These days the #FreeBSD-derived #Darwin powering #Apple's operating systems has about the same installed base as #Windows. Adding the de facto Unix #Linux and derivatives like #Android easily eclipses Microsoft's efforts several times over.
This is Ángel Ortega, crime and horror fiction writer and former systems programmer (on space, avionics and cryptography environments).
My first contact with a #UNIX system was on 1989 on a Sun Sparcstation 2 running #SunOS. I discovered #Linux on 1993 with the SLS distribution. I ditched all Microsoft software on 1999 and moved all my computers to Linux and never looked back.
My first encounter with #OpenBSD (inside a VM) was circa 2015. I was debugging a ground station software that was complicated as hell and had some memory leaks and was driving me mad; a friend of mine recommended compiling my beast on OpenBSD because the memory management is very different and it immediately crashed on a place I never expected. That filled my heart with bliss.
My first experience with OpenBSD in real hardware was on a laptop in 2020. Everything worked (except Bluetooth because, you know, there is no Bluetooth support on OpenBSD). I finally had to install Linux on that laptop because of reasons and my heart was a bit broken.
I now have OpenBSD on a tiny Toshiba NB 200. It's 32 bit, so no Firefox for poor old Ángel, but I don't really care because I used it mostly for fiction writing and remote server maintenance while on coffee shops, libraries or parks. Battery usage is great. Everything works like a charm.
I love OpenBSD because it's compact. It makes me feel like on a vintage UNIX system, simple and solid. Native tools and servers share lookalike configuration files. Man pages are awesome af. It includes a C compiler in its base system and that means "I am a real Operating System" to me. I love security is one of its main goals. OpenBSD hackers are brilliant, stubborn, unique people.
I don't love the filesystem.
I don't care that it's a bit slower than other OSes.
Peak Solaris: SparcStation 10 running Solaris 5.5.1, with Solaris OPENSTEP as window manager, and Wabi (Windows 3.1 environment) plus Macintosh Application Environment as applications.
Unfortunately the colours in Wabi and MAE are off, as I only have a cgsix...
“Would you like to use the browser by Company X, or the browser by the company that survives on half-a-billion dollars a year from Company X, or the browser by the company that gets paid an estimated $20 billion a year by Company X even though it can survive without it?”
We desperately need a web browser by an independent organisation funded by EU taxpayer money and maintained for the common good.
@swagpussc The basic thing to understand is that this is not a world of Windows.
There have always been other operating systems, and in particular there has been, since the late 1960s, a large class of operating systems that are: Unix; one of the many flavours of Unix that #Unix split into in the 1970s; or someone creating an operating system that's very much like Unix, from the ground up, a decade or 2 later.
#Linux is (the kernel of) the last sort of operating system.
@swagpussc (...continued)
Often forgotten by people is the period in between. The people who cloned Linux and the (GNU) "shell" around it often worked from samizdat doco about 1970s Unix.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, there were a whole bunch of commercial #Unix flavours: #Xenix, HP/UX, #AIX, #SunOS, #Ultrix, OSF/1, AT&T System 3, AT&T System 5, ...
#Illumos, which came from #Solaris, which came from SunOS, is actually still around.