Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux?
After 18 years of running FreeBSD on my servers, my $0.02:<p>Politics&#x2F;marketing:<p>* Most &quot;unix&quot; admins only know linux and will advocate for it vigorously because it is so much better than.. &quot;what do you use again? Fedora? Ah, FreeBSD, something with F, I knew it!&quot;<p>* Management not always listens to reason but just wants a discussion go away, so they listen to the loudest advocates.<p>Knowledge&#x2F;Community:<p>* It is easier to copy a solution to a linux problem from stack overflow than to read the FreeBSD handbook, understand the problem and fix it.<p>* FreeBSD only is fun when one has a higher level of expertise: Knowledge of <i>sh</i> and at least a basic understanding of <i>make</i> are required, being able to at least read <i>c</i> code makes life much easier.<p>* Reading docs is hard. FreeBSD forces one to understand the standard unix tools that come with it. That means one has to spend some time reading the docs (or at least skimming over them so one knows where to look when the need arises). If one does not understand the tools, even simple init scripts are black magic.<p>* No exposure to FreeBSD at all: most hosting companies won&#x27;t even list FreeBSD as an option (though in most you&#x27;ll find some unix geek who&#x27;ll happily connect KVM or IPMI and insert the install-CD for you).<p>* The FreeBSD community is much less forgiving than the linux community: Ask a question that can be answered easily by reading the handbook or some man-page and the response will probably be silence (rarely flaming, just silence).<p>And finally also some points where one could argue that it makes sense not to use FreeBSD from an economic point of view:<p>* When using FreeBSD one is regularly forced to clean up linux-BS when venturing outside what &#x2F;usr&#x2F;ports provides: #!&#x2F;bin&#x2F;bash - or even worse #!&#x2F;bin&#x2F;sh that actually wants a bash - is one of the most common problems.<p>* When compiling software from source that does not come from &#x2F;usr&#x2F;ports one regularly has to do research what $leenox-distro-package XY provides because documentation just gives command lines for the most common linux distributions. &quot;Soo.... what exactly does that software need to compile when the docs tell me to <i>simply apt-get foo-23.5 and bar-42.666</i>?&quot;