Alt text: meme with the ‘Always has been’ format Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD and ChromeOS logos on top of the Earth The first astronaut says ‘Wait, it’s all Unix?’ A Windows logo, on top of the second astronaut. The second astronaut says ‘Always has been’ and points a gun to the first astronaut.
Regarding the true Unix, there was also Unixware, which was AT&T’s effort to move Unix to PCs (with Novell). It later passed on to SCO before they were sold, restructured, renamed and rebranded and subsequently became lunatics, In the end it seems like they offloaded it so some other company that’s just letting it die.
It was a good system. Not super fun, but industrial strength server stuff that was really reliable. Bit of a shame.
But of course, Linux was just simpler for everyone, it just doesn’t make sense to keep a million proprietary systems.
I agree.
A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.
Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven’t bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.
BSD kernel and is hardware driver policies are still very interesting to use and mess with. I run OPNsense on a device that has recently completely replaced my residential router and it’s fun to realize how complex everything is magically working together on a system that looks and feels familiar but is literally completely alien outside of GNU applications and package manager.
When I played around with FreeBSD I was fascinated by Securelevels and file flags. I don’t have any real use for that functionality on the systems that I run, but I probably would’ve thought of something by now if it was a Linux feature.
Im using freebsd on my nas because it has better zfs support than linux does. Or at least was the case as of a couple years ago.
Originally i just threw a few extra drives into my old Arch machine, but i noticed my package upgrades were being held back because zfs on linux (or whatever they called it) was dependant on older kernels or something. I cant remember the exact details.
I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I’ll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.