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Comment by _paulc | Hacker News Reader

As a long term FreeBSD user (since 2.0) and advocate, my view is that FreeBSD should focus on its niche as a rock-solid server operating system. For most developers buying a MacBook and SSH-ing into a server is probably the right answer (or running a VM if you really need something local). The level of effort to match the MacBook user experience feels like a lost cause (Linux has been trying to do this for decades with significantly more resources) and it would feel more useful to use this funding to focus on the server side.

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I'm so much on the cliff on this, whilst they should focus it's becoming more painful by the year to run stuff on FreeBSD since there is so may Linux:isms in most opensource projects today that it's almost as hard to compile on FreeBSD as it was to compile on Windows 20 years ago.

Only a month or two back I gave up on compiling Samba myself (mostly worked w/o issues in the past just with ./configure && make), relying on package/ports instead.

Modern dotnet versions are finally available (but the compilation instructions looked headache inducing), node.js filesystem watching seems broken/nonexistant (using webpack -w i had to enable some polling mode).

I love FreeBSD but Linux has EEE'd the OSS ecosystem. (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)

Kind of, on embedded space, other kernels and FOSS operating systems are shaping up, none of them using GPL derived licenses.

As another long term FreeBSD user(4.6), you can pry FreeBSD from my lap/desktops from my cold, dead, fingers.

What improvements are you looking for on the server side?

Seems to me this money will do wonders for the client side, while on the server side, FreeBSD is already miles ahead of the competition.

> or running a VM if you really need something local

I agree, we often overlook the fact that virtualization made enormous progress in the last decades on consumer hardware.

So if I want to run FreeBSD on my laptop I might have to boot Linux first (I know...). Simply because few OS can afford the luxury of broad hardware support nowadays.

FreeBSD is still a very competitive OS but it might start lagging is some aspects behind the most innovative Linux distributions such as NixOS.

My wish would be some work on configuration management and automation since it might be a low hanging fruit for such an integrated OS developed by a single entity.

The ability to daily drive an operating system on the machine sitting on your desk helps get contributions that also help it be a better server operating system.

On my bubble it is more like buying Windows laptops.

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