Why is Linux more popular than BSD?

http://serverfault.com/questions/36359/why-is-linux-more-popular-than-bsd

by rohshall • 14 years ago

88 107 14 years ago

wladimir• 14 years ago

Speaking for myself, I chose Linux over BSD as main OS back in the day (~1998), even though BSD was "hot" in hacker circles, because Linux had a slight edge in convenience. Configuration of X and such were slightly easier with Linux (Slackware back then), and HW support was somewhat better (though FreeBSD came close).

Also Linux has the GNU utilities (GNU grep etc), which were somewhat more featureful than the BSD equivalents. I know they can be installed on *BSD though the ports system but as I was new to unixy OSes, having a lot of packages installed by default was great.

I have no idea how it is these days, Linux just stuck.

dazzawazza• 14 years ago

I too started with a linux in the late 90's but moved to Free/OpenBSD by 2000 as IMO the BSD community had got it's shit together and the Linux community had turned in to a shambles optimised by slashdot style commenting everywhere.

By that point the BSDs supported most common hardware and didn't suffer from fire and forget IDE drivers which corrupted my Linux servers at least once per year. Although they were slower they just seemed to work. Combine that with a rational layout of /etc /usr/local/etc and all the other places that UNIX's squirrel away files and BSD just stuck for me. I haven't looked back as far as servers go.

The desktop is another kettle of fish though. Ubuntu is still far better than PCBSD but both are still lightyears away from the polish that windows/mac desktops have.

draven• 14 years ago

I chose (Free)BSD over Linux back in the day (~1999) also for reasons related to X. The Linux distributions I tried came with an X server that didn't support my graphics card (a Voodoo 3 3000!). FreeBSD got the latest X server in the ports and it ran fine on this card. I later moved to Linux (Debian then Arch) but FreeBSD was a great learning experience, and it felt clearner/more organized.

sarnowski2• 14 years ago

I started with Linux many years ago and used various distributions. I rarley had any driver issues. Sine some years now, I am using OpenBSD for all my personal stuff. My desktop and my server. I will never go back to any Linux Distribution as OpenBSD is so much cleaner, consistent, easier to use and better documented than any other distribution out there. There are two problems with OpenBSD. At first the hardware support. I choose my machines carefully so that OpenBSD is supported which is not that easy sometimes. The second problem is the JVM. At my work place, everything runs on Linux servers with Oracle JVMs so I have to use that. OpenJDK 7 is already pretty stable on OpenBSD but the behaviour can vary too much so that this is not an option.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

I was a big fan of OpenBSD for personal servers (not desktops), but my new ARM server put an end to that, by necessity.

nnq2• 14 years ago

...can you elaborate on why? really, I'm interested. I mean I get that having the same OS for a server and for a desktop simplifies things, but... how did you arrive at OpenBSD? ...did you first go through FreeBSD? I'm sure other people will be thankful too if you'd blog about your experience!

(Note: I'm currently investigating a "cheapest to maintain" solution, and by this I mean man-hours, not upfront costs, so I could choose Windows Server just as well - not that I would do that - for both my personal server and the servers of a bunch of NGOs that I help with sysadmin stuff for free... and was wondering if something like FreeBSD was better than Ubuntu Server LTS ...I want something that I could just "drop it there and leave it running for 5 years", but at the same time there will be some packages - like webserver and related that I will want to keep to the latest stable versions, like upgrading every few months or so; and yes, I do care about security, so being of to date on all security fixes and at the same time not having to keep fixing an recompiling stuff...)

sarnowski2• 14 years ago

Yeah I had FreeBSD on the route before OpenBSD. FreeBSD was a very disappointing experience for me. This is some years back so the situation may be better. Back then, a lot of ports were broken. It felt that every second port did not compile. The second thing was that FreeBSD is like most Linux distributions: It tries to support everything and that is bad. If you have a problem and ask how you solve that with FreeBSD you mostly get the answer: you can use X or Y or Z. X has this disadvantages, Y was not updated for years and Z has no documentation. I also tried to try NetBSD but it panic'ed on all my machines during boot.

Disclaimer: I am an OpenBSD fanboy because it opened my eyes. OpenBSD's base system already solves 90% of my problems with exactly one, perfectly maintained and documented solution. You want a firewall? Choose between pf, netfilter or something else on FreeBSD. On OpenBSD the answer is "use pf" (which is btw by far the best paket filter I every experienced). The port system just works, is up-to-date and has good default configurations (and I never missed a package). Maintenance is very easy. It is not as easy as apt-get update && upgrade but the release upgrade (every 6 months) never broke anything on my systems (and takes just 10 minutes). Besides that, there is nearly nothing to do. Here is the bug/update list of the current release (5 months old): http://openbsd.org/errata51.html The last thing I want to mention now is the consistency in all tools. For network configuration there is ifconfig which can just handle everything (e.g. on linux you have to use special tools for wlan). You have great manual pages. The manual pages are real manual pages with introductions to the systems, various high level topics down to device nodes etc. They are completely up-to-date and the best source for all informations.

humdumb3• 14 years ago

"cleaner, consistent.. better documented"

I think that sums it up. Why should I use Linux?

BSD definitely can't do everything that Linux can do, but it can do most things, normally the most important things, and it can do some interesting things that Linux cannot.

For programs that only are available on Linux, BSD kernels can run Linux applications.

It's a little painful using Linux after you become accustomed to BSD. Linux is really fast, but it's too random, sometimes even chaotic, and it seems disorganized by comparison.

But for people who are used to Linux there seems no reason to switch. Linux has lots of resources behind it to keep up with new hardware. BSD will never be as quick to produce drivers.

jamesmcn• 14 years ago

Wow, it wasn't that long ago when this was flamebait of the highest order.

Linux has always been better at supporting a wider array of consumer hardware than *BSD. That combined with the Unix(TM) lawsuit lead to the quick early commercial success of Linux on 32-bit Intel hardware. The rise of the internet did the rest.

jlgreco• 14 years ago

Interestingly OpenBSD has had stronger wifi support than Linux at times in the past few years. They are very aggressive about getting rid of binary blobs, so they throw a lot of effort at that problem.

snogglethorpe• 14 years ago

> Wow, it wasn't that long ago when this was flamebait of the highest order.

Judging from the tenor of some of the responses, I'd say it still is... oO;

nodata• 14 years ago

Because of Mandrake: it just worked, hardware support was better, and it had a pretty GUI installer.

fleitz2• 14 years ago

Because worse is better.

If you count OSX as BSD than far more people use BSD desktops than Linux desktops. But if you count iOS and Android then it starts to become a toss up.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Nursie3• 14 years ago

Would you count OSX as BSD? It seems to me to be a hybrid thing, far more questionable than android as linux.

Either way, I assumed we were talking about things that are more commonly held as BSD and Linux. In which case the question doesn't even specify desktops - linux is the dominant OS in the server and embedded markets.

kokey• 14 years ago

Last night when I instinctively typed 'man ascii' on OSX and it came up with that man page, and when I do 'ls -lsh |sort -n' to sort files by size _and_ also have the human readable sizes visible, I keep being reminded that OSX is still very much BSD under the bonnet, for me.

zurn• 14 years ago

Do you mean Linux did the "cut corners / spread like a virus" thing in the beginning and caught up technically once it dominated mindshare?

I think it's not really the same thing as "worse is better" when you are comparing a implementation effort started from scratch competing with a legacy code base. Of course it will have less features at first. The (more) open development from the start, friendlier community and BSD fragmentation then won people over.

prtamil2• 14 years ago

Better Audio Support in Linux So that i can watch movies and listen to songs.

prtamil2• 14 years ago

Because of Lawyers.

humdumb3• 14 years ago

Actually because of senior managment who told the company lawyers to take action. But yeah, this is the correct answer. Go figure it's at the bottom of the thread.

Linus was a 386BSD user, or hoped to be. A lawsuit stopped people like him from getting their hands on the BSD code to play with, so he wrote a UNIX clone himself using MINIX as a model. Eventually the legal situation with BSD was cleared, and BSD became free and available to everyone, but that wasn't until 1993 or so. And even after the lawsuit some people still wanted to make money selling BSD for the PC. (They failed.^1) By that time, lots of people had already shifted to Linux as the "free" available UNIX as it was readily available. Why pay for CD-ROMs of BSD when you could freely download Linux via FTP?

1. But just look at Apple. BSD is in lots of commercial products, though you might not always realize it.

derleth5• 14 years ago

> Linus was a 386BSD user, or hoped to be. A lawsuit stopped people like him from getting their hands on the BSD code to play with, so he wrote a UNIX clone himself using MINIX as a model.

Torvalds himself said that he couldn't use 386BSD because it required the 80387, which he didn't have.

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2010/02/18/freebsd-and-the-gpl/

Apparently this is wrong because I misquoted. Damn.

njharman2• 14 years ago

> senior managment who told the company lawyers to take action

There's lawyers that "take action". Then there's lawyers who advise. Senior management gets advice from a few sources and then makes a decision. If that decision involves lawsuits, patents or any other type of legal action you can be sure the idea originated with lawyers.

YoukaiCountry• 14 years ago

Years ago when I had to make the choice, it was easy: Linux supported a larger amount of hardware. I didn't really want to spend all of my time writing drivers when I had other work to do.

michaelpinto2• 14 years ago

The dirty truth: Marketing.

Back in the 90s there was a major push to market Linux by a wide number of vendors from Red Hat to IBM if I recall correctly. In the dot.com 1.0 era you couldn't leave a tradeshow without being given a t-shirt or stuffed toy of the tux mascot. You could also go into a bookstore, but a book on a book on Linux and get a free CD with an installer. You could also go into a computer store of that era and buy a boxed copy of Linux. This made Linux really popular with the first generation of web geeks.

derleth5• 14 years ago

True, except BSD had an installed base and a base of advocates back then dating back to the 1970s. BSD was the hacker Unix back when you could still credibly build a workstation around Motorola 68000 derivatives.

Now, the standard narrative here is that BSD was under a legal cloud in the early 1990s due to the USL v. BSDi lawsuit, but BSDs still existed in 1993, when the lawsuit was settled. Was the Linux marketing machine that dominant in 1993? Even before the kernel had hit version 1.0?

michaelpinto2• 14 years ago

I think that's why BSD became to base of NeXT which was really in the workstation space at the time (and would later become Apple OS X). The thing with Linux was that many early web hackers would take a used PC and turn it into a server as their first hello world project. However many of these webmasters weren't hardcore Unix geeks with CS degrees but hobbyists -- and then the hobbyists turned pro.

russgray• 14 years ago

I remember my first home distro (outside of the university labs) was Definite Linux, in 2000. The installation CD came free with a magazine.

hollerith• 14 years ago

For a while in the 1990s, the leader of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, was recommending people coming from Windows to choose Linux rather than BSD on the desktop. I do not recall his reasoning. Maybe something to do with better support for video cards.

shin_lao• 14 years ago

Probably better hardware support. Also FreeBSD installation has been extremely arcane until recently.

I'm a long BSD fan, worked professionally on FreeBSD kernel and used OpenBSD a lot (and still do!).

However you can find BSD in many appliances and if you have a Mac, you use FreeBSD!

tzs• 14 years ago

For me it was because back in the early days of both, BSD folk had a bad attitude.

First encounter: I wanted to try BSD, but it would only work with its own partition format. You could not have a disk partitioned for both DOS/Win and BSD. The BSD folks didn't think that was important--if you really wanted to dual boot, get a second disk.

Linux could dual boot with DOS/Win on one disk, so I used Linux.

Second encounter: BSD did not support IDE CD-ROMs. When asked when they would be supported, BSD folks said IDE was not good enough for workstations and servers--get a SCSI CD-ROM.

The problem with this was that SCSI CD-ROM drives were around $400. IDE CD-ROM drives were under $100. If you were going to make heavy use of the drive, that $300 difference might be justified. Most people were NOT going to make heavy use of the drive--it would be used to install the OS and then sit unused until it was time to install the next version of the OS.

Linux would install from my IDE CD-ROM drive, so I used Linux.

By the time BSD got to the point that it could coexist well with DOS/Win, and didn't have ridiculous hardware requirements, Linux was sufficiently mature and established that there just wasn't much point.

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

Amazing. The question gets linked, gets attention, gets the answers improved (slightly, but it had only been a few minutes), and so a mod rushes in to lock it immediately.

willvarfar• 14 years ago

my own opinion: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stack... http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/26580091073/stack...

skrebbel• 14 years ago

It's ridiculous. This attitude of only allowing questions that could be answered with provable and verifiable fact is going to keep stackexchange from ever moving into non-exact-science territory succesfully.

I'd love a stackexchange site on history, for example. but there's no single question on history that wouldn't get moderated away with moderators like this.

Except "Does the majority of expert believe that <question>?", of course. And yeah, that'll help.

quiesce• 14 years ago

Until then, we have http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

desas• 14 years ago

There already is http://history.stackexchange.com/

reidrac• 14 years ago

After reading the comments I was expecting something else :)

I think one reason could be that they follow different philosophies: as end user you're going to use a Linux distribution, that includes a kernel, userland tools, applications, etc; whilst in BSD the kernel is very integrated with the userland tools and the base system includes a lot of functionality that can be completed with the ports (package system), so you're using the BSD system + some packages.

I enjoyed FreeBSD from 4.1 to 4.10 as desktop OS, and OpenBSD from 2.8 to 3.8 (web/mail servers, but firewalling mostly), and upgrading was a difficult task. I must thank to these operating systems I have the sysadmin skills I have now ;) Back then (I don't know if things have changed) you had to upgrade the system, while in Linux you could download the latest version from kernel.org, compile and install (ABI/API didn't change frequently, at least).

This different philosophy has pros and cons, and I believe one of the consequences is that Linux is more popular than BSD.

guard-of-terra4• 14 years ago

Every time I've touched BSD I screamed in Agony.

It usually has non-working vi (beeping at the sight of arrow keys), ancient shell, colourless ls and other commands lacking about every other key I throw into them.

I understand that BSD has traditions to do exactly that that you will now defend, but those traditions are not unlike muslim africa that tell them to circumcise young girls or kill for blasphemy. Traditions are baaad, mkay? Not gonna get any new users with traditions. Admit that getting new users is not any of your priority and you lost because of that.

Technically BSDs were always interesting, but you can't bring yourself to use this awkward tool.

how_gauche• 14 years ago

PLEASE tell me you didn't just compare monochrome output from "ls" with female genital mutilation. Please.

koide• 14 years ago

No, he made an analogy relating the reason to have monochrome ls and ancient vi/bash in BSD to the reason female genital mutilation occurs.

Not exactly classy, arguable, but not out of the line either.

meaty6• 14 years ago

I've never experienced any of these problems. vi always works for me and has done since about 1997. The shell is usually a bourne derivative - no problems there. Colours - you really don't need these in ls.

Coloured "ls" is one of those things that is absolutely entirely useless if you actually know how to use ls.

I find all BSD derivatives to be professionally documented, extremely reliable and with very few hidden surprises.

Compared to digging through GNU info and the utter bloat that most of the GNU toolchain has become[1] and favourite system tool dependency hell replacement of the hour (upstart, udev, dbus etc) it's absolute bliss.

[1] *BSD distributions are all slowly phasing out GNU toolchain due to these problems.

guard-of-terra4• 14 years ago

Documentation will be extra nice if I could bring myself to actually use BSDs, which I can't.

You're lucky, vi didn't work for me. Perhaps my terminal is to blame, but it works with Linux.

derleth5• 14 years ago

> Coloured "ls" is one of those things that is absolutely entirely useless if you actually know how to use ls.

Knowing how to use non-colored ls is way down my priority list now that colored ls is widely available, much the same way learning more about ed is not a high priority for me.

> GNU info

GNU info is much more useful than man pages, which are, at best, memory aides for people who already know the software and, at worst, confusing masses of trivia that beg to be broken up into multiple pages.

> bloat

In my experience, 'bloat' can be defined as "any feature I'm not using at the moment" or, if I'm feeling cranky, "any feature that I feel allows people stupider than me to be productive using my favorite tool". It is a snarl term of the first water, with no value except to express a negative emotion.

CrLf• 14 years ago

If colored "ls" had been standard from the early days, I'd bet that people would be praising how useful it is, and wondering how can you live without it. But many *nixes still don't have it and people that made a life using them get into this "get off my lawn" attitude.

I can read the output of "ls" just fine without color. I use systems without colored "ls" daily. But... I find color in "ls" invaluable.

Color conveys information in a very unobtrusive way (if it isn't excessive). Much better to see blue text and knowing immediately that it's a directory, than looking at the permissions column or warts ("ls -F").

Actually, colorless "ls" makes the system feel old. It's the feeling I get every day when using AIX, for example. I just feel like changing the color scheme to green-on-black or amber-on-black just to feel like the old days.

cturner3• 14 years ago

    I've never experienced any of these problems.
    vi always works for me and has done since about 1997.

This would be because you don't expect to navigate around vi with arrow keys when you're in insert mode.

[Although I've tested this on openbsd this morning, and even that seems to be supported now - a shame, it promotes bad habits.]

I'd guess that (like me) guard of tera came to unix via a redhat derivative, and developed all sorts of bad habits there which makes the transition to other unixes more difficult.

For me, this is a major reason for the success of linux with young developers - it makes some things easy and friendly, but in doing so locks you in to expectations that stymie your development. Not unlike Microsoft Word.

    Coloured "ls" is one of those things that is
    absolutely entirely useless if you actually know
    how to use ls.

Another example of the same dynamic.

warp• 14 years ago

GNU always seemed more user friendly to me. The BSDs didn't have long options (--help, --version, etc..) so BSD commands and shell scripts always looked cryptic.

cletus• 14 years ago

You need look no further than this question to see that something is rotten in the state of Stack Exchange. The question was asked in July, posted to HN 2 hours ago and locked an hour later. There is nothing flamebait-y in the answers. It's good stuff actually.

As to the question at hand: Linux was more accessible and this was back in the pre-1.0 days (my first distro was ~30 5.25" disks of SLS downloaded over a 2400 baud modem). It happened to support hardware I happened to have.

Honestly at the time it ever even occurred to me to use BSD or even that I could.

loxs• 14 years ago

Correction - July 2010

danielbarla3• 14 years ago

Actually, last edited in July 2010, originally asked on Jul 6 '09.

And yes, the whole "not a good fit for the site / not constructive" is hotly debated, with many high-profile members of the community having left over it already. Personally, I don't see how you can have meaningful discussions about soft topics while maintaining the "supported by facts" rule. And unfortunately (for the site), most of the more interesting topics are "not a good fit".

andyjohnson0• 14 years ago

According to the revision history [1] it was asked on 6th July 2009

[1] http://serverfault.com/posts/36359/revisions

anu_gupta2• 14 years ago

ServerFault (and most SE sites) aren't designed to have vague quasi-religious debates about something as nebulous and subjective as why Linux became more popular than BSD.

The network is supposed to be a focused, solution-centred set of sites - as evinced by this from ServerFault's FAQ:

"You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page."

danielbarla3• 14 years ago

Some of the best, most insightful and useful answers have been chatty, open-ended discussions on SE... While I get the need for moderation, as the parent pointed out, the answers and debate were very civilised and relatively fact-based.

meaty6• 14 years ago

The problem with this is that a lot of conclusions are drawn from discussion. StackExchange with its almost nazi-like moderation forces no discussion, resulting in very biased answers which favour those with a not necessarily well deserved or earned reputation.

I much prefer to have a few opinions on the table and form my own from them.

diminish2• 14 years ago

Recently I was looking on SE question about emacs which was closed but was deleted. Why doesn't someone launch a site for such questions?

mattmanser• 14 years ago

Bollocks.

There's no other word for it.

1. They locked it when it got attention. So most people thought it was fine until some pedantic, overzealous admin noticed it.

2. Where else am I supposed to ask a question like this? These are actually really important question in understanding the history and context of why people make decisions.

3. There are plenty of problems which programmers face every day that have no definitive answer. Should I start a new namespace or not in scenario a? Should I use framework x or framework y? What are the long-term downsides to approach z?

These fit the SO model fine, it's just that there are a bunch of pedants out there locking these extremely valuable questions.

Also fracturing the community with all these different exchange sites is actually getting really irritating. programmers.stackexchange.com, for example, is filled with very poor advice to lots of programming questions that get upvoted as it seems to attract architect astronauts.

meaty6• 14 years ago

I managed to salvage old Sun4 hardware out of skips and from usenet. It was far better supported on BSD than most of the rather fragmented x86 bits of kit were back then. The hardware support situation in the early-late 90's was horrible for most operating systems, Windows and Linux included. It is much improved now.

I originally installed NetBSD off QIC tape that was mailed to me by a friend at a university which had a decent connection :) It was plugged in via a large SCSI cable that only worked if you bent it in half and put a cable tie around it (it's innards were shredded).

Memories.

Just to add: StackExchange is a horrible pit of elitism. I'd rather deal with Usenet SPAM than use it.

antidoh• 14 years ago

Usenet used to be ubiquitous, especially when most of us were using dialup ISPs. Now we're all on broadband and our ISPs (Comcast et al.) don't carry it. There's Google groups, sort of ...

Does anyone subscribe to a for-pay usenet provider that they like? Does it offer old school text-based client access?

6ren• 14 years ago

SO aims at definitive factual technical answers. That's impossible for this question.

I think SO should have a sister "discussion" site, and just move these interesting questions across instead of closing them.

mhd2• 14 years ago

Bad karma for the socket API.

cturner3• 14 years ago

I realise you're joking, but interested to read more. What drives you crazy about the BSD socket API? Is there another model you've seen or worked with that improves on it?

I've never really considered the socket API in terms of whether it's good or bad - it's just part of reality. But I'm interested to know more.

mhd2• 14 years ago

To be honest, it's been a while since I seriously looked at the alternatives on the lowest level, as BSD sockets basically won - nobody's looking at OpenTransport or TLI anymore.

But I do think they're way too overexposed. It's a very low-level system, with lots of related system calls, ioctls etc., requiring the user to do all the error checking, setup and boilerplate. All error-prone, too many L3 addresses passed around and altogether a mixture of several decades of network programming.

Assuming that's all really necessary on the lower levels (don't want to get into that, not my area of expertise), it's still not something a common systems programmer should face. You might know about the details, just like you know about TCP/IP packets, network layers etc, but more 80+ percent of your day job you shouldn't need to care about that. It's like constructing output piece by piece, with print_number(12); print_string(" / 2 = "); print_number(12/2); print_newline(); etc. Nobody but the most ardent DJB fans would want to do that. But for sockets it's basically expected. Network programming would've needed a printf-style interface from the early days, now it's too late to wrap the basic, the proliferation of incompatible high-perf syscalls didn't help.

I don't want to appear like one of those smug Plan 9 purists, but they did something right. Apart from treating network communication and file systems the same way, they also had some nice wrappers for the lower level stuff, e.g. http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man3/dial.html

But yes, I'm mainly joking about "bad karma". Getting something right in the first place is hard, and often you don't get second chances.

riffraff• 14 years ago

I think the first answer on SF is correct but there is one factor that is not accounted for, IMHO, which is Linus. Who is the "BSDBDFL" ?

The free/net/open/dragonfly forks may all be interesting, but they fragmented the community. I'd blame the lack of a single strong leadership.

derleth5• 14 years ago

> Who is the "BSDBDFL" ?

The BSD Benevolent Dictator For Life? Nobody. The BSD world has been fragmented since the 1980s at least; even before the proliferation of Open Source BSDs, there was a little tribe of closed-source BSDs being sold by workstation manufacturers and going up against the similarly closed-source System V OSes to be King of All Unix.

I suppose my point is the BSD universe long predates the modern concept of Open Source and, therefore, a lot of the current practices surrounding Open Source software.

abrahamsen• 14 years ago

Speaking of the free variants of BSD only, and from my point as an interested bystander: Linus Torvals was a much better community manager than Bill Jolitz.

386BSD was extremely buggy, and Bill Jolitz was dismissive about the community effort to improve it. He appeared from his Usenet posts to be in some kind of emotional pain. Without a natural leader, the community fragmented. One group made a "patchkit" to collect fixes to the official distribution. Another group cut ties, making their own distribution (NetBSD). Eventually the patchkit group also got fed up with Bill Jolitz lack of cooperation, and released the patchkit version as FreeBSD.

Meanwhile, the Linux people seemed to have fun. Linux was even more buggy and far less featureful, but was improving fast from the collective effort of the community. Sometimes they made (for an old Unix person) atrocities like "color-ls". And their willingness to diverge from old Unix paradigms did make their software more convenient. color-ls is actually kind of useful.

The Linux developers seemed to consist of college kids being enthusiastic about a hobby they all loved. The BSD developers seemed to be hard working software professionals, making great personal sacrifices for a BSD cause. The first group was simply more fun to be around, so the community grew faster, especially among college students.

When the college students graduated, they took Linux with them to their new jobs.

...

Come to think of it, it actually mirrors the early BSD vs SysV UNIX cultural divide. Or even early Unix vs pre-Unix OS's.

njharman2• 14 years ago

> Linus Torvals was a much better community manager than Bill Jolitz.

Must be, I don't remember ever hearing of Bill Jolitz. And I've used (Open)BSD to build firewalls back in the day.

diminish2• 14 years ago

Linux vs BSD question on servervault makes me think that, as the history of computation is getting older and older, facts become fuzzier and legends start to form, a mythology is born. Linux vs BSD, BSD in OS/X?, Emacs and Xemax and..

Nux2• 14 years ago

For me it was the ports system; they were a very cool idea at a first glance but when they broke.... and that did happen a lot. Then RHEL and clones came and that was the end of the FreeBSD for me: I could finally make system updates without heart palpitations and abi/api changes.

A proper package management system and binary packages might have saved FreeBSD in the data centre; maybe it could still do, though it's a very long shot now. It's a shame really...

mxey• 14 years ago

You might want to check out the new pkgng system, if you still care.

Nux2• 14 years ago

I still care, but pkgng doesn't seem to solve that problem. What solves some of the problem is Debian GNU/kFreeBSD; but that came a bit too late.

greedo• 14 years ago

I started out with FBSD, moved on to OBSD, then Solaris 10. Finally got onto using RHEL and about the only thing I really miss from the BSD days are the man pages. The BSD teams really had excellent man pages compared to the Linux world. It's not as big a deal now with so much more info on the web, but concise, precise man pages are a really nice feature to have.

X-Istence• 14 years ago

Since we are on history anyway, does anyone know of a good answer to my question?

http://serverfault.com/questions/5095/historical-question-wh...

delinquentme2• 14 years ago

This might be off-topic but: Would a single operating system been a more productive use of developer time? ( I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone whos building embedded systems upon open source )

lutusp2• 14 years ago

> Would a single operating system been a more productive use of developer time?

Yes, but a runner-up would be operating systems that can use each other's code, as is often the case with *nix-like operating systems. Given the natural tendency to fork operating systems, at least there's a way to cross-port code that works in most cases.

Oh -- I just realized you're asking this from an individual perspective. The answer is still yes -- you're better off focusing your attention on one OS. If you don't, you'll be competing with people who do, and they'll be more productive.

dmm• 14 years ago

Let's weave narratives!

dschiptsov• 14 years ago

Peer effect. Bandwagon effect. IBM/Redhat. web-hosting companies. Oracle. Ubuntu.

acdha2• 14 years ago

For me, it came down to taking the rest of the system as seriously as the kernel. I first installed Linux back in the 0.9 days and it was interesting but no more so than 386BSD or TSX-32: boot the kernel and spend time trying to get applications to compile. Forward ahead a year or two to Slackware where packages installed in a few seconds rather than significant fractions of an hour (yay, 20MHz 386!) because they had binary packaging and updates were relatively simple, freeing time to write code in this hot new Perl language rather than trying to compile it.

I tried FreeBSD & OpenBSD repeatedly over the years, even running a key company server on OpenBSD for awhile in the late 90s / early 2000s - security was compelling - but I noticed two things:

1. BSD users treated updates like going to the dentist and put them off until forced - not without cause, as ports frequently either broke things or simply spent hours rebuilding the world - whereas Linux users generally spent time working on their actual job rather than impromptu sysadmin. "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" had by then an established track record of Just Working and fresh install time for a complex system was measured in minutes for Debian (iops-limited) and, even as late as 2004 or so when we ditched the platform, days for FreeBSD even when performed by our resident FreeBSD advocate. I'm sure there are ways to automate it but while routine in the Linux world, I've never met a BSD user in person who actually did this.

2. The BSD systems were simply less stable, often dramatically so, because the parts were never tested together: you had the kernel which is stable and deserves significant respect but everything else was a random hodgepodge of whatever versions happened to be installed the last time someone ran ports. Unlike, say, Debian or Red Hat there was no culture of testing complete systems so a few months after a new release you'd often encounter the kind of "foo needs libbar 1.2.3 but baaz needs 1.1.9" dependency mess which required you to spend time troubleshooting and tinkering – a class of problem which simply did not exist at the system level for most of the Linux world. It wasn't as bad as Solaris but the overall impression was more similar than I'd like.

One other observation: during years of using Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris / Nexenta / etc. on a number of systems (the most I've managed personally at any point in time was around ~100) there were almost no times where the actual kernel mattered significantly in a positive direction. Performing benchmarks on our servers or cluster compute nodes showed no significant difference, so we went with easier management. On the desktop, again no significant performance difference so we went with easier management and better video driver support (eventually why many desktop users moved to OS X - no more GL wars). There was a period where more stable NFS might have been compelling but the BSD and Linux NFS clients both sucked in similar ways (deadlocking most times a packet dropped) and the Linux client got better faster and we ended up automating dead mount detection with lazy-unmounts to reduce the user-visible damage.

pconf• 14 years ago

BSD users treated updates like going to the dentist and put them off until forced

Not typical of any BSD sysadmin I've known, ever. OTOH if your "BSD users" were not sysadmins that would explain it.

install time ... days for FreeBSD even when performed by our resident FreeBSD advocate

Clearly your "FreeBSD advocate" did not know what he/she was doing. Without provisioning a FreeBSD install should not differ from an Ubuntu or RH install by more than a few minutes (in either direction).

But in a datacenter provisioning is critical, and FreeBSD ceeded that space to RH's kickstart long ago. BSD also tied a ball and chain deprecating multi-partition default root volumes (when 1G drives became commonplace.

But more than anything else FreeBSD lost this race by not developing user-friendly installation software (GUI or CLI).

But for those who do know how to install BSD and the difference between things as fundmental as portinstall vs makeworld the ongoing time spent updating and upgrading will pay that back may times over. This is because: A) the ports system works across _all_ versions and architectures i.e., you don't have to upgrade the entire OS simply to upgrade say mysql to 5.5, B) OS upgrades break far fewer apps in BSD than any version of Linux, C) kernel vulnerabilities average once every few years in BSD vs ever few weeks (sometimes days) in Linux, and D) backwards compatibility is far better (recall when RH tried to "deprecate" nslookup for example).

The BSD systems were simply less stable

This would be due to your user-sysadmin's skillset as everyone else's experience is the opposite (as noted in the OP).

acdha2• 14 years ago

>> BSD users treated updates like going to the dentist and put them off until forced > Not typical of any BSD sysadmin I've known, ever. OTOH if your "BSD users" were not sysadmins that would explain it.

Professional sysadmins - but obviously more conservative than ones you know. That was the base install, a ton of ports and mucking around getting video drivers, etc. installed. This is for a fully-configured scientific workstation, not just a bare OS install, so there were a couple hundred packages installed by the time you include all of the various dependencies.

I'm certain that binary packages would have shaved a lot of time off of this (that's what I used to use on OpenBSD a decade ago) but that wasn't exactly strongly recommended at the time, which is why I mentioned culture — I'm certain you can manage FreeBSD better but in practice I have yet to meet anyone in person who actually does this. Small sample size and all but this is untrue of any Linux user I've met other than the Gentoo fanatics who consider tweaking CFLAGS a source of entertainment.

> A) the ports system works across _all_ versions and architectures i.e., you don't have to upgrade the entire OS simply to upgrade say mysql to 5.5, B) OS upgrades break far fewer apps in BSD than any version of Linux,

A) is comically untrue: not only can you easily compile newer packages but extensive backports repositories exist to make it easy and safe to install a new version of something important while keeping the rest of the system stable. For many distributions this exists as a vendor-provided service and there are others (e.g. IUSCommunity.org) which serve particular markets and a fair number of OSS projects maintain repos for the Debian & Red Hat worlds.

B) may be true in your experience but it's radically unlike mine. I've run many versions of Linux on many systems over the years and upgrades have been quite smooth - the Debian / Ubuntu world is the most stable but Red Hat isn't far behind. The key again is binary packages - moving from a known set of packages to a known set of newer packages makes it a lot easier to test an upgrade.

> C) kernel vulnerabilities average once every few years in BSD vs ever few weeks (sometimes days) in Linux

Highly debatable but Linux or BSD kernel vulnerabilities are rare enough not to be worth arguing over: most of the threat is in userland, which is a large part of why package management is so important. Far more systems are compromised by lax updates rather than zero-days.

Why is Linux more popular than BSD?

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