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Good point. Apple have certainly made it more mainstream. Still a small subset of overall PC platforms.

But what this article is referring to is BSD derived from Linux.

BSD derived from Linux seems like a folly to me. Nothing ever works as planned. Fun for the techie type — like building a Frankenstein. A cool idea but is it useful? And is it useful to mainstream folks.

FreeBSD has offered Linux ABI compatibility almost as long as the FreeBSD project has been around, ie when it essentially broke off from William and Lynne Jolitz's stagnating 386BSD. When I started using in 1996 or 97, it offered fairly good Linux userland ABI compatibility then. That didn't mean that FreeBSD doesn't have its own ABI, it does. It just means that when the FreeBSD encounters a Linux executable file, it can pretend to be Linux so that it can run that executable. This normally doesn't impact the "BSD" part of FreeBSD at all, it's just a little extra source code. In fact, people were often bragging about how much more efficiently Linux-compiled programs ran on FreeBSD back in 1997. Both OS's have evolved quite a bit since then.

There's been some tinkering that could make it possible to use some Linux drivers with FreeBSD. Technically, that's a different problem entirely because graphics drivers usually don't live in "userland". But FreeBSD already provides kernel modules that allow you to use Windows network card drivers. It's just another option available to you if FreeBSD doesn't yet offer native support for some of your hardware.

Whether an OS is “mainstream” anymore is rapidly becoming irrelevant in a world where most mainstream computer users are doing their most sophisticated computing with smartphones. You can make Linux or FreeBSD or even Windows work as a desktop OS, but Windows has almost all of the commercial software out there. Even then, most mainstream users are usually just web browsing, and that can be done with any OS that can run a decent (and for the most part free) web browser. The infrastructure that provides content for your web browser can be just about any decent OS, not necessarily a “mainstream” one.

Perhaps there will come a day when somebody can someone can take a perfectly functional Android phone on their Verizon/AT&T/tracfone plan and put a Linux/FreeBSD-based, completely open source OS onto it ...and still get it to work with whatever wireless broadband provider that they want to use.