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As someone who hasn't used BSD, but is considering it for a small server (not mission critical, so OK for me to be learning with), could you expand on the major
by _rs 8y ago
As someone who hasn't used BSD, but is considering it for a small server (not mission critical, so OK for me to be learning with), could you expand on the major differences to you between OpenBSD and FreeBSD (vs possibly other options)? When you say you like OpenBSD "for the edge", do you mean cutting-edge, or edge network equipment? Thanks!
- wonks 8y agoWell, they contracted "edge" with "internal", so I think they mean network edge?
- akerro 8y agoNetBSD is for network edge.
- pbalau 8y agoand your toaster
- thijsvandien 8y agoOpenBSD is more conservative and security-minded, so I'd say network edge. Interestingly though, its laptop hardware support has historically been better.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoOpenBSD devs actually tend to use OpenBSD on their own systems (and most of them own ThinkPads), which, weirdly, is not the case with most FreeBSD devs, who run something else on their desktop.
- loeg 8y agoThis isn't necessarily a fair characterization of FreeBSD devs, although it's probably pretty close. I'd guess about 50-50 FreeBSD vs Mac users.
- xmj 8y agoThis has noticeably changed in past years. More and more thinkpads, more and more dogfooding
- xenadu02 8y agoI'm guessing this is because macOS pulls from FreeBSD on a semi-regular basis.
- umanwizard 8y agoMaybe they pull some things sometimes but I get the sense their command-line tools in general are just unmaintained and collecting dust. Do you have a citation that they pull regularly? FWIW: ~ man rm | tail -n1 BSD January 28, 1999 BSD
- loeg 8y agoThey pulled at least once, historically, but don't seem to pull on a regular basis. Anyone who wants newer tools than the few they keep updated installs homebrew.
- sigzero 8y agoI would use OpenBSD for my network "edge" and FreeBSD for my general purpose servers and desktop.
- 2trill2spill 8y agoFreeBSD is focused on being a good server and appliance operating system and OpenBSD is focused on security and correctness of their code base.
- auslander 8y ago> It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux Not your quote, but I would add: ... and think of OpenBSD to FreeBSD as diamond to granite, 'rock solid' is understatement :) "We have fixed many simple and obvious careless programming errors in code and only months later discovered that the problems were in fact exploitable." https://www.openbsd.org/security.html https://www.openbsd.org/security.html
- pjmlp 8y agoGiven the symbiotic use of C on the UNIX world, the way OpenBSD devs care about security is quite valuable.