As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!
Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
Try e.g. Void Linux, it's built by BSD-inclined people and is also refreshingly simpler than most big distros. (It's my daily driver for the last 8 years.)
But if you want tighter integration of userland and kernel, I suppose what RedHat is doing is closer to that. They pursue a non-Unix way though: an immutable distro, ideally only running systemd and podman in the userland, put everything into containers.
As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.
But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer.
Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines.
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!
Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
how so? could you please elaborate?
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Try e.g. Void Linux, it's built by BSD-inclined people and is also refreshingly simpler than most big distros. (It's my daily driver for the last 8 years.)
But if you want tighter integration of userland and kernel, I suppose what RedHat is doing is closer to that. They pursue a non-Unix way though: an immutable distro, ideally only running systemd and podman in the userland, put everything into containers.
As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.
*BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin…
But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer.
Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.
> As enshittification encroaches onto Linux
What enshittification?
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together
Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
> As enshittification encroaches onto Linux
This is a ridiculous stretch of the term
> With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer.
ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines.
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
linux userspace has always sucked ass
In what way? Do you have concrete examples?