>> From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.
I remember when FreeBSD was considered to be more mature than Linux for server use. What made Linux more exciting than FreeBSD? Why did FreeBSD lose ground?
The problems, for me, were:
- apps developed specifically for Linux. The shim wasn't 100%.
- Hardware support. This wasn't too bad, but I always had to take it into consideration.
- Virtualization. This was the killer for me. Yes, jails are fantastic, if your entire workload ran on FBSD. But if you needed even one Windows/Linux instance, for any reason, you needed another physical machine. With Windows and Linux I could consolidate everything into a single machine.
Things have improved a lot, and I may try it out again, but unfortunately the mindshare is all Linux now.
It took a long time for FreeBSD to support MS-DOS partitioning, so for a long time you couldn't dual-boot between Windows and FreeBSD without buying a second hard disk. So kids getting started tended to run Linux instead of FreeBSD, and they stuck with what they knew.
I remember when FreeBSD was considered to be more mature than Linux for server use. What made Linux more exciting than FreeBSD? Why did FreeBSD lose ground?