For those who don't know what I am talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc..... For what this has to do with Linux adoption, read http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/a... about how the uncertainty around all of the BSD distributions lead to people jumping onto the Linux bandwagon. This got Linux ahead and it never looked back.
Remember when SCO was trying to sue everybody over Linux? Why didn't the *BSDs become more popular then?
Linux being more popular then the BSDs had nothing to do with anything Legal outside of Linux being GPL.
During the BSD lawsuit, free software was not widely understood, the company doing the suing (AT&T) was one of the biggest in the world, and the one being sued (BSDI) was a nobody by comparison. It was clear that AT&T had grounds for a real case. Everyone I know that was there says that there was real fear of the outcome. And I've known a lot who were there.
By contrast when the SCO lawsuit happened, open source was far better understood, it was a small company (SCO) doing the suing, and the companies being sued were the biggest in the world (starting with IBM). This threat was far less credible, and if it failed, everyone assumed that they would get lost in the shuffle.
It didn't hurt for the latter case that groklaw stepped up and there were endless well-informed people who said that the case was groundless. And no, I don't just mean nerds who read slashdot. But also most of the tech media, various interested lawyers, and so on.
Maybe this is a complaint about Ubuntu, or gnome, or systemd.
All other servers are using OpenBSD so it looks like I've got some upgrades to get to!
But "optimized for desktop usage" is a very vague term with different meanings for everybody. My tastes are geared towards a light X workstation that doesn't add any extra whistles unless you ask for them. In the Linux world the closest I've seen to this is Arch. I also used debian for a long time (starting with netinst and no GUI, and adding things only as I need them).
Driver support is great, I agree. And the network management is far simpler. It just felt slow.
In the 90's Linux was pretty well aimed at the techy crowd. you were expected to know or learn administration (including the location of and editing of etc files) and not be afraid of './configure && make && make install'
Then the focus changed and while your Gentoos and Arches never went away, a larger portion of the focus was on either being user friendly and/or providing an enterprise desktop experience.
This is something the BSDs (with the exception of TrueOS) never did -and certainly not OpenBSD.
It's worth pointing out (and folks in this thread already have) that if you want the hacker's experience, it's still out there. It just has almost nothing to do with mainstream Linux (which is a shame).
Looks like it. I'm running Void Linux without all these, and it feels simple and lightweight. Also fast.
(OTOH when I have to work with BSD userland utilities that are part of macOS, I often miss the GNU extensions, e.g. to `date` or to `awk`.)
I still shake my head when I think back to the 90s and how Linux managed to overtake the BSDs. Good to see they are still very much alive and moving forward.