Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

[Posted May 29, 2024 by jzb]

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report. The report provides a summary of 1,446 responses to an anonymous online survey of FreeBSD users. It provides insights into user profiles, typical usage, how the FreeBSD project is viewed, as well as recommendations for expanding the FreeBSD community and contributor base:

Currently fewer than half of users consider FreeBSD their daily driver; Individuals are less likely than Corporate Users to consider FreeBSD primary. The barrier seems to be less about software and more about hardware support, particularly around Wi-Fi drivers (which are at the top of the wish list for the Foundation to focus on in the coming year). A relatively high number of those who don't consider FreeBSD their main OS say they would consider doing so with hardware support for desktops and laptops that was equivalent to Linux.

The raw data for the survey is available as well.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 29, 2024 19:57 UTC (Wed) by aviallon (subscriber, #157205) [Link] (7 responses)

Hardware support is very hard.
That's the problem.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 30, 2024 10:07 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (4 responses)

On the other hand, the decades have brought a few drivers which worked/work with "a lot" of hardware, I'm thinking of AHCI, AHCI, MPT-SAS, NVME, RNDIS/usbnet, uvcvideo, and (to a lesser degree) AC97/IntelHDA. If only there was a wireless spec to rule them all—oh wait that's usbnet, innit.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 30, 2024 14:22 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

It'll be darkly funny if I have to put a FreeBSD VM on my laptop to tether my phone after Linux goes through with its plans to kill off RNDIS...

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 30, 2024 19:10 UTC (Thu) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (2 responses)

Is AHCI so important that you intended to list it twice, or did you mean xhci?

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 30, 2024 21:23 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (1 responses)

Just an editing mishap.
It never crossed my mind to mention XHCI, because it has got a 100% monopoly, i.e. given some arbitrary machine with USB3, there is never a time you will *not* use xhci-pci.ko. For SATA, on the other hand, there is a, say, 5% (whatever the number may be) chance you'll need e.g. sata_sil.ko instead of ahci.ko for some hardware.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 31, 2024 8:20 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

"git grep CONFIG_USB_XHCI -- drivers/usb/host/Makefile" there are several other options than xhci-pci.ko. But I agree they are all XHCI.
However, there's also cdns3, dwc3, and mtu3.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 31, 2024 12:08 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I wonder how much it affects hardware support that there are multiple BSD variants? Although the kernel in all of them is similar in spirit, a driver written for xBSD still needs some porting for yBSD.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted Jun 3, 2024 8:43 UTC (Mon) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link]

Would one option for wireless be bhyve + PCI passthrough?

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 31, 2024 4:11 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting that the third most popular desktop is i3 (9%) and the fifth is sway (4%; I suspect it would be higher if wayland were better supported on FreeBSD).

I have been using sway for 3 years and i3 for almost 10 years before that. Clearly I am not the only one who thinks these just make more sense than a Windows-clone desktop.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Posted May 31, 2024 17:57 UTC (Fri) by yeltsin (guest, #171611) [Link]

Both are pretty popular on Arch (which has a very self-selecting audience, obviously). The script that reports this information (`pkgstats`) is not installed by default, so this too is opt-in.

https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=a...