Linux never was UNIX.

Eh, I mean this is linux and it's unix - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS

Anyways, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck...

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Well no you're confusing Open Group's SUS with UNIX.

Generally you will mostly find commercial, proprietary products go for that e.g macOS or AIX. It's based on POSIX and most of the BSD's are close enough to POSIX compliance and so are Linux distributions which adhere to LSB. But again, the fully compliant systems are the proprietary Unices.

UNIX is something else entirely, i.e. an OS directly descended from the original AT&T code. The BSD's fall into this category.

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Another item no one really brings up in these threads was memory. If I remember correctly, BSD required more memory than Linux did in the early days. Back then memory was very expensive.

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If behind FreeBSD would stand IBM and Novell I am sure today FreeBSD be more popular. As I remember SCO Unix accused Linux patent violation. Some features present in 2.4 kernel disappeared in 2.6. I mention this because there was a lawsuit. From very early IBM and Novell were using Linux kernel. I think IBM decided to invest in Linux because of fiasco of its own operating system product.

I remember that lawsuit, it was without merit. IBM prevailed in court. I remember running Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 in 2002 before they morphed into the hated SCO. Caldera was my introduction to all things Linux and BSD.

Groklaw covered that one in detail. If I recall correctly that was PJ's motivation for starting her blog in the first place. However, with M$ help the case dragged on and on until 2017 or 2018 and still has not let anyone know which patents they allege are involved.

In the EU, software cannot be patented. Period. In the US, after the "Alice" case software patents are on the way out. But back to the case against BSD, that was about copyright and it turned out that it was AT&T that had done the copyright infringement.

It was the AT&T / USL lawsuit that held back BSD in the very early 90s, rather than anything to do with SCO. It wasn't settled until 1994 and the release of 4.4BSD-lite. I think Novell buying USL helped to finally settle it.

Other than the law suit, BSD has been mainly aimed at servers - it is only fairly recently that 'ready made' desktop variants have appeared, so it is a long way behind Linux in the minds of 'casual' users.

We have seen a few - PCBSD was a good start, then GhostBSD tried, & now we have the best version, so far, NomadBSD - all based on FreeBSD.

But I think BSD needs to work on its USB transfer speeds, it's what sends me back to using Linux, every time.

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I read this thread last week and this post caught my eye. I was in the process of posting a reply but got an urgent communique to meet Vladimir in the Urals and had to log off. We watched The Addams Family movie then acted it out where they danced and threw knives and Anna Chapman dressed up like Morticia. We laughed and laughed till dawn.

Don't believe me? I posted about it at the FreeBSD forums in a thread titled Why FreeBSD secret tricks?. Because when I ran the title of this thread through the Search feature in the FreeBSD forums that was the #1 result out of ten pages.

The gist of the OP was:

Which is representative of a large number of posts there by people who come from Linux and expect it to be Linux. It is not Linux, as cynwulf said. When you install it you get the Base System, the programs that come with the Base System like vi and ee (Easy Editor, which is a lot like nano) and a terminal.

Everything else is considered 3rd party programs installed through either pkg or ports by downloading a 78MB snapshot of the ports tree and compiling them from src, where pkg are pre-compiled ports.

The difference being you can choose what options to use with ports and you can not with pkg. Ports can take hours to compile one program, and Firefox-ESR now takes longer to compile than Xorg. pkg take a matter of seconds, under a minute IIRC. I've only used pkg to install all my programs once in 16 years and that only recently because I wanted to baby my IBM Thinkpad T43.

Ports are updated more frequently when vulnerabilities are found than pkg, too. It's generally recommended to use one or the other but I use both on the T43 and haven't had any problems, and I know how to work through them if I do where a new user would become frustrated unnecessarily and possibly give up.

Oh yeah, that thread "Why FreeBSD secret tricks?" Well, before you knew it we blabbered like Beelzebub in spilling beans on all our "Secret Tricks". I'm guilty as anyone else, if not damned for doing it. You see, in 2017 I posted a thread there title Beginners Guide - How To Set Up A FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch that has #1 ranking on a Google search for FreeBSD Desktop Tutorial.

But it gets worse... I have my own domain and a site for that tutorial that had been offline over a year I just put back up with a whole new layout titled Building A FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch so it gets double ranking in a google search. And if that wasn't bad enough it's described, accurately, as

And there's one on How to spoof your MAC on FreeBSD, FreeBSD wallpapers I made free to you, with more original content in the works. And, boy, am I ever in trouble.

Before I took it offline it held #1 ranking, the one on the forums held #2 and the article where it was featured in freebsdnews.com was ranked #5.

Actually it was featured twice at freebasnews.com where I had previously posted it on a ragtag board under my other bots name Siseneg, and that article was picked up by the English and Arabic Language Facebook pages of bsdmag.org.

And if Hell wasn't hot enough already, crank it up. I'm most likely one of those guys you mentioned and described as thinking of themselves in whatever language that is you're using. 1337... Is that your phone number you're giving out online? Or...OH EM GEE, are you one of those hackers!?

More likely you're one of the lesser trolls who come along posting threads like that in our forums, and biased disinformation posts like the one here quoted that I chew up and spit out like yesterdays bubblegum on a regular basis.

I mentioned that we probably all knew and loved you in the thread there, too.

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After wading in the shallow pool of Ghostbsd. Did a update kinda blindly < probably user error >

Got a aw snap screen on reboot. That pretty much talked me out of it. Took me years to figure out AntiX.
Figure this old dog don't have many tricks in his repertoire anymore. Or the patience. Wish I was younger.

Good enough that I picked up spanish, gnu/linux, and computers in general. My phone skills is rudimentary compared to
the younger folks.

Just aging out of life I guess, It, < BSD > ran good on IBM Desktop Tower wirelessly. As long I as I did not attempt to tweak it.
Dismal BSD skill set probably. But I tried.

At least I learned a little on the install process.

Updating was the worst part of using FreeBSD for me. I've become spoiled using a linux rolling release. Install once, use machine for next 12 years.

The FreeBSD operating system worked just fine for me. I used it as a main desktop for years. It did not have the hardware support for lots of devices supported in the Linux kernel. Tv tuners are an example. In fact, one still could not install FreeBSD using a usb keyboard as late as 2005. You needed a PS2.

Software versions were always way behind linux. That isn't always a bad thing. As long as any security vulnerability patches have been applied. In fact they were behind in version number compared to debian. And debian isn't exactly cutting edge.

If Linux vanished tomorrow, I would go back to FreeBSD and make it work for me. Linux disappearing would not drive me to windows. Windows is a good deal worse than when I jumped ship in 2003-4. The BSD's are solid, reliable, operating systems. I prefer linux right now anyway.

One common complaint I've heard about FreeBSD is power management. Suspend will be hit and miss depending on your hardware. For some this is a deal breaker if they can't get it working. For those who want to run it on a laptop and need to suspend multiple times a day and don't want to completely shutdown. For me it was a non issue since I installed it on a desktop and my usual routine is to suspend before bed and resume in the morning. I just changed it to powering off before bed and powering on in the morning. The boot time was fast enough.

Another reason I've heard was the name. Linus (probably joking) said it's because Linux sounded cooler than 4.4BSD or whatever it was called in the early days. I'm not sure how much of an impact that had on anything though.

I think essentially it all goes back to the AT&T legal battle, like others here have mentioned. Linux was able to grow its userbase and perhaps more importantly its developer base. This head start is still felt today since when most people are introduced to open source it's Linux because that's what the majority are familiar with. Same with development. I think most CS courses when using open source use Linux. Most of the texts I've come across do too.

If you haven't already you should check out books written by Michael J Lucas. Also I just picked up "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" and am looking forward to reading it.

A couple things that did irk me but weren't deal breakers were there is no nouveau equivalent in FreeBSD. You have to run the proprietary driver with the linux emulation layer. And if you use dired in Emacs you need to install gnu coreutils because dired uses the gnu version of ls.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy your journey into the world of FreeBSD

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This is factually incorrect. You do not have to run the Nvidia blob with Linux emulation. The blob is native code - and nvidia are one of the few hardware vendors to provide a driver for FreeBSD.

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You are correct. My mistake.

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