https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_s3/

I do not know if this has anything to do with the cliff that you saw.

To be fair, some of the time I spent on this came away from Tarsnap. But less than you might imagine.

First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given year to the Foundation. The history of donations is not represented by definition.

Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are typically summarily available on the release notes of each release [1].

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/

It's a small price to pay and it stops me having to install less stable operating systems.

I would love to know who is using FreeBSD in EC2.

ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once when a table in the production database was accidentally dropped and we could instantly rollback to the previous zfs snapshot (there was a tiny bit of data loss as a result but this did not matter too much for this application - uptime was more important). ZFS was also used for backups I believe.

A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot.

When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every team picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a zoo. With FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant.

I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that FreeBSD is a kernel+OS integrated together.

My experience with FreeBSD is that it provides a nice balance of the concerns OpenBSD and NetBSD specifically address. Historically, FreeBSD prioritized Intel CPU's (where NetBSD had greater portability) and had solid security (where OpenBSD had more of a focus on it).

The FreeBSD ZFS support really is a game changer. I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers - for a long time FreeBSD's kernel Linux support was required.

> I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.

Again, for me, FreeBSD has proven to be a nice blend of the features other BSD's provide as well as being incredibly stable on the h/w platforms I tend to use.

All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and worse; so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.

Its software catalog is also much bigger. It's a viable modern desktop daily driver and I can't say that for the other two.

As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests.

FreeBSD has better ZFS support than Linux, because it doesn't have the licensing issues.

As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros? Well, there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like Artix linux say, actually have smaller communities than FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating based on the activity level in their irc channels). The Linux community might be much, much larger than the FreeBSD community, but it's also extremely fragmented.

triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don't bother correcting me, it's a polemic, not a scientific paper

Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix like OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries included, well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace, ZFS, Bhyve, pf etc. All being in the base install means they're just better integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of those things exist for linux, or have equivalents, but they're not all part of the same project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS originated in Solaris, but they've been made first-class citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that Linux distros lack. Documentation is also very good, all accessible via manpages(no GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It doesn't have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros over the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I remember how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, still work. If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux distro, I have no idea what's going on under the hood any more. All I know is it's not what was going on 5 years ago, which isn't what was going on 10 years ago, which isn't what was going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless churn going on in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using linux, what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was janky in an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky, but nothing is understandable, at least not to my greybeard brain. Systemd takes over a new daemon every distro upgrade. DNS resolving now involves 4 different daemons with 15 different configuration files, there's two display protocols, both broken in different ways, /etc is full of long files written in strange, alien languages, and every file has its own bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make any change to your system, and all of them are somehow unsatisfactory in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough already.