I appreciate that OpenBSD sold its course on security-everywhere.
Unfortunately I also kind of lost faith in the BSD variants. There
are a few minor things such as PC-BSD suddenly vanishing, or years
before NetBSD on their mailing list admitting that Linux outperformed
their "runs on any toaster and other gimmick" strategy. But one of
the key issues I had was this:
I installed it (FreeBSD) on my second computer. I went out of my
apartment and returned hours later. Well, the FreeBSD machine was
no longer running; my linux machine on the other hand is running
non-stop for months, literally. This may be a fluke, perhaps the
computer had a problem - I am not saying this is really what the
BSDs are all about, as I also had them installed before. But then
I also asked myself "why would I want to bother with the BSDs,
if Linux simply runs better?". And I haven't found a good, convincing
answer to that for me to rationalise why I'd still be using the
BSDs. Note: I also use Linux in a non-standard way, e. g. versioned
AppDirs, but essentially Linux is simply more flexible than the BSDs
(that is my opinion) and there are more users too. There will be always
some BSD users, but to me they are like a dying breed. They would need
to market themselves as a "runs outside the nerd bubble as well"; even
Linux is still stuck in its own nerd bubble. You have to break out of
it if you want to really dominate (Linux semi-does it indirectly, e. g.
we can count many smartphones as Linux-driven, but I am still using a
desktop computer system here, so to me this is what really counts, even
if the total number is less than the smartphone users numbers).
What Linux has is mostly better hardware support and on gnome and some distributions they have a software installation tool that look like an app store but that's about it... Everything else is pretty much the same, random people wouldn't figure out a system is freebsd instead of Linux when running same desktop (like plasma).
Which is what makes Linux kernel stand out, as we can see by Sony and Apple contributions upstream.
Had BSD not been busy with AT&T lawsuit, all major UNIXes would probably still be around, consuming whatever was produced out of BSD like the networking code and OS IPC improvements over AT&T UNIX.
Instead sponsoring Linux kernel became the plan B, as means to reduce their UNIX development costs.
> Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market
Ironically the major contributor to many GNU/Linux critical components, Red-Hat, is now an IBM subsiduary, recouping that investment beyond doing only Aix.
It is no accident that all FOSS OSes that came after Linux, none of them has adopted GPL, as big corporations would rather not be obliged by it.
Of course big corporations would rather not be obliged by the GPL. But my feeling is that, if we give them the option to grab the code without contributing back their improvements, they would just do that. In the long run, this risks harming the OSS community, as developers would feel like big corps are being leeches and profiting out of their work without giving anything back.
After all, the GPL forces to contribute back only if you modify and distribute a modified version of the software (the AGPL modified this point, to account for cloud services). A corporation that isn't modifying GPL'd code or isn't redistributing the modified binaries, doesn't incur any additional burden for using a software distributed under the GPL.
It is no accident that Google has removed everything GPL out of Android, falling short of the Linux kernel, and they haven't done the final step with Fuchsia/Zircon mostly due to what appears internal politics.
Just a few hours ago on the irc channel of OpenBSD someone said that OpenBSD is good at not letting a wonky hardware run compared to linux. So you could use the dmesg and ask it in the OpenBSD mailing list and they will point out which wonky hardware is causing trouble and you can replace that problematic part.
I ran OpenBSD current for 6 years and never faced such issue
Years ago (circa ~2005) I was working for a company with a mix of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux. I was more of a fan of OpenBSD and I received a lot of grief when the OpenBSD team suddenly ripped out support for one of the Dell hardware RAID controllers (I don't remember which one, but IIRC it was one based on something from Adaptec), claiming they couldn't reliably reverse engineer it to create stable drivers. Their attempts ultimately always ended up with "random" corruption.
A year or so later our main DB on Windows (long story on why we were running windows DBs with most of the other kit being BSD/Linux) had a total corruption incident (it was painful, but we had a replica failover that we recovered from) - turns out we could get an answer from Dell since Windows was obviously supported by Dell themselves. There was a known issue with that model of RAID controller that would result in random and total corruption - and there was no way to fix it in firmware.
I was smug about it, but had to concede that people should still be given an informed choice. IIRC Dell was very quiet about it, which is certainly not "informed choice". Had we known, we'd have shelled out for different hardware for our databases!
To be fair, there was not much Dell could do as their PERC cards were all rebranded Adaptec and later LSI. Adaptec was the gold standard for ages, but I assume was enshitified somewhere along the way. The long term result was that the entire hardware raid world ditched Adaptec for LSI and/or software RAID (eg ZFS). Dell (in those days, not sure if it's still the case) had excellent support. There was a bug on another server model where the onboard video card would eventually fail and fry the motherboard. Even years later out of support, Dell would for free replace it if it failed with whatever new model equivalent existed.
I left the company before things were totally resolved, but I think dell ultimately gave people who complained LSI cards, but it took awhile for those to be designed and manufactured to fit the internal drive slot. Most people who were also using external arrays moved to third party ones or other hardware.
Unfortunately I also kind of lost faith in the BSD variants. There are a few minor things such as PC-BSD suddenly vanishing, or years before NetBSD on their mailing list admitting that Linux outperformed their "runs on any toaster and other gimmick" strategy. But one of the key issues I had was this:
I installed it (FreeBSD) on my second computer. I went out of my apartment and returned hours later. Well, the FreeBSD machine was no longer running; my linux machine on the other hand is running non-stop for months, literally. This may be a fluke, perhaps the computer had a problem - I am not saying this is really what the BSDs are all about, as I also had them installed before. But then I also asked myself "why would I want to bother with the BSDs, if Linux simply runs better?". And I haven't found a good, convincing answer to that for me to rationalise why I'd still be using the BSDs. Note: I also use Linux in a non-standard way, e. g. versioned AppDirs, but essentially Linux is simply more flexible than the BSDs (that is my opinion) and there are more users too. There will be always some BSD users, but to me they are like a dying breed. They would need to market themselves as a "runs outside the nerd bubble as well"; even Linux is still stuck in its own nerd bubble. You have to break out of it if you want to really dominate (Linux semi-does it indirectly, e. g. we can count many smartphones as Linux-driven, but I am still using a desktop computer system here, so to me this is what really counts, even if the total number is less than the smartphone users numbers).