Modern software development is driven by fashion and trends. All you need is a few tech “influencers” to switch to freebsd then crowds will follow. FreeBSD was and remains my first love, but not being fashionable there is nowhere i can use it.
> All you need is a few tech “influencers” to switch to freebsd then crowds will follow.
As someone who would like to switch to FreeBSD but cannot, let me give you a few counterpoints. I also loosely follow actual fashion trends in clothing.
I actually think that FreeBSD is already fashionable. It scaled up WhatsApp and Netflix, two of the most impressive startups! Tarsnap uses it. It seems pretty stable, and I would be perfectly fine adopting it.
Where would I adopt FreeBSD? In two places – on the desktop/laptop, and on the server.
On the desktop/laptop: I need perfect screen resolution on my laptop and external monitor, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and a way to correctly use my plugged-in microphone and headphones. Ubuntu delivers all of this with some grumbling, and MacOS and Windows do it flawlessly. What does FreeBSD do? Reports seem to say that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are problematic.
On the server: I need a compelling way to manage thousands of servers if needed, and something like Ansible won't cut it. For whatever reason, distributed systems on top of FreeBSD seems to be something that the community refuses to build on. I'm not sure what kinds of frameworks WhatsApp and Netflix built to manage their servers, but none of it seems to be public.
So, I kind of disagree; I think FreeBSD is fashionable but fails to be utilitarian enough. Fix the problems on the desktop/laptop; or deliver a way of showing how to scale up quickly with FreeBSD, and you'll get your adoption.
> Reports seem to say that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are problematic.
They've always been fine for me, and sound is more reliable than Linux. What went wrong for you?