who uses freebsd for personal use? Bearded geeks?
I've got chinny-chin-chin whiskers and am a geek of sorts in this incarnation of my life but quit high school in the 10th grade. I taught myself to use every computer or OS I've ever used from an AppleII to Solaris but never worked IT in my life. Hardly paints me as a Ken Thompson clone. I use nothing but FreeBSD on a daily basis and am not lacking in any areas of functionality as far as my needs go for everyday desktop use. I currently have 5 laptops running FreeBSD, one running OpenBSD I rarely use and could not be happier with it as an OS.
I've used FreeBSD in a "company" (and BSDI before) since the mid 90s and I'm always years behind. FreeBSD 5 and 6 literally didn't work (and were slower than 4.7), so we skipped them; what was that, 3 years? You run into MORE PROBLEMS upgrading to "new" software than you do "incompatibilities" with a 2 year old OS.
I didn't start using a FreeBSD clone till 2005, finally fleeing that feckless flock from frustration in a fulminating firestorm to FreeBSD and Freedom in 2012. Without delving into detail it was a similar situation to the one you describe that effected everyone using that version of their product but a wily wolf in wool.
You obviously are more schooled in the intricacies of FreeBSD than I, but I never have a problem keeping my boxen running. That's probably because I keep my system updated to a current RELEASE, stay current on
# freebsd-update fetch and patch any vulnerabilities for 3rd party programs as soon as possible. I would consider anything less poor Admin skills for myself as a home user.
Customers want stability.
My desktops could not be more stable and I wouldn't have it any other way or people would be hearing about it. I have a plethora of screenshots posted, one at 306 days uptime for the Thinkpad X61 laptop that served solely as my .mp3 player. It stayed offline in that role so I never updated it since it could not have been running better.
New versions of an OS are unstable by definition.
Please provide facts to back up your claim about FreeBSD. I just updated one of my machines to FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE-p10 and it's been running like a perpetual motion machine the 10 days since without any intervention on my part. I did another when it came out, have one left to do and always do a full rebuild of the system. Most problems people post about in that forum are from upgrades. An upgrade making more sense for a business where time is a factor.
As long as a fairly late version of PHP runs, nobody cares what version of FreeBSD is running on the system
I'd consider that poor practice by an Administrator for a "company". But then I'm just a home user who doesn't know beans from frijoles about Corporate Policy in such matters. Previous point of poor executive decisions or principals pertaining to perceived plebeian pinheads patronizing their product principally not pertinent to this post.
Please enlighten me how that works out to be good security practice for a company, or an acceptable level of service to your paying customers who expect "Professionals" to be handling their data in a Professional manner.
