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Linux became more popular than BSD because the AT&T lawsuits made the legal status of BSD questionable. By the time it was cleared up, Linux had the momentum.

Linux became more popular than BSD because the AT&T lawsuits made the legal status of BSD questionable. By the time it was cleared up, Linux had the momentum. I am not sure that Debian popularity really had much to do with it. The first Linux distro to really pull away from the pack was Red Hat ( pre RHEL and Fedora ) with the introduction of a package manager ( RPM ). Most of the other popular distros of that era were based off RPM ( Mandrake and SUSE for example ). But RPM at first required downloading packages individually before they could be installed or upgraded. You could upgrade an entire installation to the next release with a CD that had all the new RPMs on it. Debian solved that problem by introducing the concept of a repository. While .deb files worked similarly to RPM, “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” was a new thing. Even then, Debian was kind of a niche, power-user distro. The revolution came when Ubuntu created a more user friendly version of Debian. RPM based distros eventually got YUM and other repository based equivalents to apt-get but by then Ubuntu had the momentum. I think Debian became more popular later because of Ubuntu ( though I may have that wrong ). Ubuntu itself had a huge diaspora with many other popular distros starting off as basically Ubuntu modified to address some user complaint or other. These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. FreeBSD may never regain its position vs Linux but it has maintained its market position pretty well relative to some Linux distros I would say.

pxc 4y ago
> These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. It does. What would you say are the features driving that? My guesses are: 1. Users find repository management painful or cumbersome, especially but not exclusively on deb-based distros. On Arch you've basically got a couple of distro repos plus a giant catch-all (the AUR) so there's no real repo management in practice. 2. Speed is a package manager's most visible, user-facing feature, and pacman is very fast, relatively speaking. 3. People have bad experiences of botched release upgrades, and most Arch-based distros just don't have those 4. The AUR has a very low barrier to entry, which substantially soothes the typical 'straying from the happy path' pain point, because it means there are easily available packages for novel, proprietary, and quirky or ill-behaved applications which can be difficult, impossible, or slow to get packaged and maintained so they can reside in a distro's main repos.
hulitu 4y ago
> Linux became more popular than BSD because the AT&T lawsuits made the legal status of BSD questionable. By the time it was cleared up, Linux had the momentum. In theory this was the e reason. In practice, Linux played nicely with the PC partition table and linux installers became newbie friendly much earlier than BSD. BSD did not have a graphical installer until DragonflyBSD. Also for many users, the ability to coexist with Windows and DOS was crucial. BSD did not advertise DOS compatibility (fatfs) and dual booting.

pxc 4y ago

> These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. It does. What would you say are the features driving that? My guesses are: 1. Users find repository management painful or cumbersome, especially but not exclusively on deb-based distros. On Arch you've basically got a couple of distro repos plus a giant catch-all (the AUR) so there's no real repo management in practice. 2. Speed is a package manager's most visible, user-facing feature, and pacman is very fast, relatively speaking. 3. People have bad experiences of botched release upgrades, and most Arch-based distros just don't have those 4. The AUR has a very low barrier to entry, which substantially soothes the typical 'straying from the happy path' pain point, because it means there are easily available packages for novel, proprietary, and quirky or ill-behaved applications which can be difficult, impossible, or slow to get packaged and maintained so they can reside in a distro's main repos.

hulitu 4y ago

> Linux became more popular than BSD because the AT&T lawsuits made the legal status of BSD questionable. By the time it was cleared up, Linux had the momentum. In theory this was the e reason. In practice, Linux played nicely with the PC partition table and linux installers became newbie friendly much earlier than BSD. BSD did not have a graphical installer until DragonflyBSD. Also for many users, the ability to coexist with Windows and DOS was crucial. BSD did not advertise DOS compatibility (fatfs) and dual booting.