The OS of PS4 and PS5 is apparently based on FreeBSD. Netflix uses FreeBSD for its CDN servers. pfSense and OPNsense are popular firewalls that are based on FreeBSD.
JunOS from Juniper is also based off of FreeBSD (I think they're moving to Linux, though) as (were?) NetApp filers (they made heavy use of the Berkley FFS snapshots back in the day).
FreeBSD was popular for many appliances, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as it was generally rock-solid, had very mature networking, and the legal departments at the time liked the more permissive licence.
It's getting less and less common to see it, though. Sheer market share numbers mean performance, driver support, user familiarity, and companies no longer being afraid of the GPL mean that has Linux pretty much taken over.
It makes me a bit sad, but the OS on most Juniper gear is just a control plane for ASICs nowadays and NetApp has moved on to more advanced filesystems. Finding developers to write drivers/software for Linux is probably an order of magnitude easier.
That’s related to anti-tivolization in GPLv3 and basically Apple is forced to stop shipping things that’s updated to GPLv3. That’s not just about scared, assuming being scared means they are irrational and they could have adopted it if they want. Legally they cannot ship it unless they are changing their business model.
They could though. They're just being overly cautious.
All it forbids is blocking users from running modified FOSS code which macOS doesn't do. You can compile what you want and run it in Xcode. Even on iOS you can do this.
What TiVo did was shipping FOSS code but not giving users any access to their device.
But Apple enforces code-signing, and that prevents them to ship those binaries under GPLv3 in the OS. The users can always compile them on their own (or via their favorite package manager) but Apple just can't ship it (without changing how they operate fundamentally.)
No, unless you have a laptop used by their developers. Every 2 years, I try to install FreeBSD on some of my Dell laptops, find that the wifi doesn't work, then give up. Been doing that for about 8 years..
Even if true, not having great support for laptops doesn't mean "no one uses FreeBSD". Obviously it's supported by essentially all server hardware and is used there, as well as many routers and the Playstation.
I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop in about a decade (~2016-2017), and I had similar issues. I couldn't get WiFi working even though I thought it should be supported, I couldn't get the laptop brightness controls working, the sound would just randomly cut out, and after a certain point I have to ask myself how much time I am realistically willing to spend on getting this working. I was trying to run it because of Jails and ZFS, but by 2016 Linux containers were generally "ok enough" nowadays, and ZFS On Linux seemed to work ok on Arch after a bit of finagling, and Linux stuff seemed work more consistently.
FreeBSD is pretty neat, don't get me wrong, I have played with it on servers and I ran an OPNsense router for years, so this isn't a dig on the OS as a whole, just that I don't think it's a good fit for laptops, at least the ones I've tried.
I am a FreeBSD user.
I have replaced Windows with Manjaro for gaming. I also use OpenBSD and wish I could run MacOS in bhyve.
Typically I purchase hardware supported by the software I intend on using. I don’t blame the software or hardware vendors, if I intend to use them in a non-supported way.
A lot, no. On the desktop it's 0.01% according to one of those stats websites. However it's hard to detect because Firefox identifies itself as running on Linux.
I run it myself on my desktop and it's great. What I like is that it's not constantly changing stuff for the sake of it like with Linux. New init systems, changing ifconfig for other commands etc. And it's much better documented.
You have web services you desire to host. Let's call our first jail, infrastructure.
Within our infrastructure jail we want to create a Virtual Machine for actual web services.
You have a AMP stack and you wish to keep MySQL, Apache and PHP isolated. Security right?
We construct a VM named Web Services running FreeBSD. This VM now enables us to construct more jails to handle isolated MySQL and Apache/PHP instances. These jails have no idea about the host underneath as they're being hosted in a floating hive.
The VM is now the host so all jails connected traditionally via a Bridge and this is where netgraph comes in. However to explain NG over HN would be painful.
bHyve too isn't just limited to a single jail, you could then create a second jail on the FBSD host and construct the same. "Network Infrastructure" where you handle routing between jails.
So you now have two jails, each running virtual machines isolated from each other running hierarchical jails.
In my case I have a storage virtual machine. Using ZFS, space is dynamic and storage jail within issue all my nfs zfs shares, my smb shares et cetera. This makes backups easy as all I ever need to do is backup the storage virtual machine.
A media jail where I hold all my streaming services and a network jail where all things network infrastructure go. Routers, monitoring, dns et cetera.
You can go deeper than that. I was playing with a host where you had a, VM, Jail with hosted a dedicated firewall for jails which hosted jails for services.
Host > Jail > VM > FW Jail > Service Jail A > Jail A, B, C
And because all is contained in a virtual machine, I just power off the VM and backup the raw image.
Not as much as it used to be. Before cloud computing became a thing, if you wanted to squeeze the last bit of performance out of hardware, FreeBSD was the way to go. Yahoo! used it when Yahoo! was the biggest site on the internet. Over time Linux became more performant and ever since it has become the OS of choice for AWS and other cloud provides, FreeBSD's popularity has dropped.
