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Die hard OpenBSD fan. ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/kc-bike/2894306940/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/kc-bike/2894306940/ ) The primary functional differences
by ax0n 16y ago
Die hard OpenBSD fan. ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/kc-bike/2894306940/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/kc-bike/2894306940/ )
The primary functional differences are a more mature code base (I didn't say more technically advanced or superior) and in general a unified system. What most people have come to know as "Linux" or "GNU/Linux" is a kernel mashed together with the GNU userland. And most distributions then further pile things onto it, kind of assuming they know what kinds of things the end-user will want to do, and picking a few applications that will help the end-user accomplish those tasks. Maybe it's Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox and Pidgin.
The BSDs provide a system. The kernel and userland are maintained and enhanced by the same group of people. There's a bit more control in what's provided in the base system.
After installing Free/Net/OpenBSD Users are generally left with a text-mode login console where a small subset of non-BSD-based things are installed but often not active. X.Org may be ready to go, as may Apache, lynx and some others. In the case of OpenBSD, these tools are often patched considerably before packaged with the base OS.
Want something other than twm for your Window Manager? Want a graphical web browser? An office productivity suite? You can install them easily via binary packages, or use the ports system.
If you've used Gentoo or Arch Linux, you will probably find that the ports system (/usr/ports/* if you installed it) is familiar.
I use OpenBSD quite a bit, even on the desktop. It's fast, free, and very robust. It's also probably the most strictly audited operating system code base in existence. Those guys (like me) are pedantic when it comes to security.
I highly suggest you fire up one of them (OpenBSD or FreeBSD, I'd suggest) in a VM and give it a shot. VirtualBox is free. NetBSD is primarily geared toward maximum portability between hardware platforms. I personally think that's the only thing it's got over OpenBSD.
I used to be a FreeBSD fan before 5.x. The team had a really rough time after Jordan left for Apple. I became disenchanted and haven't really given it the time of day for almost a decade now. It's probably a fine OS.
- ams6110 16y agoIf you want a desktop-oriented BSD "to try" I recommend PC-BSD. It's a very painless install and the whole distribution is geared towards a fairly non-technical user.
- ax0n 16y agoThis guy sounds plenty technical, though. Also, PC-BSD starts losing the point of the unified system and kernel. It's essentially a FreeBSD fork with more GNU stuff.
- linimon 16y agoFreeBSD 5.x was the learning curve for SMP (and also brought in a lot of other technologies such as power control); there was a tremendous amount of changed code. For some people it worked fine; for many it was pretty rough. The decision for 5.x was to gamble that single-core systems were going to become less important than multi-core systems, and that FreeBSD should push to optimize for the latter. Around the 7.0 timeframe, that promise finally started paying off. By that time, performance and stability on SMP were on a par with what 4.x had had on single-core. Let's put it this way: there were no tears shed when 5.x went EOL :-) (fwiw, the last maintenance release of 5.x was in 2006.) For anyone whose last experience was 5.x, 8.1 will be a difference of night-and-day.