8 ms·

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

chousuke 5y ago
I recommend giving OpenBSD a try over the others. It's just... a clean OS, and the base system is extremely well documented; to the point that I think it's the only OS you can learn inside out without ever using Google. OpenBSD might not be the best choice for any given use, but it's so remarkably consistent and understandable that I think everyone interested in alternative OSes should try it out at least once.
- kazen44 5y ago
  OpenBSD has been the OS with the lowest amount of maintenance in my opinion. used it as a webserver and VPN appliance for a couple of years now. only thing in terms of maintenance is the following when a new release is released. pkg_add -u ( i usually update extra packages every 6 months, which is mainly lets encrypt). syspatch sysupgrade reboot: after reboot sysmerge to see if i need to do a config diff. Has been rocksolid and very future rich in base aswell.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    While sysupgrade is convenient, there's usually some manual steps. Always read the upgrade guide before upgrading.
    - wahern 5y ago
      For the OpenBSD curious: This release only includes changes related to SNMP, which I imagine are irrelevant to most people, though probably exciting for a subset of OpenBSD users. https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade70.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade70.html The upgrade guide for 6.9 gives a better flavor for how OpenBSD handles and documents subsystem and configuration changes: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html Notice how succinct and consistent (across decades!) are the upgrade guides. The above have the same basic format and content as this one from 2004: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade35.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade35.html I've been doing remote upgrades of OpenBSD and Linux (mostly Debian, but also occasionally Red Hat derivatives) for over 20 years. While I've fortunately only rarely encountered significant problems with any of them, OpenBSD upgrades are the only ones where I can have any confidence in understanding and tracking how the system evolves across upgrades. Follow the upgrade guide and delete outdated files (much easier since sysclean(8)), and a 10-year-old OpenBSD box can have a filesystem as pristine as a freshly installed system. I'm not one of those people who wants pristine for the sake of pristine. But pristine is important when you care about security, and maintenance burden is a huge component of security, as are simplicity and transparency.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- melony 5y ago
  I don't want a OS where I have to read man pages and documentation to get around. The whole self documentation excuse is the same reason why Emacs is slowly losing market share. People want software that is intuitive, and failing that, have all answers available on their favorite search engine. Short of baking a chatbot or search engine into OpenBSD, relying purely on self documentation is not sustainable. Though the idea of Clippy being powered by GPT3 does sound appealing.
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    Sure, you could make the OS CLI "intuitive" (by which I am sure you mean discoverable) by supplying the 'help' command, but in the end wouldn't this still amount to reading a bunch of text?..
  - lcall 5y ago
    You can still use search engines, but once you learn your way around the documentation, you might find it is more reliable and quicker. To me, it seems worthwhile to have fewer 0-day bugs to worry about, and more reliable separation between user accounts (fewer privilege escalation bugs, etc etc). (I also recommend setting default umask to 0077 for the same reason, except while using pkg_add -- I have a wrapper script that undoes it temporarily for that due to issues encountered.) There are reasons people use Windows or Apple (perceived convenience), and reasons not to (long-term cost/benefit decisions for known uses). In case it becomes useful to anyone: One way to traverse the docs is (occasionally helpful) is using something like http://man.bsd.lv/ http://man.bsd.lv/ for OBSD docs, like putting in an "=" (w/o quotes) in the search field then clicking "apropos" shows all the commands -- a useful way to learn "what is available in the base system"; or doing full-text searches (can be learned locally, I have an awkward script for it if needed), (Edit: s/what is available/what is available in the base system/ .) And: I find the ~"only 2 remote holes in the default install since about 1996" to be very impressive. Edit: Another way to look at it might be by priorities. I have come to see priorities of some systems roughly as: OpenBSD: security, openness, correctness (including of documentation), portability. Linux: features, performance, openness, breadth of everything, compatibility, convenience (distributions vary in specifics of course; debian and/or devuan continue to impress me in their own way). FreeBSD: performance, stability, openness. NetBSD: portability, stability?, maybe enjoyment for its developers, openness. (I know least here.) Windows / Apple: profitability while targeting preferences of specific groups who want different specific kinds of convenience, it seems.
- matja 5y ago
  Lack of ZFS, or any checksumming filesystem at all is a hard "no" for me.
ink_13 5y ago
IME it depends on your use case. If you want something you can use as a border router/firewall, OpenBSD. If you want something for more general-purpose computing (like a desktop or home server), FreeBSD. If you want something you can install on your toaster, NetBSD.
- messe 5y ago
  I think this is a bit limiting. FreeBSD's networking performance can be significantly higher than OpenBSD's (although IMO OpenBSD's pf has nicer syntax), so it's a great firewall choice. Similarly, on desktop, OpenBSD can be pretty nice if you're a developer comfortable in the terminal; it runs the same graphics drivers as FreeBSD and Linux (other than NVIDIA). It's defaults tend to be a bit more sensible on desktop/laptops too IMO as its developers are more likely to dogfood it. There's been good progress on NetBSD desktops over the past few years as well, but I'm less familiar with it, so I can't comment too much. With regards to portability, NetBSD supports more systems, but often I've found that OpenBSD is a little bit more stable on the ones they do support as they insist on not using cross compilation: so every system they do support is at least stable enough to build itself, which is a good stress test, especially on older machines.
thuccess129 5y ago
Next level-up cornucopia of options for postunix wannabe irckidz is 9P: 9legacy, 9front, 9fans. That is the cool as quantumcomputing question.
bluejekyll 5y ago
This isn’t all that different from choosing the Linux OS of choice. That decision often is partnered with the package manager that’s desired, and how quickly things are upstreamed in it. Do you want apt, nix, yum/rpm? Then how stable do you want it? Debian, Ubuntu, etc? How much support are you looking for? Redhat, etc. I guess I don’t see a major difference in the complexity of that decision process in the Linux space, which might have been alluded to.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Most Linux distributions are much more similar to each other than BSDs are. At least that's my impression after spending the last month at work porting a bunch of scripts from Linux to several BSDs (Free, Open, and Net). The differences are too many to describe here, from where they install third party libraries, to configuration file locations and formats, to how basic tools work (essential things like grep/sed/awk have (sometimes very) different feature sets, flags, and runtime characteristics (for example, how exactly do they handle signals)). Default shells are also very different, though that's a pretty minor thing. If you compare something like Debian, Alpine, and NixOS, then maybe..
  - bluejekyll 5y ago
    I find each Linux OS that’s based around a different package manager to generally feel like a different operating system. That’s my point. The BSDs all have a common ancestor. The Linux’s tend to all have a GNU user space, the kernels are mostly the same, but the OS layout tends to differ in important ways.
- anthk 5y ago
  Not even close. Each BSD is it's own OS.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    *its
  - bluejekyll 5y ago
foodstances 5y ago
They all feel different, I would encourage you to install each in a VM and play around and see which one you like the best.
epitactic 5y ago
This is why I've setup my homelab with a hypervisor, you don't have to choose and can run each of these operating systems, for specific purposes they are best suited for. This is what I do: OpenIndiana: file server (ZFS) OpenBSD: firewall, router, network services (DHCP, DNS, NAT) DragonflyBSD: game server FreeBSD: other general application services I haven't found a personal use case for NetBSD yet, though I would like to (it is great for embedded systems).
- bpye 5y ago
  Is OpenIndiana really better than FreeBSD or ZFS on Linux today? I’ve had a pretty great experience using ZFS with NixOS but I’m curious if I’m missing anything.
  - doublepg23 5y ago
    Yeah I think using ZFS on even Linux is fine now since they’re using the same code base at this point.(IME Ubuntu has the most painless experience as it ships with the kernel by default.)
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Which hypervisor are you using for that? I used to run Xen for a similar purpose, but I ended up just running normal debian with a bunch of lxc containers instead after dealing with some Xen issues that were difficult to unravel.
  - epitactic 5y ago
    ESXi (free version), it works well though if I had to do it again from scratch today, I'd probably go with KVM
    - Datagenerator 5y ago
      Tried Proxmox?
hackbinary 5y ago
If you are looking to dip your toe in and have a tinker with BSD, FreeBSD is probably the best place to start because it has spread of compatibility. But if you are looking for more focused projects, then Dragonfly for best out of box desktop experience, openbsd for security and firewall, and netbsd for compatibility and portability across loads of devices.
undoware 5y ago
My advice? Go with OpenBSD. These are the folks that brought you the word 'hackathon', and OpenSSH. (Ever use ssh? Thank OpenBSD.) These are the folks that actually bother to read not just a PR, but actual full codebases, just to make sure their pointers don't dangle. It's been years since the DevOps space was first told to prefer 'livestock' -- disposable, nearly-identical instances -- to pets -- long-lived customized instances and servers -- but as every farmer knows, if you have lots of sheep, the job is a lot easier if you have a sheepdog. Not quite a pet, but not cattle, either. OpenBSD is my sheepdog. It keeps my git repos, it runs my wireguard VPN, and it, above all the other systems I touch, is trusted. But trust is ultimately about people, not about systems. Systems get their trusthworthiness from their creators, the way the moon gets light from the sun. And in trustworthiness, the OpenBSD community has a breathtaking superpower: They can say no. They are good at saying no. Do you know how hard that is -- to have someone ask for a feature, and just tell them off? That's the hardest thing any manager ever has to do, and these guys are good at it. Rare, in FOSS space. These are the folks that are so good at saying 'no' that they ship with a literal actual bespoke copy of 'vi', that does exactly what it is supposed to, does not take packages, and also does not have a package manager pulling in raw github HEADs. (I love you, neovim, but you are so trusting!) OpenBSD has been around for most of my 20+ career in this industry and it's sort of always been this aggressively reliable paperweight of a distro. I'm never quite sure what to do with it (NixOS is my go-to for my workstations -- NixOS + Wayland + Sway + Alacritty + Neovim is as close to godliness as a user interface can come) but OpenBSD finds its uses, and in those uses, it is smooth and heavy and reliable, making it the perfect foil for the rest of my infra: For where NixOS is neurotic and brittle, OpenBSD is saturnine and malleable. I think of my infra as sort of being like a knife blade, with a glittering Nixos/Wayland/Neovim edge supported by a soft, heavy core of OpenBSD. If everything else breaks, so long as I have my OpenBSD instances, I can recover. One final word: At my end, I just finished upgrading my instance at openbsd.amsterdam; big shoutout to that amazing team for their incredible support. (Mischa, in particular, is a force of nature, and I am fan. ;D)
- Datagenerator 5y ago
  Thank you for writing this. Analogous to spinning wheels, the outside rotating very fast ( NixOS/Arch) and near the stable center we have several BSD's. FreeBSD for the excellent ZFS, OpenBSD for vital network functions, Wireguard etc. Cheers, happy donations to the BSD Foundation!
proxysna 5y ago
If you are looking for a great server system give Omnios/Smartos and other Illumos distributions a try. Rock solid, well engineered and legitimately fun to tinker with. OpenIndiana is the desktop option, heard a lot, but i have no experience myself.
t-3 5y ago
OpenBSD for laptops, VM guests, and VPSs. It has a very coherent userland, and the devs dogfood heavily, my go-to for anything I have to actually administer. FreeBSD for servers and NAS, desktop. FreeBSD has high performance all around, ZFS, jails, bhyve, linux compatability, etc. But it's not as nice to administer as OpenBSD. I want to love it, but it's tedious. NetBSD is an OK choice for anything, and very capable, but doesn't stand out for anything other than portability. If you enjoy hacking on things, you might find a lot of use in it.
- _ofdw 5y ago
  Openbsd has consistently scored towards the bottom in all performance benchmarks that I've seen in the last few years, when compared to FreeBSD and various linuxen. I would personally never use it for a laptop.
  - anthk 5y ago
    If you cared about actual security, you would use it in a laptop thanks to bioctl and full disk encryption.
    - ranger_danger 5y ago
      OpenBSD is not really as secure as people make it out to be: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html And plenty of other OSes have FDE and everything in-between.
      - nix23 5y ago
        Really good to see hardenedbsd is being mentioned, thanks for the link.
    - na85 5y ago
      I don't think OpenBSD's reputation for security is warranted. Their vaunted claims of only two remote holes in the default install is useless because if you're using it for a daily driver you're going well beyond the default install.
rgacote 5y ago
It's not like there's not 42 different flavors of Linux...
snvzz 5y ago
Try them all. Or as a start, try any. You can eventually try them all.
theonemind 5y ago
I'd recommend trying one of the big three. If you value performance, FreeBSD. If you like a really well-documented, simple, coherent system, OpenBSD. If you've got a real tinkerer mindset, NetBSD--like, kernel extensions in Lua, run it on anything you can find with a processor in it. They're all good. I wouldn't over-complicate it. Just look at the one with known strengths that most match what you most value and dip in. A lot of the knowledge crosses over if you want to try other ones anyway, they're all related.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ktm5j 5y ago
I'm quite fond of Dragonfly BSD. It's a pleasure to use, well documented and hammerfs seems pretty decent.

chousuke 5y ago

I recommend giving OpenBSD a try over the others. It's just... a clean OS, and the base system is extremely well documented; to the point that I think it's the only OS you can learn inside out without ever using Google. OpenBSD might not be the best choice for any given use, but it's so remarkably consistent and understandable that I think everyone interested in alternative OSes should try it out at least once.

kazen44 5y ago
OpenBSD has been the OS with the lowest amount of maintenance in my opinion. used it as a webserver and VPN appliance for a couple of years now. only thing in terms of maintenance is the following when a new release is released. pkg_add -u ( i usually update extra packages every 6 months, which is mainly lets encrypt). syspatch sysupgrade reboot: after reboot sysmerge to see if i need to do a config diff. Has been rocksolid and very future rich in base aswell.
- snvzz 5y ago
  While sysupgrade is convenient, there's usually some manual steps. Always read the upgrade guide before upgrading.
  - wahern 5y ago
    For the OpenBSD curious: This release only includes changes related to SNMP, which I imagine are irrelevant to most people, though probably exciting for a subset of OpenBSD users. https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade70.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade70.html The upgrade guide for 6.9 gives a better flavor for how OpenBSD handles and documents subsystem and configuration changes: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html Notice how succinct and consistent (across decades!) are the upgrade guides. The above have the same basic format and content as this one from 2004: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade35.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade35.html I've been doing remote upgrades of OpenBSD and Linux (mostly Debian, but also occasionally Red Hat derivatives) for over 20 years. While I've fortunately only rarely encountered significant problems with any of them, OpenBSD upgrades are the only ones where I can have any confidence in understanding and tracking how the system evolves across upgrades. Follow the upgrade guide and delete outdated files (much easier since sysclean(8)), and a 10-year-old OpenBSD box can have a filesystem as pristine as a freshly installed system. I'm not one of those people who wants pristine for the sake of pristine. But pristine is important when you care about security, and maintenance burden is a huge component of security, as are simplicity and transparency.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
melony 5y ago
I don't want a OS where I have to read man pages and documentation to get around. The whole self documentation excuse is the same reason why Emacs is slowly losing market share. People want software that is intuitive, and failing that, have all answers available on their favorite search engine. Short of baking a chatbot or search engine into OpenBSD, relying purely on self documentation is not sustainable. Though the idea of Clippy being powered by GPT3 does sound appealing.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Sure, you could make the OS CLI "intuitive" (by which I am sure you mean discoverable) by supplying the 'help' command, but in the end wouldn't this still amount to reading a bunch of text?..
- lcall 5y ago
  You can still use search engines, but once you learn your way around the documentation, you might find it is more reliable and quicker. To me, it seems worthwhile to have fewer 0-day bugs to worry about, and more reliable separation between user accounts (fewer privilege escalation bugs, etc etc). (I also recommend setting default umask to 0077 for the same reason, except while using pkg_add -- I have a wrapper script that undoes it temporarily for that due to issues encountered.) There are reasons people use Windows or Apple (perceived convenience), and reasons not to (long-term cost/benefit decisions for known uses). In case it becomes useful to anyone: One way to traverse the docs is (occasionally helpful) is using something like http://man.bsd.lv/ http://man.bsd.lv/ for OBSD docs, like putting in an "=" (w/o quotes) in the search field then clicking "apropos" shows all the commands -- a useful way to learn "what is available in the base system"; or doing full-text searches (can be learned locally, I have an awkward script for it if needed), (Edit: s/what is available/what is available in the base system/ .) And: I find the ~"only 2 remote holes in the default install since about 1996" to be very impressive. Edit: Another way to look at it might be by priorities. I have come to see priorities of some systems roughly as: OpenBSD: security, openness, correctness (including of documentation), portability. Linux: features, performance, openness, breadth of everything, compatibility, convenience (distributions vary in specifics of course; debian and/or devuan continue to impress me in their own way). FreeBSD: performance, stability, openness. NetBSD: portability, stability?, maybe enjoyment for its developers, openness. (I know least here.) Windows / Apple: profitability while targeting preferences of specific groups who want different specific kinds of convenience, it seems.
matja 5y ago
Lack of ZFS, or any checksumming filesystem at all is a hard "no" for me.

ink_13 5y ago

IME it depends on your use case. If you want something you can use as a border router/firewall, OpenBSD. If you want something for more general-purpose computing (like a desktop or home server), FreeBSD. If you want something you can install on your toaster, NetBSD.

messe 5y ago
I think this is a bit limiting. FreeBSD's networking performance can be significantly higher than OpenBSD's (although IMO OpenBSD's pf has nicer syntax), so it's a great firewall choice. Similarly, on desktop, OpenBSD can be pretty nice if you're a developer comfortable in the terminal; it runs the same graphics drivers as FreeBSD and Linux (other than NVIDIA). It's defaults tend to be a bit more sensible on desktop/laptops too IMO as its developers are more likely to dogfood it. There's been good progress on NetBSD desktops over the past few years as well, but I'm less familiar with it, so I can't comment too much. With regards to portability, NetBSD supports more systems, but often I've found that OpenBSD is a little bit more stable on the ones they do support as they insist on not using cross compilation: so every system they do support is at least stable enough to build itself, which is a good stress test, especially on older machines.

thuccess129 5y ago

Next level-up cornucopia of options for postunix wannabe irckidz is 9P: 9legacy, 9front, 9fans. That is the cool as quantumcomputing question.

bluejekyll 5y ago

This isn’t all that different from choosing the Linux OS of choice. That decision often is partnered with the package manager that’s desired, and how quickly things are upstreamed in it. Do you want apt, nix, yum/rpm? Then how stable do you want it? Debian, Ubuntu, etc? How much support are you looking for? Redhat, etc. I guess I don’t see a major difference in the complexity of that decision process in the Linux space, which might have been alluded to.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Most Linux distributions are much more similar to each other than BSDs are. At least that's my impression after spending the last month at work porting a bunch of scripts from Linux to several BSDs (Free, Open, and Net). The differences are too many to describe here, from where they install third party libraries, to configuration file locations and formats, to how basic tools work (essential things like grep/sed/awk have (sometimes very) different feature sets, flags, and runtime characteristics (for example, how exactly do they handle signals)). Default shells are also very different, though that's a pretty minor thing. If you compare something like Debian, Alpine, and NixOS, then maybe..
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  I find each Linux OS that’s based around a different package manager to generally feel like a different operating system. That’s my point. The BSDs all have a common ancestor. The Linux’s tend to all have a GNU user space, the kernels are mostly the same, but the OS layout tends to differ in important ways.
anthk 5y ago
Not even close. Each BSD is it's own OS.
- snvzz 5y ago
  *its
- bluejekyll 5y ago

foodstances 5y ago

They all feel different, I would encourage you to install each in a VM and play around and see which one you like the best.

epitactic 5y ago

This is why I've setup my homelab with a hypervisor, you don't have to choose and can run each of these operating systems, for specific purposes they are best suited for. This is what I do: OpenIndiana: file server (ZFS) OpenBSD: firewall, router, network services (DHCP, DNS, NAT) DragonflyBSD: game server FreeBSD: other general application services I haven't found a personal use case for NetBSD yet, though I would like to (it is great for embedded systems).

bpye 5y ago
Is OpenIndiana really better than FreeBSD or ZFS on Linux today? I’ve had a pretty great experience using ZFS with NixOS but I’m curious if I’m missing anything.
- doublepg23 5y ago
  Yeah I think using ZFS on even Linux is fine now since they’re using the same code base at this point.(IME Ubuntu has the most painless experience as it ships with the kernel by default.)
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Which hypervisor are you using for that? I used to run Xen for a similar purpose, but I ended up just running normal debian with a bunch of lxc containers instead after dealing with some Xen issues that were difficult to unravel.
- epitactic 5y ago
  ESXi (free version), it works well though if I had to do it again from scratch today, I'd probably go with KVM
  - Datagenerator 5y ago
    Tried Proxmox?

hackbinary 5y ago

If you are looking to dip your toe in and have a tinker with BSD, FreeBSD is probably the best place to start because it has spread of compatibility. But if you are looking for more focused projects, then Dragonfly for best out of box desktop experience, openbsd for security and firewall, and netbsd for compatibility and portability across loads of devices.

undoware 5y ago

My advice? Go with OpenBSD. These are the folks that brought you the word 'hackathon', and OpenSSH. (Ever use ssh? Thank OpenBSD.) These are the folks that actually bother to read not just a PR, but actual full codebases, just to make sure their pointers don't dangle. It's been years since the DevOps space was first told to prefer 'livestock' -- disposable, nearly-identical instances -- to pets -- long-lived customized instances and servers -- but as every farmer knows, if you have lots of sheep, the job is a lot easier if you have a sheepdog. Not quite a pet, but not cattle, either. OpenBSD is my sheepdog. It keeps my git repos, it runs my wireguard VPN, and it, above all the other systems I touch, is trusted. But trust is ultimately about people, not about systems. Systems get their trusthworthiness from their creators, the way the moon gets light from the sun. And in trustworthiness, the OpenBSD community has a breathtaking superpower: They can say no. They are good at saying no. Do you know how hard that is -- to have someone ask for a feature, and just tell them off? That's the hardest thing any manager ever has to do, and these guys are good at it. Rare, in FOSS space. These are the folks that are so good at saying 'no' that they ship with a literal actual bespoke copy of 'vi', that does exactly what it is supposed to, does not take packages, and also does not have a package manager pulling in raw github HEADs. (I love you, neovim, but you are so trusting!) OpenBSD has been around for most of my 20+ career in this industry and it's sort of always been this aggressively reliable paperweight of a distro. I'm never quite sure what to do with it (NixOS is my go-to for my workstations -- NixOS + Wayland + Sway + Alacritty + Neovim is as close to godliness as a user interface can come) but OpenBSD finds its uses, and in those uses, it is smooth and heavy and reliable, making it the perfect foil for the rest of my infra: For where NixOS is neurotic and brittle, OpenBSD is saturnine and malleable. I think of my infra as sort of being like a knife blade, with a glittering Nixos/Wayland/Neovim edge supported by a soft, heavy core of OpenBSD. If everything else breaks, so long as I have my OpenBSD instances, I can recover. One final word: At my end, I just finished upgrading my instance at openbsd.amsterdam; big shoutout to that amazing team for their incredible support. (Mischa, in particular, is a force of nature, and I am fan. ;D)

Datagenerator 5y ago
Thank you for writing this. Analogous to spinning wheels, the outside rotating very fast ( NixOS/Arch) and near the stable center we have several BSD's. FreeBSD for the excellent ZFS, OpenBSD for vital network functions, Wireguard etc. Cheers, happy donations to the BSD Foundation!

proxysna 5y ago

If you are looking for a great server system give Omnios/Smartos and other Illumos distributions a try. Rock solid, well engineered and legitimately fun to tinker with. OpenIndiana is the desktop option, heard a lot, but i have no experience myself.

t-3 5y ago

OpenBSD for laptops, VM guests, and VPSs. It has a very coherent userland, and the devs dogfood heavily, my go-to for anything I have to actually administer. FreeBSD for servers and NAS, desktop. FreeBSD has high performance all around, ZFS, jails, bhyve, linux compatability, etc. But it's not as nice to administer as OpenBSD. I want to love it, but it's tedious. NetBSD is an OK choice for anything, and very capable, but doesn't stand out for anything other than portability. If you enjoy hacking on things, you might find a lot of use in it.

_ofdw 5y ago
Openbsd has consistently scored towards the bottom in all performance benchmarks that I've seen in the last few years, when compared to FreeBSD and various linuxen. I would personally never use it for a laptop.
- anthk 5y ago
  If you cared about actual security, you would use it in a laptop thanks to bioctl and full disk encryption.
  - ranger_danger 5y ago
    OpenBSD is not really as secure as people make it out to be: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html And plenty of other OSes have FDE and everything in-between.
    - nix23 5y ago
      Really good to see hardenedbsd is being mentioned, thanks for the link.
  - na85 5y ago
    I don't think OpenBSD's reputation for security is warranted. Their vaunted claims of only two remote holes in the default install is useless because if you're using it for a daily driver you're going well beyond the default install.

rgacote 5y ago

It's not like there's not 42 different flavors of Linux...

snvzz 5y ago

Try them all. Or as a start, try any. You can eventually try them all.

theonemind 5y ago

I'd recommend trying one of the big three. If you value performance, FreeBSD. If you like a really well-documented, simple, coherent system, OpenBSD. If you've got a real tinkerer mindset, NetBSD--like, kernel extensions in Lua, run it on anything you can find with a processor in it. They're all good. I wouldn't over-complicate it. Just look at the one with known strengths that most match what you most value and dip in. A lot of the knowledge crosses over if you want to try other ones anyway, they're all related.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ktm5j 5y ago

I'm quite fond of Dragonfly BSD. It's a pleasure to use, well documented and hammerfs seems pretty decent.