BTW: Those are just the monetary donations towards the foundation, additionally you have developers that are directly paid to work on the FreeBSD project (search for "Sponsored by"):
Can't argue it's niche but it's far from uncommon. The BSD licensing allows usage in places allergic to the GPL so you see it (or don't) often used behind the scenes in lots of products.
...and I'm writing this comment on a Lenovo T450s running FreeBSD. Dang can probably verify the user agent of my POST, if he has nothing better to do (pretty sure he does).
The experience is not perfect (just _now_ I'm enjoying fighting with a deskhop (https://github.com/hrvach/deskhop) which isn't seen as a ums pointing device unless another usb mouse is also present, but that's the first problem in months (admittedly it's also the first change in as many months)).
Would be interested to hear more about BSD as a daily driver.
Is the slower wifi problematic? How about browsing the web, are the major bowsers (chromium or Firefox) supported? What about running the tools necessary for web development (or any other language that isn’t C)?
Chromium and Firefox are both there, yes. Sometimes one or 2 versions behind if you go for the packaged version, but I've compiled them both before quite painlessly. Even in the packages you may occasionally run into something not working - browsers are so big now and not all corner cases get tested for every possible OS. I've had tabs crashing, although not since a couple years.
The wifi is not really slow but disconnects with a certain frequency (at least 1 brief drop per day) which on the same hardware didn't happen on Windows or Linux. The slowness is not noticeable until you're trying to move gigabytes - watching youtube is unaffected for example.
Can't help with the web development info, I'm relatively ignorant there - more on the sysadmin side of things :) but a lot of Linux software can be run directly thanks to a compat layer (linuxulator) which gives you a convincing impersonation of a centos, debian or ubuntu - or you can actually run the distro themselves in a jail.
The biggest absence is Docker. Not as a concept (jails are actually better under many aspects, and native to FreeBSD), but because so much software is now shipped like that. There's progress to get them working properly, otherwise you run them in a Linux Bhyve (BSD hypervisor) VM.
I haven't tried running an LLM since none of my FreeBSD machines have hardware even remotely capable of that, would be nice to hear if anyone was successful.
