I don't recall them refusing to support x86, but BSD development was mostly done by academics rewriting and improving AT&T UNIX, which was mostly on big iron systems of the time. They were focused on academic computer science work. The lawsuits stopped a lot of BSD work as the universities were sorting it all out. William and Lynne Jolitz start porting 4.3BSD to the Intel 80386 at Berkeley in 1989 (but the code wasn't released for years due to said lawsuit) before Linux existed. That is the first BSD-on-x86 work; by December 1990 they had contributed a working port to UCB. Most of the code didn't see the light of day until ~1992.

Also, usable and production ready BSDs were running large websites on x86 long before linux became mainstream and well-supported enough to be used. The BSD TCP/IP stack was the reference implementation for ages and BSD was heavily used in the internet's early days as a lot of early companies spun out of Californian universities. Hotmail ran on FreeBSD. Early SunOS variants were based off of BSD, as were some other commercial unixes.

The bigger killer, I think, is that BSD was (and still has) a bit of closed mindset to newcomers and were and are more conservative to new technology, despite some foundations of techbeing started with them. Docker's origins can be directly traced to FreeBSD jails. Sometimes the conservatism is warranted and a benefit (eg OpenSSH).

I go back to take a look at the BSDs every now and then and frankly it really looks like that mindset has stayed, somehow.

Generally speaking the BSDs seems really fork-a-phobic and it kinda shows given how little dynamism is there in the development those systems.

Even the Solaris derivatives have a faster tempo.

> But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.

When was that? Presumably wwaaaaaaaay before 386BSD was a thing right?

i think what the chaos did was enable more individual contributors. you didn't have to join the BSD team to get a core OS tool accepted into the system. anyone could just mix and match the tools and apps they liked. it's not that BSD prevented that but that they just didn't invite it. you can create your own spin of a distribution and if it gets enough users and contributors it gets accepted as an official version. there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel. try making a official BSD spin using GNU coreutils.

GNOME prioritises Linux now but it shipped with Solaris from 2003 onwards and Sun contributed accessibility features around that time.

> BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans.

oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.

The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).

Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")

Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).

And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).

I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?

Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.