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A Love Letter to FreeBSD

A Love Letter to FreeBSD

13 comments

·November 30, 2025
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adastra22

I so wish that FreeBSD was GPL. I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that.

But I don't like Linux. I use it daily, but I don't like it. I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.

a-dub

freebsd didn't have the hardware support base that linux did and suffered a huge delay in rearchitecture when x86 smp hardware became widely available. (only one cpu could be in the kernel at a time, the "bkl", was a major impediment in the early 00s). freebsd had better resource scheduling at the time and a beloved networking stack, but linux caught up with cgroups etc. i think linux was also just a trendy vanguard of sorts as the world learned of open source software by and of the internet.

CalChris

GCC vs LLVM. It isn’t the license.

bigfishrunning

I don't know about that... Llvm didn't exist until 2003. The BSDs and Linux both existed for a long time before that, and Linux already had much more momentum at that point.

blueflow

I think that's less because of the license and more because people found patching gcc to be a big pain.

CalChris

Correct, it’s not the license.

hnthrowaway0328

Can you please elaborate the str of Freebsd vs Linux?

kosolam

As a small user I find it hard to find a use case where I’d want a bsd for some reason. I even installed ghostbsd in a vm to try it but it seemed very similar to linux so I didn’t understand what’s the upside?

alex1138

I know this is the noob perspective but they should try (yes, I'm already aware of GhostBSD) to make getting into the desktop a little bit easier, it can be very hard to bootstrap anything and learn if you're new to it

tuhgdetzhh

A love letter to the last operating system that isn’t trying to gaslight you. FreeBSD really is the anti-hype choice: no mascot-as-a-service, no quarterly identity crisis, just a system that quietly works until the heat death of the universe.

CalChris

Speaking of better vendor support, why doesn’t it support Apple Silicon yet? Obviously, Asahi has led the way on this and their m1n1 boot loader can be used out of the box. But OpenBSD has supported Apple Silicon for three years now.

null

[deleted]

sapphirebreeze

REDWALL