> Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux.
Why is that so impossible? Konqueror had a tiny fraction of the contributors that Mozilla had, but since it was better designed it was still able to get ahead, and now almost everyone is using a Konqueror-derived rendering engine. If they had "consolidated" with Mozilla we would have missed out on that.
Right now, FreeBSD does a lot of things better than Linux. ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. Jails are still ahead of Linux containers. OSSv4 is still nicer than ALSA. FreeBSD ifconfig is still nicer than whatever you have to use to configure your wifi this week. I'm not going to switch to a worse OS, and I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone else to.
Why are jails better and if so why did they lose to containers?
Why is OSS better when alsa could probably interface with one of those talking fish on the wall if you ask it nicely.
Why is ZFS any better than the Linux implementation if freeBSD is backporting the Linux version now.
Why is ifconfig better than network manager when there are no drivers for half the chipsets anyway.
Linux is practical, and I think hate for it comes from BSD users frustrated that they dont want to learn how another kernel works but I share none of the problems BSD users often claim. Your hangup is on a distro or a filesystem but never the actual Linux kernel which it seems to me nobody bothers to learn before trashing anyway.
> Why are jails better and if so why did they lose to containers?
They're better because they have actual security/isolation engineering. They lost because all people care about is having some kind of backend for orchestration systems that's capable of running Python. Even on Linux you can find all sorts of technical arguments about one form of container being better than another, but no-one actually cares beyond "does kubernetes use it as a backend? y/n".
> Why is OSS better when alsa could probably interface with one of those talking fish on the wall if you ask it nicely.
It offers a proper unixy API where you just have bytestream interfaces that you write to. You can use ordinary command line tools rather than needing a bunch of specialised programs.
> Why is ZFS any better than the Linux implementation if freeBSD is backporting the Linux version now.
There are more maintainers for ZFS on Linux - which should tell you something about how much better ZFS is than any Linux-native filesystem. The ZfsOnLinux codebase is fine, and if the licensing issues were ever resolved then one of the biggest reasons to use FreeBSD would go away.
> Why is ifconfig better than network manager when there are no drivers for half the chipsets anyway.
Because it works the way you'd expect, and stuff that works continues to work. E.g. fun story: Linux can't connect to my work VPN, because there's no way to pass a one time passcode through to a VPN login. Even though I've got the same version of OpenVPN installed on both FreeBSD and Linux, which has support for one time passcodes, on Linux that gets lost somewhere in the tightly-coupled layers in between that are necessary to have a network connection there.
> Linux is practical, and I think hate for it comes from BSD users frustrated that they dont want to learn how another kernel works but I share none of the problems BSD users often claim. Your hangup is on a distro or a filesystem but never the actual Linux kernel which it seems to me nobody bothers to learn before trashing anyway.
ZFS support is a kernel licensing issue. Jails are something that would require kernel-level support. Beyond that "Linux" is a pretty standard synecdoche for the whole OS; if there were reputable non-systemd/networkmanager/wayland distributions that would solve some of my problems, sure, but there aren't (I looked at installing Devuan but it seems to have already collapsed).
> Linux can't connect to my work VPN, because there's no way to pass a one time passcode through to a VPN login. Even though I've got the same version of OpenVPN installed on both FreeBSD and Linux, which has support for one time passcodes, on Linux that gets lost somewhere in the tightly-coupled layers in between that are necessary to have a network connection there.
I suspect that you are missing whatever the gui ovpn plugin uses for askpass (should be in the log, complaining). Try starting the vpn from cli ('nmcli connection up $conname'); nmcli is pretty good at asking for info it needs, without the 'tightly-coupled layers' getting into its way.
Nope - just tried it, "Error: Connection activation failed: Unknown reason". There's a bug in the Ubuntu bug tracker that's been there for a year or two with no solution.
Why is that so impossible? Konqueror had a tiny fraction of the contributors that Mozilla had, but since it was better designed it was still able to get ahead, and now almost everyone is using a Konqueror-derived rendering engine. If they had "consolidated" with Mozilla we would have missed out on that.
Right now, FreeBSD does a lot of things better than Linux. ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. Jails are still ahead of Linux containers. OSSv4 is still nicer than ALSA. FreeBSD ifconfig is still nicer than whatever you have to use to configure your wifi this week. I'm not going to switch to a worse OS, and I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone else to.