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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 comput
by 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 agoI 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.