Linux has always been more pragmatic and focused on getting stuff out that works now. BSD has always been a promise that might be better in theory but is of little practical use to most people.

The FreeBSD desktop exists, it is called “Mac OS”.

Linus Torvalds used the GPL for his kernel, forcing companies to release the source code if they improve it and distribute it. The main userland was a lot of GPL licensed GNU software for a very long time, with a similar effect.

The BSD folks, on the other hand, decided to give everything away, by using much more “liberal” licenses. Apple took the BSD base, bolted their UI on top of it and gave almost nothing back. That would not have happened if BSD was GPL licensed.

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.

Why Linux ended up being the big thing is pretty well answered in the historical sense if you want to go looking for it. As for its low modern adoption. No one can really answer that for certain. I’ll give you my two cents on the matter, but that’s all anyone can do. All of this is based on research done on and off over the years in regards to this very topic as well as personal anecdote and hearsay. I will point out specific examples that I am familiar with, but don’t fault me for missing anything.

Everyone is already on Linux. Both companies and individual people. While the BSD’s work just fine for some people, it is largely hardware dependent. I have heard many people liken it to where Linux was 10 - 15 years ago in terms of hardware support. That alone means that most people can’t use it. Less people = less developers making things better = less people trying it. We’ve all seen that song and dance before. Good ole chicken and egg problem.

Furthermore, while BSD certainly has its strengths. Being technically better has never been enough with anything. There are lots of equivalents to BSD features that are good enough eg: cgroups and others for jails. More importantly with a lot more big players using and contributing to Linux. Those things also see a faster rate of development and more quickly meet the needs of companies.

There is of course the license debate. While not as important now as it was before at least to a lot of individuals, I have personally been trying to answer this question for years doing my own research. The only reason I bring this up is that companies often upstream there work. Netflix famously chose freebsd over linux for their simpler and faster networking stack. They have contributed many improvements to that upstream and there are examples floating around as to how those improvements helped to improve freebsd networking for others. Although according to many Linux has largely caught up in that regard if not surpassed it. There are after all many tech giants that use linux and also need to serve similar amounts of traffic if not more than Netflix. However, regardless of if its is better or worse. The point is I feel like examples like this are far and few between. Because companies can simply take the bsd code and choose not to give anything back. It certainly feels like they do so more often than not. I based that on my ability to find useful examples in the first place. Which is of course admittedly flawed.

You will notice a lot of the use of the word “feels” in that last paragraph because I don’t have any concrete proof. It is hard to measure how much a company has contributed to freebsd. It is less talked about and even combing through commits you would need to know who is behind those aliases. There are concrete examples of things that were contributed, but in my opinion a lot of the contributions are even more company specific than those on linux.

For example when it comes to changes that matter to a desktop user. Sony contributed drivers for their ps5 controller on linux. Here is a random article for that here: https://androidexperto.com/sony-releases-official-ps5-controller-driver-for-linux/ I found many articles of bsd people digging into linux code to get the ps5 controller working on bsd as recently as 2024. Here is just one of those https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/playstation-5-dualsense-controller-pairing.80786/. In my opinion however, it is kind of strange that they would have to do any work to get it working considering that the ps5 and ps4 if I remember correctly were based on freebsd in the first place. Why did Sony not contribute drivers upstream for bsd? They must have them because the console itself needs them. This harpens back to me saying that it feels like companies more often than not choose not to contribute back when they don’t have to.

It has been hard for me to find equivalent examples on the bsd side. Little things like hardware or software support for user facing things that have been contributed to the bsd’s by the big names, but not to Linux

Anyways, that’s the short version of a random miss mash of things I could think of.

I like and knew BSD quite well and understood how to troubleshoot it.

Unfortunately, Linux is just moving so much faster, has more and newer software, and easier to find support.

Also less hardware compatibility on BSD.

And I’ve just recently started using catchyos which has btrfs running out of the box and it works quite well so far, and that was one if things I missed about BSD was zfs.

There’s an infamous usenet-thread with Torvalds and Tanenbaum arguing over monolithic vs microkernel design. I microkernel is cleaner from a separation standpoint, but that also introduces hurdles and overhead.

Linux is popular because the hardware support is pretty great. There’s few laptop/BSD combinations that work well with sleep/suspend/wifi, while just about any laptop will have everything working with a recent Linux kernel.

Because nearly none of the software I use daily is supported on any of the BSDs. Don’t get me wrong, I have fun playing around with them, but I’d be miserable using it daily. I still have to switch to Windows every now and then, typically for a game that a publisher refuses to have their anti-cheat software run on Linux (as well as a few other one-off situations.)

This video has a similar discussion about the C++ programming language vs other programming languages that are theoretically better. https://youtu.be/I7fEsbksKRE?is=T53DqwVNM3ps97JY

The summary: An imperfect solution today is nearly always used over the perfect solution that will arrive at some unknown time in the future. Also momentum is a thing.

I have friends that daily drive BSD, but I never have. For me it’s because Open Source is already a small field, and Linux solves all the problems I have, while also having the most mind-share, focus, and community. I want it to be FOSS for ethics, which Linux is, but otherwise don’t need anything that BSD offers, so there’s no reason for me to attempt anything more. If there’s even one compatibility problem, it’d be one too many for no benefit.

That having been said, I do donate money every month to one of them, because I like that they exist. So that’s probably weird…

TL;DR: I don’t daily drive (Free)BSD because it doesn’t work with some hardware and software that I use.

I’m not an expert in the BSD’s. But I’ve tried to daily drive FreeBSD a couple of times and can speak to it for myself from that viewpoint. Most recent attempt was about a year ago.

The issues I had:

Poor WiFi support. I understand that wireless driver support is iffy and even if it does work, it has poor speeds. I tried this on my laptop and could not get WiFi to work. There was a workaround in passing wireless card through to an alpine Linux guest VM and connecting there then creating a bridge. I did get this to work, but I found it impractical.

Games (via Wine/Proton) aren’t really an option. I understand you can install steam via a Linux compatibility layer and it’s somewhat functional with workarounds. I did not try this.

Those were dealbreakers for me. But the desktop experience itself was good. I ran KDE, and it felt the same to me. if I was running it on a wired machine that wasn’t used for gaming, I think I’d be happy to use it.

bsd just isnt at the same level as linux for desktop use. for servers bsd can get by just fine, but linux is a bigger target market for software including hardware drivers, graphics acceleration etc.

spin up a bsd and try it for yourself. i quite like it. i used it on my nas for a while because i has better zfs support. some things are a bit different, but if youre comfortable with linux you’re like 80% of the way there already.

after using linux for a quarter century, using bsd gives me the same feeling i got when i was using linux for the first time.

Popularity. Which also means more support.

Keep in mind that there is some history too. Linux was released under the GPL earlier then BSD became open source. It then developed faster and got more support. So it became the popular kernel.

Could someone knowledgeable tell me why desktop Linux has seemed to be ‘chosen’ in comparison to something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

I’m not necessarily knowledgeable, but I’ve gathered that Linux has historically been a little more approachable than the *BSDs, for the average person.

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