Why is Linux more popular than BSD?

For me it was because back in the early days of both, BSD folk had a bad attitude.<p>First encounter: I wanted to try BSD, but it would only work with its own partition format. You could not have a disk partitioned for both DOS/Win and BSD. The BSD folks didn't think that was important--if you really wanted to dual boot, get a second disk.<p>Linux could dual boot with DOS/Win on one disk, so I used Linux.<p>Second encounter: BSD did not support IDE CD-ROMs. When asked when they would be supported, BSD folks said IDE was not good enough for workstations and servers--get a SCSI CD-ROM.<p>The problem with this was that SCSI CD-ROM drives were around $400. IDE CD-ROM drives were under $100. If you were going to make heavy use of the drive, that $300 difference might be justified. Most people were NOT going to make heavy use of the drive--it would be used to install the OS and then sit unused until it was time to install the next version of the OS.<p>Linux would install from my IDE CD-ROM drive, so I used Linux.<p>By the time BSD got to the point that it could coexist well with DOS/Win, and didn't have ridiculous hardware requirements, Linux was sufficiently mature and established that there just wasn't much point.

You need look no further than this question to see that something is rotten in the state of Stack Exchange. The question was asked in July, posted to HN 2 hours ago and locked an hour later. There is nothing flamebait-y in the answers. It's good stuff actually.<p>As to the question at hand: Linux was more accessible and this was back in the pre-1.0 days (my first distro was ~30 5.25" disks of SLS downloaded over a 2400 baud modem). It happened to support hardware I happened to have.<p>Honestly at the time it ever even occurred to me to use BSD or even that I could.

Speaking of the free variants of BSD only, and from my point as an interested bystander: Linus Torvals was a much better community manager than Bill Jolitz.<p>386BSD was extremely buggy, and Bill Jolitz was dismissive about the community effort to improve it. He appeared from his Usenet posts to be in some kind of emotional pain. Without a natural leader, the community fragmented. One group made a "patchkit" to collect fixes to the official distribution. Another group cut ties, making their own distribution (NetBSD). Eventually the patchkit group also got fed up with Bill Jolitz lack of cooperation, and released the patchkit version as FreeBSD.<p>Meanwhile, the Linux people seemed to have fun. Linux was even more buggy and far less featureful, but was improving fast from the collective effort of the community. Sometimes they made (for an old Unix person) atrocities like "color-ls". And their willingness to diverge from old Unix paradigms did make their software more convenient. color-ls is actually kind of useful.<p>The Linux developers seemed to consist of college kids being enthusiastic about a hobby they all loved. The BSD developers seemed to be hard working software professionals, making great personal sacrifices for a BSD cause. The first group was simply more fun to be around, so the community grew faster, especially among college students.<p>When the college students graduated, they took Linux with them to their new jobs.<p>...<p>Come to think of it, it actually mirrors the early BSD vs SysV UNIX cultural divide. Or even early Unix vs pre-Unix OS's.

Speaking for myself, I chose Linux over BSD as main OS back in the day (~1998), even though BSD was "hot" in hacker circles, because Linux had a slight edge in convenience. Configuration of X and such were slightly easier with Linux (Slackware back then), and HW support was somewhat better (though FreeBSD came close).<p>Also Linux has the GNU utilities (GNU grep etc), which were somewhat more featureful than the BSD equivalents. I know they can be installed on *BSD though the ports system but as I was new to unixy OSes, having a lot of packages installed by default was great.<p>I have no idea how it is these days, Linux just stuck.

The dirty truth: Marketing.<p>Back in the 90s there was a major push to market Linux by a wide number of vendors from Red Hat to IBM if I recall correctly. In the dot.com 1.0 era you couldn't leave a tradeshow without being given a t-shirt or stuffed toy of the tux mascot. You could also go into a bookstore, but a book on a book on Linux and get a free CD with an installer. You could also go into a computer store of that era and buy a boxed copy of Linux. This made Linux really popular with the first generation of web geeks.

I started with Linux many years ago and used various distributions. I rarley had any driver issues. Sine some years now, I am using OpenBSD for all my personal stuff. My desktop and my server. I will never go back to any Linux Distribution as OpenBSD is so much cleaner, consistent, easier to use and better documented than any other distribution out there. There are two problems with OpenBSD. At first the hardware support. I choose my machines carefully so that OpenBSD is supported which is not that easy sometimes. The second problem is the JVM. At my work place, everything runs on Linux servers with Oracle JVMs so I have to use that. OpenJDK 7 is already pretty stable on OpenBSD but the behaviour can vary too much so that this is not an option.

Amazing. The question gets linked, gets attention, gets the answers improved (slightly, but it had only been a few minutes), and so a mod rushes in to lock it immediately.

Because worse is better.<p>If you count OSX as BSD than far more people use BSD desktops than Linux desktops. But if you count iOS and Android then it starts to become a toss up.<p><a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html</a>

Probably better hardware support. Also FreeBSD installation has been extremely arcane until recently.<p>I'm a long BSD fan, worked professionally on FreeBSD kernel and used OpenBSD a lot (and still do!).<p>However you can find BSD in many appliances and if you have a Mac, you use FreeBSD!

After reading the comments I was expecting something else :)<p>I think one reason could be that they follow different philosophies: as end user you're going to use a Linux distribution, that includes a kernel, userland tools, applications, etc; whilst in BSD the kernel is very integrated with the userland tools and the base system includes a lot of functionality that can be completed with the ports (package system), so you're using the BSD system + some packages.<p>I enjoyed FreeBSD from 4.1 to 4.10 as desktop OS, and OpenBSD from 2.8 to 3.8 (web/mail servers, but firewalling mostly), and upgrading was a difficult task. I must thank to these operating systems I have the sysadmin skills I have now ;) Back then (I don't know if things have changed) you had to upgrade <i>the system</i>, while in Linux you could download the latest version from kernel.org, compile and install (ABI/API didn't change frequently, at least).<p>This different philosophy has pros and cons, and I believe one of the consequences is that Linux is more popular than BSD.

Wow, it wasn't that long ago when this was flamebait of the highest order.<p>Linux has always been better at supporting a wider array of consumer hardware than *BSD. That combined with the Unix(TM) lawsuit lead to the quick early commercial success of Linux on 32-bit Intel hardware. The rise of the internet did the rest.

Better Audio Support in Linux So that i can watch movies and listen to songs.

I think the first answer on SF is correct but there is one factor that is not accounted for, IMHO, which is Linus. Who is the "BSDBDFL" ?<p>The free/net/open/dragonfly forks may all be interesting, but they fragmented the community. I'd blame the lack of a single strong leadership.

For me it was the ports system; they were a very cool idea at a first glance but when they broke.... and that did happen a lot. Then RHEL and clones came and that was the end of the FreeBSD for me: I could finally make system updates without heart palpitations and abi/api changes.<p>A proper package management system and binary packages might have saved FreeBSD in the data centre; maybe it could still do, though it's a very long shot now. It's a shame really...

GNU always seemed more user friendly to me. The BSDs didn't have long options (--help, --version, etc..) so BSD commands and shell scripts always looked cryptic.

Because of Mandrake: it just worked, hardware support was better, and it had a pretty GUI installer.

Because of Lawyers.

Since we are on history anyway, does anyone know of a good answer to my question?<p><a href="http://serverfault.com/questions/5095/historical-question-why-does-slice-c-or-slice-2-cover-the-entire-disk" rel="nofollow">http://serverfault.com/questions/5095/historical-question-wh...</a>

Linux vs BSD question on servervault makes me think that, as the history of computation is getting older and older, facts become fuzzier and legends start to form, a mythology is born. Linux vs BSD, BSD in OS/X?, Emacs and Xemax and..

This might be off-topic but: Would a single operating system been a more productive use of developer time? ( I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone whos building embedded systems upon open source )

Years ago when I had to make the choice, it was easy: Linux supported a larger amount of hardware. I didn't really want to spend all of my time writing drivers when I had other work to do.

Every time I've touched BSD I screamed in Agony.<p>It usually has non-working vi (beeping at the sight of arrow keys), ancient shell, colourless ls and other commands lacking about every other key I throw into them.<p>I understand that BSD has <i>traditions</i> to do exactly that that you will now defend, but those traditions are not unlike muslim africa that tell them to circumcise young girls or kill for blasphemy. Traditions are baaad, mkay? Not gonna get any new users with traditions. Admit that getting new users is not any of your priority and you lost because of that.<p>Technically BSDs were always interesting, but you can't bring yourself to use this awkward tool.

Peer effect. Bandwagon effect. IBM/Redhat. web-hosting companies. Oracle. Ubuntu.

Bad karma for the socket API.

Let's weave narratives!

For me, it came down to taking the rest of the system as seriously as the kernel. I first installed Linux back in the 0.9 days and it was interesting but no more so than 386BSD or TSX-32: boot the kernel and spend time trying to get applications to compile. Forward ahead a year or two to Slackware where packages installed in a few seconds rather than significant fractions of an hour (yay, 20MHz 386!) because they had binary packaging and updates were relatively simple, freeing time to write code in this hot new Perl language rather than trying to compile it.<p>I tried FreeBSD &#38; OpenBSD repeatedly over the years, even running a key company server on OpenBSD for awhile in the late 90s / early 2000s - security was compelling - but I noticed two things:<p>1. BSD users treated updates like going to the dentist and put them off until forced - not without cause, as ports frequently either broke things or simply spent hours rebuilding the world - whereas Linux users generally spent time working on their actual job rather than impromptu sysadmin. "apt-get update &#38;&#38; apt-get upgrade" had by then an established track record of Just Working and fresh install time for a complex system was measured in minutes for Debian (iops-limited) and, even as late as 2004 or so when we ditched the platform, days for FreeBSD even when performed by our resident FreeBSD advocate. I'm sure there are ways to automate it but while routine in the Linux world, I've never met a BSD user in person who actually did this.<p>2. The <i>BSD systems were simply less stable, often dramatically so, because the parts were never tested together: you had the kernel which is stable and deserves significant respect but everything else was a random hodgepodge of whatever versions happened to be installed the last time someone ran ports. Unlike, say, Debian or Red Hat there was no culture of testing complete systems so a few months after a new release you'd often encounter the kind of "foo needs libbar 1.2.3 but baaz needs 1.1.9" dependency mess which required you to spend time troubleshooting and tinkering – a class of problem which simply did not exist at the system level for most of the Linux world. It wasn't as bad as Solaris but the overall impression was more similar than I'd like.<p>One other observation: during years of using Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris / Nexenta / etc. on a number of systems (the most I've managed personally at any point in time was around ~100) there were almost no times where the actual kernel mattered significantly in a positive direction. Performing benchmarks on our servers or cluster compute nodes showed no significant difference, so we went with easier management. On the desktop, again no significant performance difference so we went with easier management and better video driver support (eventually why many desktop users moved to OS X - no more GL wars). There was a period where more stable NFS might have been compelling but the </i>BSD and Linux NFS clients both sucked in similar ways (deadlocking most times a packet dropped) and the Linux client got better faster and we ended up automating dead mount detection with lazy-unmounts to reduce the user-visible damage.