FreeBSD system and its share of worldwide use - July 2024

T

teo

The share of FreeBSD usage in the world generates a hope of light in the face of the advancement and modernization of other systems used in the world.

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Operating System Market Share Worldwide:
  • FreeBSD: 0,01%
  • Chrome OS: 1,41%
  • Linux: 4,45%
  • Unknown: 7,14%
  • Os X: 14,92%
  • Windows: 72,08%
 
hi. teo :
what is unknow desktop operation system ? can you show me something.? i have used freebsd14.1 desktop. thanks.
 
It is very difficult to advance FBSD as a desktop OS if most of the devs and/or maintainers are using Windows or MacOS.
Edit: Clarification, when I said "devs" I was talking about FreeBSD developers specifically.
 
BaronBS said:
It is very difficult to advance FBSD as a desktop OS if most of the devs and/or maintainers are using Windows or MacOS.
Click to expand...
Developers and maintainers are on those systems because there is a high share of users in the world using those desktop graphical environment systems, and little by little linux is getting there. That's where the big ones in marketing, advertising, business, etc, are going, it's a mutual benefit for everyone, they keep those systems developed with the latest technology and software or hardware.
 
Those numbers represent similar distributions posted here in another thread recorded by Wikipedia,
which made them for me believable also insofar as Windows usage dropped from 81% to 72%, while Mac rose from 7.7% to 15%, and Linux from 2.5% to 4.5% in the last 13 years.

But to me it's even not satisfying, cause I am missing two things (besides 'How the numbers were recorded', and 'What are "unknown"?'):
1. How many users are 100%?
2. How accurate is the presentation? I mean is 0.01% somewhere near the real approximated value,
or simply just a way to say:
'we know it's more than zero, but we only display 2 post decimal positions, so we gave it a 0.01, while at 2 positions the correct rounded value would have been 0'?
 
BaronBS said:
It is very difficult to
Click to expand...
teo said:
That's where the big ones in marketing
Click to expand...
You miss an important point.
You both see it from the point of view of people who have some expertise on computers.
App. >80% of all computers users don't give a shit about what system they use; they simply eat what they are feeded.
And app. 70% don't even know there is something besides Windows, and MacOS - and they don't care.
(And all those using company's machines cannot chose at all. And that's quite a lot users.)

The very first thing you need to do before you even think about to use some BSD, or Linux is, you need to care, what you're using, asking yourself why, and if there are alternatives.
Most users don't even get near that.
 
cracauer@ said:
Also, how is this measured. If it is via the identification string of a web browser - FreeBSD often sends a Linux ID.
Click to expand...
That. And all these numbers are inaccurate by at least 7%, since we simply don't know what "unknown" means. Matter-of-fact, since there really aren't any desktop operating systems other than Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, Linux and *BSD, the "unknown" category must be a failure to determine the real OS, not another system we don't know about.

Another methodological issue: If this is measured by looking at web server logs of publicly accessible web servers, it is biased by how much these OSes are used for browsing, and how. Here's is an interesting tidbit I learned while working in Silicon Valley: The average American household (meaning IP connection) does about 60 searches per hour during daytime (waking) hours, or about 1 per minute. The bulk of those are actually not real searches (where you go to www.google.com or www.bing.com, enter a search string, and click "I'm feeling lucky"), but are caused by autocomplete on the address bar. Now, if you count all of those in the above statistics, it will be heavily biased towards people who type web URLs slowly, giving autocomplete time to cause many searches.

Finally: I vaguely remember that today, roughly 80% of human-caused web traffic comes from mobile (cell phones and tablets). Could be higher, as desktops and laptops are going the way of the dinosaur or wooly mammoth.
 
Desktops are often laptops nowadays. Far be it from me to make demands here, but if the foundation wants to see an uptick here: get WiFi fixed! That's the one big fat functional elephant in the room that I see. Being stuck at 54Mbps on a handful of cards in this decade is not exactly viable anymore.
 
My wired connection works well but it runs as a mystery to me, vs how I used to set it up. For instance, today three times it was absent and fixed by a reboot on the 4th one. Previously, the Ifconfig... route add... were simple but as it works out of the box I cannot use those as it would mess it up.
..........................
the second glaring missing feature is the graphic card nomenclature.
For instance, nvidia - nvidia fine.
but others. Amd? Intel? etc the freebsd driver names do not correlate to the card names easily, and when found are easily forgotten unless one already has experience with the brand and driver.
.........................
the third obstacle to wide usage is lack of an easily found printer on each continent in each
of the classes: color laser, ecotank, black and white laser. Which includes a copier in the printer as a mutlifunction and preferably a usb stick input/output. Most PC users consider their system lacking without that feature as their school, business, or government expects them to have one alongside their OS, typically I think to print/use pdf's. This could be fixed with a not trivial but not expensive input of time and money by a team of FreeBSD users relegating anything beyond plain UFS2 to something secondary. But maybe that is just me, I am old having used FreeBSD since Jan 2004. { I should mention that my BW laser MFC has a copying problem at present but still works with ghostscript... for .ps and .pdf alike ]
....................
And of course, inertia. MIght I add I think in the past more people did buildworlds constantly so there was more pride in the accomplishment. Then freebsd-update [ which I have never used ] and the interest in
a better product by coding is set aside for 'easiness' leaving fewer enthused upon each upgrade so as to, at least potentially, spread the joy around when things went smoothly.
 
bvdw78 said:
... get WiFi fixed!
Click to expand...
That has applications far beyond desktop/laptop use. For example using the OS on router/AP class machines. For a few years I tried to use my FreeBSD server as an AP, and slowly figured out that the WiFi code just doesn't handle all the cases with a variety of clients. I ended up having to reboot my whole server multiple times a day just to clear logjams in the WiFi stack; that's when I switched to an outboard serious AP.

jb_fvwm2 said:
the third obstacle to wide usage is lack of an easily found printer on each continent in each of the classes ...
Click to expand...
That requires cooperation from printer vendors. For scanners, the situation is even worse. They typically support OSes in this order: Windows, Mac, Linux. For scanners, the switch to cloud-based scanners helps the situation, but brings problems of its own.

And of course, inertia. MIght I add I think in the past more people did buildworlds constantly so there was more pride in the accomplishment. Then freebsd-update [ which I have never used ] and the interest in
a better product by coding is set aside for 'easiness' leaving fewer enthused upon each upgrade so as to, at least potentially, spread the joy around when things went smoothly.
Click to expand...
Ease of administration and upgrade is vital for a consumer desktop product. It needs to be single command or single button. Matter-of-fact, I'm already somewhat unhappy (as a server administrator!) with having the separation between "freebsd-update" and "pkg upgrade", and the fact that precompiled packages are not synchronized with the base OS releases. I would much rather have the simplicity of "FreeBSD 13.3 comes with Alpha version X, Beta version Y, and Gamma version Z", and packages only change version when everything else does. None of this CI/CD stuff.
 
teo said:
Developers and maintainers are on those systems because there is a high share of users in the world using those desktop graphical environment systems, and little by little linux is getting there. That's where the big ones in marketing, advertising, business, etc, are going, it's a mutual benefit for everyone, they keep those systems developed with the latest technology and software or hardware.
Click to expand...
Sorry for my simplified comment, I edited for better understanding.
 
%pupil -sceptical said:
You miss an important point.
You both see it from the point of view of people who have some expertise on computers.
App. >80% of all computers users don't give a shit about what system they use; they simply eat what they are feeded.
And app. 70% don't even know there is something besides Windows, and MacOS - and they don't care.
(And all those using company's machines cannot chose at all. And that's quite a lot users.)

The very first thing you need to do before you even think about to use some BSD, or Linux is, you need to care, what you're using, asking yourself why, and if there are alternatives.
Most users don't even get near that.
Click to expand...
I edited my comment, gave it more context.
 
ralphbsz said:
we simply don't know what "unknown" means.
Click to expand...
At least it's a known unknown that's known.


ralphbsz said:
as desktops and laptops are going the way of the dinosaur or wooly mammoth.
Click to expand...
Ah! A new source for server names!

ralphbsz said:
I vaguely remember that today, roughly 80% of human-caused web traffic comes from mobile (cell phones and tablets).
Click to expand...
Google reported the 50% mark was crossed a very few years ago. Maybe that's what you recall.
 
Since Windows will dominate the desktop market for at least the duration of our lifespans, I am glad that FreeBSD focus includes elsewhere. It would be a shame to compromise that for a pipe dream.

Linux is first in line for the "free desktop" and even that *will never happen*.

It would be interesting to see where FreeBSD sits in terms of server usage. The stats that teo linked are lacking this info.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Let's not forget that this is a manufacturer's built wall to climb and not one built by FreeBSD.
Click to expand...
OpenBSD can do WiFi just fine with the Intel cards in my laptops going back to 2018. FreeBSD? Not so much. Now as a user I don't care who built any of these walls. If FreeBSD wants to see any meaningful adoption on laptops or otherwise mobile "desktop"-ish devices, this needs to get fixed and brought into the third decade of the 21st century. Sure I get by with the wifibox port or a USB-tethered smartphone, but I won't go so far that I'm calling that a solution to the problem. It's duct tape, and duct tape is unworthy of a system as carefully designed as FreeBSD.
 
I think that too many Linuxes (Linii?) have, in trying to get the newcomer interested, have lost a lot of what made them interesting in the first place. RedHat is a big offender, but I guess they are aiming at corporate. Around RHEL6 or 7, they crippled the text install, severely limiting what you could do with it. If you look at much of their documentation, it's all about how to do things with the Gnome interface.

Then there is Arch, also considered a major Linux distribution, and I think they still say, If you want a nice GUI interface with everything point and click, then maybe Arch isn't for you. Yet, they still succeed. So, maybe it's best that FreeBSD stay what it is, it has a simple curses based installer, causing a lot less cursing <pun intended> than GUI based ones, that hang while trying to figure out your graphics card, or the mouse won't work, or the next button is off the screen on a VM, though I would agree that I wish wireless would be improved. The wifibox program, https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox has gone a long way towards improving that (though I couldn't get it working for myself), and, in my experience, FreeBSD's wireless is fast enough for youtube videos, but that would probably help it get it to a point where it matched Linux.
 
I think it's ironic that the same people who complain about the lack of support for desktop I/O are the same ones who condemn the concept of an official desktop release. No one is going to develop I/O drivers (or applications for that matter) on a server that they have to waste countless hours shoehorning into a productive desktop. You want good I/O support? You can't debug application performance without a desktop either. There's still no official Firefox release for FreeBSD.. go figure.

Give developers a viable platform to use to help facilitate said support. A small barrier to entry to entice anyone who's curious. We have partial support for bluetooth, wifi, thunderbolt, and USB3 and all development has come to a halt. No one simply cares enough; there's no incentive. FreeBSD's device driver model sucks for desktop also. We could use something like I/Okit.

That's without even mentioning macOS. That (especially with Apple Silicon) compounds this incentive issue.
 
bvdw78 said:
OpenBSD can do WiFi just fine with the Intel cards in my laptops going back to 2018. FreeBSD? Not so much.
Click to expand...
Indeed. If I ignore the "Fatal Firmware Error" that pops up in the kernel messages every so often, then they work fine on OpenBSD ;)

However I would say that FreeBSD has had to take one step back so it can take a giant leap forward. For example with the iwlwifi(4) driver, it is still fairly buggy, but once this is in place, it will offer a far superior feature-set to OpenBSD's offerings and will be in a closer lockstep to the vendor's drivers.

OpenBSD (and NetBSD) do great in their hardware support and often beat FreeBSD to the punch, but they do tend to stagnate a little. There is only so much you can do with (awesome) scrappy reverse engineering. For example, no Intel wifi cards on OpenBSD support power saving or hostap mode.
 
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