Some hated the GPL, viewing it as less free (which is kind of true depending on who’s freedom you care about… personally I care about freedom of users and protecting society from large corporations, but you do you BSD fans).
Some disliked the crappy network stack (the superior UDP performance and IPv6 compliance were much touted at the time… although my own benchmarks didn’t confirm the BSD folks beliefs there). It may be hard to imagine with all of the innovation in networking layers that continues in Linux now, but that was the situation 20 or 25 years ago.
Further on networking, some disliked the ipchains/iptables (now nftables I guess) firewalling and whined constantly about how much better pf was. My firewalling needs have always been simple (except for whatever horrors Docker forces on me), so I never understood the rage.
Some complained about the terrible threading model in Linux (back before this was essentially solved in Linux, leaving Linux threading far superior to BSD threading).
Some pointed to the plethora of distributions as inferior to the obviously better model of the OS shipping with a blessed set of tools (think FreeBSD “base” or whatever).
Some bemoaned the lack of “jails” in Linux (essentially a primitive form of containers).
Anyway.
I think basically it was just annoyance that people used Linux instead of their favorite.
The only one i can understand is the complain with distributions tbh
The one about jails is stupid because containers exist and i don’t see how GPL gives less freedom, heck, i’d say that BSD is worse because when you contribute to a project, you are now giving free labor to companies…
I’ve messed around with Dragonfly BSD a bit… it mostly felt familiar to me, and I can potentially see myself using a BSD in the future if I ever needed to jump ship. The multiprocessing and the HAMMER2 filesystem on that one in particular seemed neat. Though obviously I didn’t have good GPU support on that particular BSD since I have an nvidia card XD
I did a tour with OpenBSD about 2000-2004. It works just fine, with a much reduced ecosystem of pre built packages, just because of the quantity of devs around.
I saw Dragonfly when it started and I’m glad to hear it’s still going. The idea held a lot of promise.
The only real reason to use a BSD is if you use a dedicated system for something like serving files, or some embedded stuff that requires to poke at its innards. As a general purpose machine, it’s way, way more limited than Linux. You’ll find yourself very constrained by the hardware and some of the software support. But there are lots of nifty toys, so if you have a spare machine and want to play with it, by all means, it’s certainly worth your time.
NGL, I really wanna try either free or open bsd
I worked at a company filled with BSD zealots. Their burning hatred for Linux was all-consuming, bad really put me off of the lot.
Why did they hate Linux?
Lots of different reasons.
Some hated the GPL, viewing it as less free (which is kind of true depending on who’s freedom you care about… personally I care about freedom of users and protecting society from large corporations, but you do you BSD fans).
Some disliked the crappy network stack (the superior UDP performance and IPv6 compliance were much touted at the time… although my own benchmarks didn’t confirm the BSD folks beliefs there). It may be hard to imagine with all of the innovation in networking layers that continues in Linux now, but that was the situation 20 or 25 years ago.
Further on networking, some disliked the ipchains/iptables (now nftables I guess) firewalling and whined constantly about how much better pf was. My firewalling needs have always been simple (except for whatever horrors Docker forces on me), so I never understood the rage.
Some complained about the terrible threading model in Linux (back before this was essentially solved in Linux, leaving Linux threading far superior to BSD threading).
Some pointed to the plethora of distributions as inferior to the obviously better model of the OS shipping with a blessed set of tools (think FreeBSD “base” or whatever).
Some bemoaned the lack of “jails” in Linux (essentially a primitive form of containers).
Anyway.
I think basically it was just annoyance that people used Linux instead of their favorite.
The only one i can understand is the complain with distributions tbh
The one about jails is stupid because containers exist and i don’t see how GPL gives less freedom, heck, i’d say that BSD is worse because when you contribute to a project, you are now giving free labor to companies…
I’ve messed around with Dragonfly BSD a bit… it mostly felt familiar to me, and I can potentially see myself using a BSD in the future if I ever needed to jump ship. The multiprocessing and the HAMMER2 filesystem on that one in particular seemed neat. Though obviously I didn’t have good GPU support on that particular BSD since I have an nvidia card XD
same but the drivers though 😓😓
I did a tour with OpenBSD about 2000-2004. It works just fine, with a much reduced ecosystem of pre built packages, just because of the quantity of devs around.
I saw Dragonfly when it started and I’m glad to hear it’s still going. The idea held a lot of promise.
The only real reason to use a BSD is if you use a dedicated system for something like serving files, or some embedded stuff that requires to poke at its innards. As a general purpose machine, it’s way, way more limited than Linux. You’ll find yourself very constrained by the hardware and some of the software support. But there are lots of nifty toys, so if you have a spare machine and want to play with it, by all means, it’s certainly worth your time.