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The movie came out in 1999. In the movie, they state that it's 1999 (in the Matrix anyway). Neo is pretty tech savvy and a renowned hacker.
My assumption is he would've used FreeBSD. Or, maybe, Slackware. But I'm leaning more towards BSD.
In 1999, I bet he was running Gentoo.
The first release was in 2002.
Definitely Gentoo
Man I wish FreeBSD hadn't fallen to the wayside. It's really cohesive and feels put together in a way not Linux distro ever has.
Except it uses push over licensing
That's a GPL point of view. Most BSD users I've talked to prefer a more permissive license. Theo said: "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back. Ironic."
i guess this might be why a lot of processing and storage clusters use it behind closed doors with proprietary code we will never see.
Which is fine with for example OpenBSD, they write "ISC or Berkeley style licences are preferred, the GPL is not acceptable when adding new code, NDAs are never acceptable. We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to."
And where system is doing better, Linux or BSD? Also the point of the GPL is not to give back. You can have GPL code that is read only and it doesn't hurt a thing. The point is you can get the code running on your computer and freely make changes to it.
Doing better in what way? Number of installs or being robust and secure? If we go by numbers one could argue that Windows is doing best on the desktop, and that proprietary code therefore is something to strive for. Either way it's a tangent of the original statement, that the BSD license is a "pushover" license, which I oppose, because the BSD devs are deliberately allowing their code to be used by anyone for any reason.
You know, I've never used it. Maybe I'll install it in a VM tonight and give it a whirl.
Is it still worth using? Say, for a web dev? Or is it less supported?
Honestly it isn't. Support for anything front-end related is way more sparse compared to Linux.
That's a shame. I'd love a new exotic OS to try.
I don't think I've ever heard FreeBSD described as either "new" or "exotic"
New and exotic to me.
“hello system” is pretty nice to look at, and has some Mac-isms I find helpful. FreeBSD has a new release recently, so maybe Nomad or GhostBSD could be worth trying. You’ll find FreeBSD is a lot more “consistent” compared to Linux, but be prepared for random hardware to not work.
I'll give you "new" but it's about as far from exotic as you can get... Not a bad thing, BTW, and I highly recommend giving it a try, it's an excellent system, though probably better for a server than a workstation/desktop (though it definitely can be a very good workstation/desktop if you like)
Its Ports system is the inspiration for Gentoo's Portage, BTW
It's usually used for storage servers these days. ZFS is most stable there.
Ix (Truenas) is transitioning to linux though.
I mean, it’s decades older with a history of being used in business critical applications…
I'd argue that he'd use OpenBSD and be running his own firewall, web server, email server, and ftp server.
Or SuSE Linux, the non-slackware or jurix version was bleeding edge at the time.
PC-BSD
Maybe both? BSD for his server, Slackware for his desktop. Or something.
Remember he presses Ctrl+x to try to get rid of the message on his screen. That's Unix, right?