot Linux from DOS back then, by using LOADLIN and relying on UMSDOS support which could manage a Linux-compatible filesystem within a DOS directory such as C:\LINUX\. No need to mess with partitioning at all. With some added prompts in AUTOEXEC.BAT, you could basically turn even plain DOS into something as powerful as a modern UEFI boot manager. Of course this stuff became less feasible after NT-based systems took over, making conventional dual boot and separate partitions the best choice overall.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    I'm 99% certain you could boot BSD from DOS back then too. 386BSD 1.0 contains a "boot.exe" which works with FreeDOS -as long as you don't load anything else! https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/1.0 https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/1.0 I think that FreeBSD 2.0 may have used the boot utility as well -but I'm not sure. I remember when I encountered Linux in the late 90's there was a distro that sat on MS-DOS; I think it may have been "Monkey Linux" ( https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm )? It wasn't Slackware -but I pretty quickly found slackware and began using "zipslack" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack) before diving in and doing a real Linux install. So by 97 or so Linux was figuring out more sophisticated ways to co-exist with DOS if not Windows95. Probably had been for a couple years before that -but 97 is when I found Linux so I don't know. And yes, by the time XP was released Linux was popular enough that people didn't bother making kludges like that any more. It probably didn't help that vfat and fat32 were different than the old umsdos file system so that the drawbacks out-weighed the benefits.
- loeg 5y ago
  Yeah, BSD was still doing its funky "slice" subpartitioning scheme instead of using MBR partitions directly (and for the next two decades as well). Linux has always just used MBR/EBR partitions (prior to GPT).
segmondy 5y ago
The first Unix system I ever used was a 386BSD. The first Unix system I could ever get my hand on by downloading or buying disks was Linux. From the get go, Linux was easy to obtain. I of course preferred the BSDs since that's what I was used to, but just being able to hack on Linux 24/7 from my bedroom without having to share the system with hundred others, and having root access without having to hack someone's else system just allowed me to dive deeper than the BSDs. It was easier to find other folks going through the same and targeting everything first for linux before BSD. It created a tremendous fast feedback loop, easy to obtain, more programs available for it.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  I was there for Minix and Linux, I didn't get my hands onto 386BSD at the time (nor knew it existed), only a bit later FreeBSD/NetBSD and eventually OpenBSD. Hence my question: Was 386BSD somehow harder to obtain than Linux? I guess it was just because at the time, where large transfers over modem were entirely impractical, Linux distributions tended to pop up "everywhere", in book stores as part of books or by themselves, in computer magazines, in rather "micro" distributions on floppy disks etc.? While I guess 386BSD's distribution channels were less fanned out?
  - nineteen999 5y ago
    I sourced my original Slackware/Redhat/Debian CD image from Infomagic back in the 1990's. This was a common way to get the install media before dialup speeds hit 38400 and beyond since downloading a whole distro was so slow and would require so much disk space. It looks like they had a seperate BSD image at the time which had the BSD's on it. So probably not much more difficult to obtain than Linux by 1995. https://archive.org/details/infomagic-BSDisc-1-1-93 https://archive.org/details/infomagic-BSDisc-1-1-93
  - segmondy 5y ago
    I could access it through network via michnet back then. I had no idea where to obtain one, and I think when I did finally find one for sale through some computer magazine, it was in hundreds of dollars (easily $500+) when I barely had pennies to rub together as a high schooler. When I got Linux, I put money together with friends to get a CD. Our major expense was really buying pack of floppies to transfer and install it since we didn't have a CD drive then.
smackeyacky 5y ago
More likely it was device support. You could get something like the Yggdrasil distribution that seemed to support a pile of video cards, network cards, CD-Roms etc. that were hard to get working on 386BSD. You have to remember that for most people, getting X up and running was a real effort, let alone patching the kernel to support whatever weird CD-Rom you might have. I picked up 386BSD first, but quickly switched to Linux (around '94 I guess) simply because the community had more of a stake in Linux for providing support for different devices.
- dbcurtis 5y ago
  Ding, ding, ding! Winner, winner! Chicken dinner! It's about the drivers. Getting traction with a new OS is all about driver support. Which is what makes launching a new OS hard, assuming your goal is to be popular. You have to inspire an army of driver writers.
  - leoc 5y ago
    But was that better driver support simply a snowballing consequence of Linux already having been ahead by then? If so (and IDK if it is so) then the original explanation would have to lie elsewhere.
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      There was quite a bit of weirdness surrounding the BSDs back then due to AT&T code that was replaced, it kind of became moribund after some dispute over patches that I didn't follow too closely, then those patches became forks (FreeBSD and NetBSD). By the time the smoke cleared, XFree86 was ported to Linux and the general perception was the Linux community had their stuff together, while the BSD guys were fighting over nothing. I don't think it helped that the BSD distributions were very opinionated about their userlands, where in Linux you had lots of choice. In hindsight, it seems to me the BSD guys simply blew their shot by infighting at a time when early adopters were clamouring for a Unix like, and didn't care about the BSD purity war. That was where the snowball started. Linux had no real advantage other than the cooperative nature of the community.
throw7 5y ago
I was fortunate to have a 386 (bought by my parents for college) with me in the early 90's (there was one other floor mate in college I remember who had a 386 at the time). I came from BBS's (c128 with modem) and had no notion of BSD vs linux or any of the legal battles of the time. I can only put it down to "marketing" or some type of "fate" that one day on usenet I learned that I could install "linux" a type of "Unix" (the "same" thing I was using on the workstations in college) on my 386. It was Slackware that I had installed at the time and that's my story. I eventually did learn about BSD later but it didn't really "click" with me when I tried it. I think maybe Linux was the "zeitgeist" of the time and information on it was just readily more available (at least for me).
eadmund 5y ago
> Was it the specter of lawsuits (which ultimately had no effect?) I think that this was mostly it. > Was it GPL vs. permissive licensing (which seems like it would favor BSD in terms of adoption?) Many folks prefer to adopt & contribute to an OS when they know that they are legally protected from others taking their contributions proprietary. I think that another factor, sadly more important in the 90s than now, is that the GNU userland was far more user-oriented than the BSD userland. Back then, Unix users actually used the command-line tools, and GNU was in a lot of ways more pleasant (if also, um, a bit scattershot and buggy).
noisy_boy 5y ago
My first exposure to Unix was Sun Solaris at work. I was very interested to install it on my home PC but failed to. During my searches to install Unix, I came across Linux and joined some user groups. At the same time, one of the magazines included an installation CD that basically just worked. Once I resolved the modem issues, there was no looking back. Did try Freebsd later but ended up going back to Linux and have stayed with it since.
rnd0 5y ago
I think you've covered most of the points -particularly the lawsuits and the development model (why code where you're not wanted when Linux is just right there ?). I suspect that BSD may have been a bit more flakey than Linux as well. I've never tried it on bare metal so I may be wrong; but in emulation 386BSD seems very difficult to get working properly. I wasn't there, but based on that experience I'm guessing that Linux got to a more usable point first? Another point is that Linux simply ran on a wider variety of commodity hardware earlier than BSD did.
eschaton 5y ago
Observing this at the time, it was entirely the lawsuits.
Tor3 5y ago
386BSD vs Linux came down to a single thing for me: Support for MBR partitions. I was aware of both systems from the beginning and started to prepare trying both of them from around January 1992. What I had available was a 486 PC with OS/2. So in the end it was quite simple: With Linux and its support for partitions I could use that 486 without losing OS/2 (this was at work, after all, I couldn't ditch that system - I used it for production). I first booted and executed Linux from a floppy, and soon I could install Linux on a separate HD partition (and still boot from a floppy, for a while). But 386BSD needed to take over the disk, and that was out of the question. That was the showstopper for me. And shortly after that, my x-terminal broke and I switched to use that particular 486 PC as a replacement, a hack version of X11 came around early so that was actually possible. I was a little involved in testing new drivers and filesystems and so on, and by that time I was firmly into the Linux camp and have stayed there since. My original Unix experience was mainly from SunOS.
pjmlp 5y ago
PlayStation OS is based on BSD, but as the license goes very few see the outcome of that.

joshbaptiste 5y ago

IIRC patent battles in court with AT&T and code removals from the source which kept 386BSD from getting off the ground quickly..

musicale 5y ago
NetBSD and FreeBSD came out in 1993, the same year as Slackware. The BSDs seem like pretty complete Unix systems and are still in use today, but they are also-rans compared to GNU/Linux.
- hapless 5y ago
  FreeBSD had to reboot the project after some lawsuits -- FreeBSD 2.0 is a different codebase from FreeBSD 1.1 It was a huge setback for every kind of adoption
  - musicale 5y ago
    I didn't actually know that the FreeBSD project had to "reboot" - this is very interesting and adds to the "lawsuit" theory.

convolvatron 5y ago

i think it was timing personally. i was an old sun guy and really didn’t like the solaris shift. there was about a onetk two year gap where 386bsd was kind of half baked but you could get a .9 slackware install running pretty easy. when freebsd released i switched back. not sure if that’s actually correct, but is the way i remember it

flomo 5y ago
Yeah, the story I read was Jolitz went AWOL, so there was a contentious period when Net/Open/Free split and self-organized and started releasing again.

ggm 5y ago

For many years the BSD tcp/ip stack was by far the best. Linux lacked viable networks far into its infancy. So I too expected BSD to reign Supreme. For the life of me I cannot explain it, because the rise of distro carried Linux up the foodchain to mainframes and down to replace vxworks and ultimately dominate phones to spaceships. Maybe it was people more than software?

musicale 5y ago
Maybe it was Linus Torvalds' famously friendly personality. :)
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  Devils advocate. He did realize (eventually) how toxic it was and has taken steps to better himself
  - afr0ck 5y ago
    People are overly sensitive. Linus was cool and very friendly and nice person most of the time on the mailing lists. Very very rarely he writes those furious replies, but honestly, it was very fun. I just don't understand why people are so much butt-hurt.
    - rnd0 5y ago
      It's literally a different generation; and people appear to bruise a lot more easily at this point in time. So yes, your first sentence answers your last one. :)
    - Tor3 5y ago
      The little interaction I had with Linus was friendly and technical (the only direct contact I had with him was a short email conversation where I provided some details about tape SCSI APIs. If there was more I don't rememember it). Anyway, I followed the Linux mailing list from when it started and for many years, and I read everything (including all the patches up to around kernel 2.3.51, if memory serves). I never saw anything I reacted negatively too, from his side. Quite the opposite.

derekp7 5y ago

My theory is it was a combination of things. From my experience, Minix was the first Unix-like system I was able to run on my PC. And Linux was sort of a spiritual successor of Minix. Then there was the fact that Linux was just a kernel, and needed a distribution to put together a working OS. Whereas BSD already was a full system. Now that would seem to favor BSD, however the userland for Linux was the GNU tools. Where BSD userland was mostly identical to other Unix systems (seeing as half of them were BSD based), GNU was (in my recollection) mostly an improvement over the standard Unix userland utilities. Furthermore since Linux was only useful if you had a distribution, a lot of distributions popped up. Now you could have a situation where BSD was more popular than any given Linux system, however the quantity of all the Linux systems ended up being more than BSD, with a lot more innovation from all the distribution creators. Each distro could specialize in a given area, you could have hobby-oriented ones, enterprise targeted, embedded... you wouldn't get that from any of the BSDs as they wouldn't have the resources to branch into all those competing specialties.

chris37879 5y ago
Exactly this, and then all those hyper specific pieces of Linux software would get picked between distros and eventually became common, and well, that's history. I got into Linux after it had beaten out BSD for popularity, but having ran into the BSD versions of some utils on macOS, yeah, the GNU variants are far superior in almost every regard. Darwin's variant of dd still doesn't even accept the status=progress flag(or any equivalent), for instance.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  That’s valid in many cases, but the dd example isn’t really fair, because you’re comparing modern GNU to ancient BSD. I don’t know how often macOS pulls from upstream FreeBSD, but I will say that relatively recently I saw a man page in macOS that still referred to ARPANet… Today’s FreeBSD does support status=progress as can be seen here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-dd-disc-clone.71958/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-d...

davidw 5y ago

It's difficult to say. In some ways, the GPL reassured anyone participating in the Linux ecosystem that no one company was going to make a play for the whole thing by hiring up key people and running with it as a proprietary system or some kind of "open core" thing where much of it was free but the fancy bits were proprietary.

flomo 5y ago
There was some crossover between open source *BSD and a closed source OS called BSDi. So this fear was not totally unjustified. Also people were still burned from the "Unix Wars", where closed-source BSD variants played a major role. So there was the feeling that GPL would discourage incompatible forks.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  As if modern Linux distributions are super compatible among themselves.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Aren't they? Not binary compatible, but you should be able to compile more or less the same software on any GNU/Linux unless you're missing dependencies.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Packaging, file locations, init systems, desktop stack in use, ...

loeg 5y ago

Yeah, the lawsuits hamstrung BSD right as Linux was taking off. It may have been a motivation for creating Linux in the first place.

Beltalowda 5y ago
There's some perspective of Torvalds on 386BSD in this 1993 interview: https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html Applicable part: "when I started on Linux it [386BSD] wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." I don't think the lawsuit played an issue.
- musicale 5y ago
  That explains why Linux was started, but not why it won.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    Yes, I just replied to "it [the lawsuit] may have been a motivation for creating Linux in the first place". As for why Linux "won"; I think the low bar to contributing in the earlier days helped a lot; BSD tended to be a lot more bureaucratic. And there was also some amount of drama and splits in the early 90s, which probably didn't help either.

flomo 5y ago

The answer might be it was easier to duel-boot DOS with Linux in the early days (something about partitioning). However the takeoff point probably wasn't until a few years later when Linux 2.0 was the first with SMP support. Many other reasons contributed.

zozbot234 5y ago
You could boot Linux from DOS back then, by using LOADLIN and relying on UMSDOS support which could manage a Linux-compatible filesystem within a DOS directory such as C:\LINUX\. No need to mess with partitioning at all. With some added prompts in AUTOEXEC.BAT, you could basically turn even plain DOS into something as powerful as a modern UEFI boot manager. Of course this stuff became less feasible after NT-based systems took over, making conventional dual boot and separate partitions the best choice overall.
- rnd0 5y ago
  I'm 99% certain you could boot BSD from DOS back then too. 386BSD 1.0 contains a "boot.exe" which works with FreeDOS -as long as you don't load anything else! https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/1.0 https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/1.0 I think that FreeBSD 2.0 may have used the boot utility as well -but I'm not sure. I remember when I encountered Linux in the late 90's there was a distro that sat on MS-DOS; I think it may have been "Monkey Linux" ( https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm )? It wasn't Slackware -but I pretty quickly found slackware and began using "zipslack" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack) before diving in and doing a real Linux install. So by 97 or so Linux was figuring out more sophisticated ways to co-exist with DOS if not Windows95. Probably had been for a couple years before that -but 97 is when I found Linux so I don't know. And yes, by the time XP was released Linux was popular enough that people didn't bother making kludges like that any more. It probably didn't help that vfat and fat32 were different than the old umsdos file system so that the drawbacks out-weighed the benefits.
loeg 5y ago
Yeah, BSD was still doing its funky "slice" subpartitioning scheme instead of using MBR partitions directly (and for the next two decades as well). Linux has always just used MBR/EBR partitions (prior to GPT).

segmondy 5y ago

The first Unix system I ever used was a 386BSD. The first Unix system I could ever get my hand on by downloading or buying disks was Linux. From the get go, Linux was easy to obtain. I of course preferred the BSDs since that's what I was used to, but just being able to hack on Linux 24/7 from my bedroom without having to share the system with hundred others, and having root access without having to hack someone's else system just allowed me to dive deeper than the BSDs. It was easier to find other folks going through the same and targeting everything first for linux before BSD. It created a tremendous fast feedback loop, easy to obtain, more programs available for it.

anyfoo 5y ago
I was there for Minix and Linux, I didn't get my hands onto 386BSD at the time (nor knew it existed), only a bit later FreeBSD/NetBSD and eventually OpenBSD. Hence my question: Was 386BSD somehow harder to obtain than Linux? I guess it was just because at the time, where large transfers over modem were entirely impractical, Linux distributions tended to pop up "everywhere", in book stores as part of books or by themselves, in computer magazines, in rather "micro" distributions on floppy disks etc.? While I guess 386BSD's distribution channels were less fanned out?
- nineteen999 5y ago
  I sourced my original Slackware/Redhat/Debian CD image from Infomagic back in the 1990's. This was a common way to get the install media before dialup speeds hit 38400 and beyond since downloading a whole distro was so slow and would require so much disk space. It looks like they had a seperate BSD image at the time which had the BSD's on it. So probably not much more difficult to obtain than Linux by 1995. https://archive.org/details/infomagic-BSDisc-1-1-93 https://archive.org/details/infomagic-BSDisc-1-1-93
- segmondy 5y ago
  I could access it through network via michnet back then. I had no idea where to obtain one, and I think when I did finally find one for sale through some computer magazine, it was in hundreds of dollars (easily $500+) when I barely had pennies to rub together as a high schooler. When I got Linux, I put money together with friends to get a CD. Our major expense was really buying pack of floppies to transfer and install it since we didn't have a CD drive then.

smackeyacky 5y ago

More likely it was device support. You could get something like the Yggdrasil distribution that seemed to support a pile of video cards, network cards, CD-Roms etc. that were hard to get working on 386BSD. You have to remember that for most people, getting X up and running was a real effort, let alone patching the kernel to support whatever weird CD-Rom you might have. I picked up 386BSD first, but quickly switched to Linux (around '94 I guess) simply because the community had more of a stake in Linux for providing support for different devices.

dbcurtis 5y ago
Ding, ding, ding! Winner, winner! Chicken dinner! It's about the drivers. Getting traction with a new OS is all about driver support. Which is what makes launching a new OS hard, assuming your goal is to be popular. You have to inspire an army of driver writers.
- leoc 5y ago
  But was that better driver support simply a snowballing consequence of Linux already having been ahead by then? If so (and IDK if it is so) then the original explanation would have to lie elsewhere.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    There was quite a bit of weirdness surrounding the BSDs back then due to AT&T code that was replaced, it kind of became moribund after some dispute over patches that I didn't follow too closely, then those patches became forks (FreeBSD and NetBSD). By the time the smoke cleared, XFree86 was ported to Linux and the general perception was the Linux community had their stuff together, while the BSD guys were fighting over nothing. I don't think it helped that the BSD distributions were very opinionated about their userlands, where in Linux you had lots of choice. In hindsight, it seems to me the BSD guys simply blew their shot by infighting at a time when early adopters were clamouring for a Unix like, and didn't care about the BSD purity war. That was where the snowball started. Linux had no real advantage other than the cooperative nature of the community.

throw7 5y ago

I was fortunate to have a 386 (bought by my parents for college) with me in the early 90's (there was one other floor mate in college I remember who had a 386 at the time). I came from BBS's (c128 with modem) and had no notion of BSD vs linux or any of the legal battles of the time. I can only put it down to "marketing" or some type of "fate" that one day on usenet I learned that I could install "linux" a type of "Unix" (the "same" thing I was using on the workstations in college) on my 386. It was Slackware that I had installed at the time and that's my story. I eventually did learn about BSD later but it didn't really "click" with me when I tried it. I think maybe Linux was the "zeitgeist" of the time and information on it was just readily more available (at least for me).

eadmund 5y ago

> Was it the specter of lawsuits (which ultimately had no effect?) I think that this was mostly it. > Was it GPL vs. permissive licensing (which seems like it would favor BSD in terms of adoption?) Many folks prefer to adopt & contribute to an OS when they know that they are legally protected from others taking their contributions proprietary. I think that another factor, sadly more important in the 90s than now, is that the GNU userland was far more user-oriented than the BSD userland. Back then, Unix users actually used the command-line tools, and GNU was in a lot of ways more pleasant (if also, um, a bit scattershot and buggy).

noisy_boy 5y ago

My first exposure to Unix was Sun Solaris at work. I was very interested to install it on my home PC but failed to. During my searches to install Unix, I came across Linux and joined some user groups. At the same time, one of the magazines included an installation CD that basically just worked. Once I resolved the modem issues, there was no looking back. Did try Freebsd later but ended up going back to Linux and have stayed with it since.

rnd0 5y ago

I think you've covered most of the points -particularly the lawsuits and the development model (why code where you're not wanted when Linux is just right there ?). I suspect that BSD may have been a bit more flakey than Linux as well. I've never tried it on bare metal so I may be wrong; but in emulation 386BSD seems very difficult to get working properly. I wasn't there, but based on that experience I'm guessing that Linux got to a more usable point first? Another point is that Linux simply ran on a wider variety of commodity hardware earlier than BSD did.

eschaton 5y ago

Observing this at the time, it was entirely the lawsuits.

Tor3 5y ago

386BSD vs Linux came down to a single thing for me: Support for MBR partitions. I was aware of both systems from the beginning and started to prepare trying both of them from around January 1992. What I had available was a 486 PC with OS/2. So in the end it was quite simple: With Linux and its support for partitions I could use that 486 without losing OS/2 (this was at work, after all, I couldn't ditch that system - I used it for production). I first booted and executed Linux from a floppy, and soon I could install Linux on a separate HD partition (and still boot from a floppy, for a while). But 386BSD needed to take over the disk, and that was out of the question. That was the showstopper for me. And shortly after that, my x-terminal broke and I switched to use that particular 486 PC as a replacement, a hack version of X11 came around early so that was actually possible. I was a little involved in testing new drivers and filesystems and so on, and by that time I was firmly into the Linux camp and have stayed there since. My original Unix experience was mainly from SunOS.

pjmlp 5y ago

PlayStation OS is based on BSD, but as the license goes very few see the outcome of that.