
Why is Linux more popular than BSD? - rohshall
http://serverfault.com/questions/36359/why-is-linux-more-popular-than-bsd
======
tzs
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.

------
cletus
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.

~~~
anu_gupta
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."

~~~
diminish
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?

~~~
bnr
Quora?

~~~
pooriaazimi
Quora had potential, but is dead now. And I mean literally.

------
abrahamsen
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.

~~~
njharman
> 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.

------
wladimir
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
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.

------
michaelpinto
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.

~~~
derleth
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?

~~~
michaelpinto
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.

------
sarnowski
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.

~~~
nnq
...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...)

~~~
sarnowski
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.

~~~
rohshall
Fantastic! I love fanboyish opinions. :) OpenBSD installation this weekend for
me. I love to try out distros/OSes.

------
Dylan16807
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.

~~~
skrebbel
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
Until then, we have <http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/>

------
fleitz
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>

~~~
Nursie
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
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.

~~~
Nursie
That's just the userspace on top of the kernel though, not the OS (IMHO),
though it's difficult to decide where to draw the line. By your measure
Debian/kFreeBSD could well be linux...

I know OSX is a valid and real UNIX, and the kernel is a mach/BSD hybrid, I'm
just not sure I'd count it as a BSD when the question is 'Why is linux more
popular than BSD?'. IMHO the question implies Open/Net/Free/Whatever BSD, not
OSX. What makes OSX popular is a whole variety of things, many quite separate
to the things people find appealing (or not) about the BSDs. IMHO, YMMV, etc
etc

~~~
fleitz
BSD is an operating system, Linux is a kernel, checkout the FreeBSD / OpenBSD
/ Darwin sources and you'll find a complete OS in the source tree.

Debian/FreeBSD isn't linux because it doesn't use the Linux kernel. I think
there is more question as to wether most Linux distributions are Linux or
GNU/Linux than whether Debian/FreeBSD is Linux.

Hopefully RMS doesn't read this comment.

~~~
Nursie
If BSD is an OS then I don't think OSX is a flavour of BSD...

I don't disagree with any of what you're saying there, I just think it's a
very grey area where you have multiple kernels and userlands, some of which
are fairly easily interchangeable. And yes, most linux distro's are GNU/Linux
(or at least something/linux) where Android/Linux is quite distinct.

------
shin_lao
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!

------
reidrac
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.

------
jamesmcn
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
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.

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

------
riffraff
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.

~~~
derleth
> 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.

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

~~~
Nux
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.

------
warp
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.

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

------
prtamil
Because of Lawyers.

~~~
humdumb
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.

~~~
njharman
> 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.

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

[http://serverfault.com/questions/5095/historical-question-
wh...](http://serverfault.com/questions/5095/historical-question-why-does-
slice-c-or-slice-2-cover-the-entire-disk)

------
diminish
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..

------
delinquentme
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 )

~~~
lutusp
> 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.

------
YoukaiCountry
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.

------
guard-of-terra
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.

~~~
meaty
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.

~~~
cturner

        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.

~~~
guard-of-terra
My keyboard has arrows and therefore I'm going to use those.

And I'm not getting off _our_ lawn.

~~~
meaty
So does mine but they're too far from the other keys...

~~~
guard-of-terra
I don't care because I can actually move my arms. Even better, if I move them
a bit during the day, the chance of getting carpal tunnel is reduced.

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

------
mhd
Bad karma for the socket API.

~~~
cturner
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.

~~~
mhd
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.

------
dmm
Let's weave narratives!

------
acdha
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
_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).

~~~
acdha
>> 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.

