Practically this just doesn't matter all that much. You can prefer one approach to the other and that's all fine, but from a "serious engineering" perspective i

Practically this just doesn't matter all that much. You can prefer one approach to the other and that's all fine, but from a "serious engineering" perspective it just doesn't really matter. > Trying to maintain your own linux distro is insanely difficult, infact google still uses a 2.2 kernel with all custom back ported updates of the last 30 years. 2.2? Colour me skeptical on that. But it's really not that hard to make a Linux distro. I know, because I did it, and tons of other people have. It's little more than "get kernel + fuck about with Linux booting madness + bunch of userland stuff". The same applies to FreeBSD by the way, and according to the PDF "Netflix has an internal “distro”". The problems Google has is because they maintain extensive patchsets, not because they built their own distro. They would have the same problems with FreeBSD, or any other complex piece of software.