The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed work to build FreeBSD without requiring root privilege. We have implemented support for all source release builds to use no-root infrastructure, eliminating the need for root privileges across the FreeBSD release pipeline. This work was completed as part of the program commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency.
↫ FreeBSD Foundation blog
This is great news in and of itself, but there’s more: FreeBSD has also improved build reproducability. This means that given the same source input, you should end up with the same binary output, which is an important part of building a verifiable chain of trust. These two improvements combined further add to making FreeBSD a trustworthy, secure option – something it already is anyway.
In case you haven’t noticed, the FreeBSD project and its countless contributors are making a ton of tangible progress lately on a wide variety of topics, from improving desktop use, to solidifying Wi-Fi support, to improving the chain of trust. I think the time is quite right for FreeBSD to make some inroads in the desktop UNIX-y space, especially for people to whom desktop Linux has strayed too far from the traditional UNIX philosphy (whatever that means).
I think their main selling point still is the BSD license.
PlayStation (4 and 5 at least, maybe even 3), Nintendo Switch, Juniper, NetApp, pfSense (and now OPNSense), FreeNAS and many other appliances prefer BSD because they can customize or even fork to their hearts’ content, without needing to worry about major distribution or LKML politics.
No need to convince Linus or any other person to have their code in the kernel. (Their kernel which they can keep to themselves).
The “one true source” is of course another great benefit, and I am surprised they were not reproducible in the past. (Another step in being an alternative to CoreOS)
(Those who would say “jails”, “cgroups” have been battle proven long ago. Even before “docker” was a thing, Google’s entire fleet used cgroups for containerized Linux at planet scale)