My apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this.
I’ve been reading around online about keeping software secure, and I’ve been puzzled by something for a while now. I’m not sure if this is a stupid question or not.
Generally, when I see online conversation about Linux vulnerabilities, I often see people detailing the how big the attack surface of the Linux kernel itself is due to its’ monolithic kernel; I saw a blog post about this very thing linked somewhere here on Lemmy recently. I also see folks glamoring about how the BSD ‘spinoffs’ (?) all have much better fundamental approaches to security, and they get compared to Linux quite often as ‘the superior platform’ due to things like the non-monolithic kernel and BSD Jails. Hell, one of the main self-touted benefits of the BSDs is that there is significant effort placed on discovering vulnerabilities.
Could someone knowledgeable tell me why desktop Linux has seemed to be ‘chosen’ in comparison to something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD? I don’t see any open-source forks of a BSD spinoff (only proprietary ones like what runs on the PS5), nor do I see anyone talking about using them for desktop computing purposes. Is there a fundamental challenge too great to overcome right now with using something like FreeBSD as a desktop OS, or has there simply not been enough volunteer manpower to throw at it, and Linux already has that problem, in comparison, solved? It shocks me that the adoption is so low, especially considering the reportedly amazing binary compatibility with most existing Linux software.
Linux took off around the same time that BSD was involved in a lawsuit, which halted the project while linux kept going with its development, atleast that’s what i’ve seen in youtube videos about it. I’ve looked at the BSD systems a while back out of curiousity, and while i haven’t actually tried installing it on hardware to make sure, from my research none of my devices is actually supported in terms of hardware. Meanwhile Linux worked fine for everything. Both are also opensource, so there’s not much of a reason for me to try and wrestle with BSD when Linux does the job. BSD might be worth it for some server usecases (because like you said, security), or if you feel really strongly about it idealogically one way or the other (maybe you prefer more permissive licenses, or the fact that BSD is one unified system with it’s kernel and coreutils being part of the same project).
Edit: something else i didn’t mention is that Linux has some specific cool things going for it, like Nix and Guix/declarative systems. I don’t think BSD really has a declarative approach like that available, and i’m a big fan of it.