Reddit mentions of The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin

>all I could find was BSD fans making completely false claims about Linux

and

>I'm asking why BSD has users other than the licensing given that linux exists

Sounds pretty flamy to me. But I also don't want to give a bad impression of the community if you are here to legitimately learn more about the wider operating system landscape.

The reason for my frustration is this sub is almost half composed of Linux fans swooping by to drop FUD bombs, and it sucks. Granted, this sub is also little-used by the BSD communities, as there are other long-standing methods of interacting within the community (mailing lists, forums, etc).

I'm also touchy about trolling because I WANT the BSD and Linux communities to get along. The late 80's and early 90's saw the infamous UNIX Wars, where while the various UNIX vendors squabbled about who was better, Microsoft swept the entire market.

I would recommend you check out The Daemon, the GNU, and the Penguin, which covers a lot of the history.

FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD all come from BSD, which started as a fork of UNIX at the University of California Berkeley in 1977. FreeBSD and NetBSD were founded in 1993 as community forks of BSD for the PC platform, around the same time as Red Hat and Slackware. At that point, the BSD system was about 16 years old.

BSD provided the original TCP/IP implementation, and the modern systems continue the tradition of providing high performance, stable, feature-rich TCP/IP.

FreeBSD originated the containerization concept with Jails, which were perfected shortly afterwards by Solaris with Zones. Most of those improvements have since been brought back into Jails. Linux containers showed up much later, and don't quite tackle the same problems as Jails and Zones.

FreeBSD got ZFS from Solaris and has tightly integrated the software. FreeBSD is heavily involved in the OpenZFS project. Linux can have ZFS as soon as they feel like it, but for the time being they are stuck in a far-downstream situation. Btrfs is no substitute.

On that note, storage management is probably the area where I find FreeBSD in particular to be excellent. GEOM is amazing. No Linux software can even compare.

On the virtualization front, FreeBSD has bhyve, OpenBSD has vmm. These are both new, and under rapid development. They will not reach the stability and usability of KVM for a bit of time, but I have found them to be quite good.

The FreeBSD Ports tree (OpenBSD also has a similar infrastructure, and NetBSD has pkgsrc) was perhaps the earliest implementation of software management, with automated fetching and dependency resolution. Today, it provides both a means to custom compile software easily, fetch source code, build package sets, and tweak dependencies and compile-time options. And the pkg utility is a fantastic binary package manager with some awesome capabilities.

90% of the software ecosystem available for Linux is also available for the BSDs, and the remainder is only the result of the developers being too ignorant or lazy to implement portable software. BSD is not the only system in that boat, Solaris/Illumos is also suffering in that way. That changes when the development community decides to recognize that Linux is not the only viable system available.

The availability of source code is also a huge plus. Linux does provide source, of course, but with FreeBSD I can have the entire system source code at my fingertips in a single command.

The project structure also lets me choose what kind of upgrade path I want, and whether I want bleeding edge or stable. I can run the generic RELEASE system with binary updates for security, I can compile RELEASE from source with customizations, I can run the STABLE branch for my release version, or I can run the minute-by-minute bleeding edge CURRENT version. The choice is mine.

This is just a short list. I have never found FreeBSD lacking, and I run it on almost all of my systems (servers, desktop, etc). I run OpenBSD on my laptop, and am loving it.