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Well, it's not that simple. FreeBSD has some contribution from businesses like Netflix and Nginx and those are very welcome, but they have nothing to do with d
by 0x457 4y ago
Well, it's not that simple.
FreeBSD has some contribution from businesses like Netflix and Nginx and those are very welcome, but they have nothing to do with desktop usage. Those have deadlines and budgets, features get implemented and tested. That's why FreeBSD has superb network stack, good NUMA support, files from disk to nic go brrr. That's why the move to OpenZFS was so fast.
Then, they're contributions without company backing it. This is where desktop feature live. That's why FreeBSD's Wi-Fi stack is stuck on 802.11g - no company depends on this. GPU drivers stuck at Linux 5.4 level - no company cares about it[1]. Those get discussed to death - there is no deadline, no money.
Note, that solution to graphics card driver is to use Linux's drivers, so they don't shy about GPL. However, FreeBSD folks LOVE to bikeshed and polish things. This is why PR to port linux 5.11 drm was open when 5.11 was already EoL for an entire year. Instead of "just" porting 5.11, they decided to refactor how things are done. There are like 3 people working on that PR. It still not merged and not even in review yet.
[1]: Bless Nvidia for having FreeBSD driver available. Would be nice to have CUDA too...
- Melatonic 4y agoSeriously - more than anything I feel like FreeBSD is a server OS first and foremost. Or more realistically something with lower flexibility that makes it ideal for more niche use cases as a pseudo "lower level" OS. The way I see it the two things you want MOST reliable are storages and network - and all the other features of most operating systems are just unnecessary fluff for those. What I would like to see however is maybe some specific wifi chip or USB/thunderbolt Ethernet adapter that is certified to work well with FreeBSD - for testing purposes and as a mobile network tool it would be useful to have a laptop running FreeBSD in a VM that could communicate over that dedicated piece of hardware. This would make it super convenient to test a bunch of physical hardware or do all kinds of other infrastructure work while remote.