There is no point competing on desktop apps, even Linux has a very hard time there. BSD variants have always lagged behind in that area, you could have probably written the same comment 15 years ago by just moving Openoffice etc to the “Linux only” group.

The areas where OpenBSD can compete (in addition to the ones it already fights in, like routing and network-edge roles) are cloud deployments and orchestration. If it were as easy to run OpenBSD for development as it is a containerized Linux, people would pick the more secure choice. They could also make prebuilt appliances for the most sensitive components in a deployment (databases etc).

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. All the software you mention is relatively recent (with the exception of VMware arguably) and Linux was ahead of the BSDs in adoption long before these applications were created.

Now what exactly created this divide to begin with is a matter of debate but it took place mostly in the 90's and the very early 00's. By the mid 2000's it was clear that BSDs would have a really hard time ever catching up with Linux, especially for non-server applications.

Paradoxically it might be partially why BSDs are so clean and tidy: fewer features, fewer contributors and of course they're making a complete operating system instead of just a kernel or just a distribution.

FreeBSD remains my favourite OS for servers, it's rock solid and a joy to administrate. Unfortunately for the desktop I've given up almost a decade ago, driver support is just too lackluster, especially (as you mention) for proprietary software that can't be easily ported.

I've always blamed the licensing. Lots of people adopted BSD and Linux in the early years.

The Linux users gave back (often because they had to) and the BSD users often didn't.

Which is a consequence of BSD style licenses, yet every time a project switches from GPL to something in the BSD spirit there are jumps of joy.

So in the long run it is back to the old freeware days, with the lower lever free and everything on top closed, with zero contributions.

That didn't seem to work the same way for say.. mail server software?

Sendmail, postfix and qmail all had BSD-ish licenses, and those three covered quite a majority of all opensource mail serving at the time of BSD-vs-Linux "in the same early years"

PostgreSQL, LLVM, Apache, Nginx, Xorg - all of those are covered by liberal licenses, not copyleft ones.

Drivers for hardware that is better supported in Linux compared to FreeBSD - 90% of which is graphics - are usually licensed as MIT or BSD, not GPL, even though they are shipped as part of the Linux kernel.

So, nah, it's not the license.

Docker trends do favour to Linux, while the virtualization in FreeBSD IMO is still a hard wall for many people. Jails, ezjail, bhyve, chyve, etc. Requires amount of works to get it just right. While docker runs a container is straight forward. I don't mean which is better but definitely *BSD is less attractive than mainstream Linux.

vmm in OpenBSD is pretty easy:

    vmctl create disk1.img -s 10G

    vmctl start vm1 -d disk1.img -b /bsd.rd -L -c

> there is no container ecosystem like there is on Linux

Good! On FreeBSD, for now, sanity prevails!

Let’s not forget that MacOS X is considered a BSD by many.

It's not "considered", it is a BSD.

> Electron apps... there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs.

This is one of many reasons not to use Electron. Claims of Electron portability are a sham.