alt Hacker NewsI ran a whole company on top of FreeBSD back in the day (2005 ish). It was great, and ran all my personal pcs the same way (hell, refusing to install windows to try out this bitcoin idea is even now a good idea).
But somehow Linux still took over my personal and professional life.
Going back seems nice but there need to be a compelling reason -docker is fine, the costs don’t add up any more. I do t have a real logical argument beyond that.
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Yeah, I have a similar situation; FreeBSD is a great operating system, but the sheer amount of investment in Linux makes all the warts semi-tolerable.
I'm sure some people have a sunk-cost feeling with Linux and will get defensive of this, but ironically this was exactly the argument I had heard 20 years ago - and I was defensive about it myself then.. This has only become more true though.
It's really hard to argue against Linux when even architecturally poor decisions are papered over by sheer force of will and investment; so in a day-to-day context Linux is often the happy path even though the UX of FreeBSD is more consistent over time.
In the early years after 2000, FreeBSD 4 had a much better performance and reliability in any networking or storage applications in comparison with the contemporaneous Linux and Windows XP/Windows 2000.
However, in 2003 Intel introduced CPUs with SMT and in 2005 AMD introduced multi-core CPUs.
These multi-threaded and/or multi-core CPUs quickly replaced the single-threaded CPUs, especially in servers, where the FreeBSD stronghold was.
FreeBSD 4 could not handle multiple threads. In the following years Linux and Windows have been developed immediately to take advantage of multiple threads and cores, while FreeBSD has required many years for this, a time during it has become much less used than before, because new users were choosing Linux and some of the old users were also switching to Linux for their new computers that were not supported by FreeBSD.
Eventually FreeBSD has become decent again from the PoV of performance, but it has never been again in a top position and it lacks native device drivers for many of the hardware devices that are supported by Linux, due to much fewer developers able to do the necessary reverse engineering work or the porting work for the case when some company provides Linux device drivers for their hardware.
For the last 3 decades, I have been using continuously both FreeBSD and Linux. I use Linux on my desktop PCs and laptops, and in some computational servers where I need software support not available for FreeBSD, e.g. NVIDIA CUDA (NVIDIA provides FreeBSD device drivers for graphic applications, but not CUDA). I continue to use FreeBSD for many servers that implement various kinds of networking or storage functions, due to exceptional reliability and simplicity of management.