4 ms·

I’ve thought about BSD before but can never decide between OpenBSD and FreeBSD

fuball63 6y ago
I find that the order of most user friendly to least, in terms of the "big 3" BSD's, is FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. But a lot of people love OpenBSD; personally I like it because it has the boggle command line game.
freetonik 6y ago
One aspect to consider is hardware. OpenBSD seems to have better hardware support for certain laptops, namely Thinkpads.
bromonkey 6y ago
Imo OpenBSD on laptop, FreeBSD on server/desktop. But they're both great and I don't think you'd regret either one on any system :)
snazz 6y ago
OpenBSD feels more cohesively designed, in my experience. If you have an older ThinkPad lying around, it should be a dead-easy installation and a pretty easy setup process. Back when I used it on a laptop, I liked its design but I didn't find it practical for my workflow compared to Linux and macOS.
- ndiddy 6y ago
  Do you still need to use a third-party service in order to get binary software updates between distro releases?
  - upofadown 6y ago
    No. At least not for security updates. There is syspatch for the base system and "pkg_add -u" now also also pulls from a package collection called "packages-stable". The regular 6 month base system updates have been automated as well with "sysupgrade". Doesn't work for whole disk encryption if you have required networking firmware that can't be distributed (I'm looking at you Intel), For that particular case you have to copy the new ram disk kernel (bsd.rd) to the root of the disk. Regular updates are super easy now.
jeromenerf 6y ago
Openbsd is consistent and minimal. Works out of the box with sane defaults but slow Wifi and IO, no bluetooth nor docker. FreeBSD is more complicated, less consistent but also faster and integrate novelties such as zfs, wayland, BT ... I personally prefer openbsd to FreeBSD, but still use Debian Linux for my laptops and servers.
jjuel 6y ago
I have OpenBSD on my Thinkpad T480s and pretty much everything worked great out of the box. Even something like the Volume buttons that on Linux with DWM I had to manually map to amixer they just work. Of course there are some trade-offs. Bluetooth is a big one that might not work for people. Overall compared to FreeBSD the setup was dead simple with hardly any work. I know people complain about speed on OBSD, but I have not noticed it being that much slower. I am in love and don't see myself hopping again for a while (famous last words obviously).

I find that the order of most user friendly to least, in terms of the "big 3" BSD's, is FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. But a lot of people love OpenBSD; personally I like it because it has the boggle command line game.

freetonik 6y ago

One aspect to consider is hardware. OpenBSD seems to have better hardware support for certain laptops, namely Thinkpads.

bromonkey 6y ago

Imo OpenBSD on laptop, FreeBSD on server/desktop. But they're both great and I don't think you'd regret either one on any system :)

snazz 6y ago

OpenBSD feels more cohesively designed, in my experience. If you have an older ThinkPad lying around, it should be a dead-easy installation and a pretty easy setup process. Back when I used it on a laptop, I liked its design but I didn't find it practical for my workflow compared to Linux and macOS.

ndiddy 6y ago
Do you still need to use a third-party service in order to get binary software updates between distro releases?
- upofadown 6y ago
  No. At least not for security updates. There is syspatch for the base system and "pkg_add -u" now also also pulls from a package collection called "packages-stable". The regular 6 month base system updates have been automated as well with "sysupgrade". Doesn't work for whole disk encryption if you have required networking firmware that can't be distributed (I'm looking at you Intel), For that particular case you have to copy the new ram disk kernel (bsd.rd) to the root of the disk. Regular updates are super easy now.

jeromenerf 6y ago

Openbsd is consistent and minimal. Works out of the box with sane defaults but slow Wifi and IO, no bluetooth nor docker. FreeBSD is more complicated, less consistent but also faster and integrate novelties such as zfs, wayland, BT ... I personally prefer openbsd to FreeBSD, but still use Debian Linux for my laptops and servers.

jjuel 6y ago

I have OpenBSD on my Thinkpad T480s and pretty much everything worked great out of the box. Even something like the Volume buttons that on Linux with DWM I had to manually map to amixer they just work. Of course there are some trade-offs. Bluetooth is a big one that might not work for people. Overall compared to FreeBSD the setup was dead simple with hardly any work. I know people complain about speed on OBSD, but I have not noticed it being that much slower. I am in love and don't see myself hopping again for a while (famous last words obviously).