First off, I submit that BSD is finding its home in appliances. FreeNAS and pfSense are both fairly popular, and both BSD based. Commercially, the Nintendo Switch is based on BSD, and Cisco, McAffee, and Juniper all have appliances using BSD at their core. Also, as others have pointed out, OSX.
That said, there are so many copy/paste tutorials for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian. With BSD lagging behind severely, for every person who prefers BSD and can successfully use it to do what they need, there are five more less-technical users who are able to fall into the pit of success with a Bitnami or Turnkey Linux distribution.
BSD may well be superior for certain tasks, especially networking, but the fact of the matter is that expecting BSD to simultaneously be competitive in the numbers game against Linux when Linux has an ecosystem which BSD lacks. That ecosystem encourages users looking to get something done to use that product, rather than adhere to principles which otherwise have little effect on them. I know systemd is hated in these parts, almost universally, but if I need to spin up a Wordpress instance, it takes me ten minutes to grab Turnkey Linux and start addding my content, rather than the half hour or more it would take to spin up BSD, manually install an AMP stack, figure out the BSD equivalent of/var/www, Google all the MySQL commands to create the database at the CLI since I don't have Adminer or phpMyAdmin to do it, and then add Wordpress. As a non-developer and non-distributor, the BSD vs. GPL vs. MIT license situation affects me very little, so the fact that both Debian and BSD are free-as-in-beer means that they compete on how much of my time they take to spin up.
This is why I use pfSense and FreeNAS. It's also why most of my appliances are Turnkey Linux based.
Is "pkg install phpmyadmin" not sufficient to add all the necessary AMP components, phpMyAdmin, etc?/var/www =/usr/local/www (/www... and this is a lot more logical than putting them under/var!!!!)
A few different things for controlling service startup (/etc/rc.conf) but that should be about it?
Don't doubt that there are finely tuned Linux distros specifically for spinning up your use cases (and I'm not experienced with any of them), but FreeBSD is pretty easy to get up and running today too!
Yo buddy not sure what you are getting at. Setting up wordpress on a Linux system or a BSD system is the same amount of work. Just because you are familiar with one installation process does not mean that you know all. Just by your comment I know you haven't even looked at BSD. So let me help you. System config files/etc. User installed config files/usr/local/etc. Log files/var/log. Very constant, been so for over 25 years. Every program you listed is available and I can go from bare bone to full firewal
Not trying to start a flame war even remotely, but nothing in your reply refutes the fact that the licensing is why these companies choose the BSDs. They don't pick BSD for superiority; Legal likes BSD license because it's compatible with IP, while GPL inherently isn't. I'll even add Netflix into the company list: they use FreeBSD on very specific back-end machines (and very few of them), but everything else is Linux (this comes from someone who actually works there).
I come from a traditional Unix background, I want to say the first system I used was running SunOS 3.5. In college I found out about OpenBSD and ran it on my P-90 beige box. It was great for servers, but trying to run desktop apps was a hassle since you either hoped what you wanted was there in the ports collection or were forced to build it yourself. Back in those days just getting X11 to work with your graphics card could be difficult to impossible.
Eventually I got tired of dealing with a limited port
Is it just that the pie is growing? (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, I submit that BSD is finding its home in appliances. FreeNAS and pfSense are both fairly popular, and both BSD based. Commercially, the Nintendo Switch is based on BSD, and Cisco, McAffee, and Juniper all have appliances using BSD at their core. Also, as others have pointed out, OSX.
That said, there are so many copy/paste tutorials for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian. With BSD lagging behind severely, for every person who prefers BSD and can successfully use it to do what they need, there are five more less-technical users who are able to fall into the pit of success with a Bitnami or Turnkey Linux distribution.
BSD may well be superior for certain tasks, especially networking, but the fact of the matter is that expecting BSD to simultaneously be competitive in the numbers game against Linux when Linux has an ecosystem which BSD lacks. That ecosystem encourages users looking to get something done to use that product, rather than adhere to principles which otherwise have little effect on them. I know systemd is hated in these parts, almost universally, but if I need to spin up a Wordpress instance, it takes me ten minutes to grab Turnkey Linux and start addding my content, rather than the half hour or more it would take to spin up BSD, manually install an AMP stack, figure out the BSD equivalent of /var/www, Google all the MySQL commands to create the database at the CLI since I don't have Adminer or phpMyAdmin to do it, and then add Wordpress. As a non-developer and non-distributor, the BSD vs. GPL vs. MIT license situation affects me very little, so the fact that both Debian and BSD are free-as-in-beer means that they compete on how much of my time they take to spin up.
This is why I use pfSense and FreeNAS. It's also why most of my appliances are Turnkey Linux based.
Re: (Score:2)
Is "pkg install phpmyadmin" not sufficient to add all the necessary AMP components, phpMyAdmin, etc? /var/www = /usr/local/www (/www ... and this is a lot more logical than putting them under /var!!!!)
A few different things for controlling service startup (/etc/rc.conf) but that should be about it?
Don't doubt that there are finely tuned Linux distros specifically for spinning up your use cases (and I'm not experienced with any of them), but FreeBSD is pretty easy to get up and running today too!
Re: (Score:2)
Yo buddy not sure what you are getting at. Setting up wordpress on a Linux system or a BSD system is the same amount of work. Just because you are familiar with one installation process does not mean that you know all. Just by your comment I know you haven't even looked at BSD. So let me help you. System config files /etc. User installed config files /usr/local/etc. Log files /var/log. Very constant, been so for over 25 years. Every program you listed is available and I can go from bare bone to full firewal
Re: (Score:1)
Not trying to start a flame war even remotely, but nothing in your reply refutes the fact that the licensing is why these companies choose the BSDs. They don't pick BSD for superiority; Legal likes BSD license because it's compatible with IP, while GPL inherently isn't. I'll even add Netflix into the company list: they use FreeBSD on very specific back-end machines (and very few of them), but everything else is Linux (this comes from someone who actually works there).
FreeBSD was a good solid OS in the 4.x
Re: (Score:2)
I come from a traditional Unix background, I want to say the first system I used was running SunOS 3.5. In college I found out about OpenBSD and ran it on my P-90 beige box. It was great for servers, but trying to run desktop apps was a hassle since you either hoped what you wanted was there in the ports collection or were forced to build it yourself. Back in those days just getting X11 to work with your graphics card could be difficult to impossible.
Eventually I got tired of dealing with a limited port