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I guess my question was more about something like Debian which would be more comparable to FreeBSD. Ubuntu is based on Debian. PopOS and Mint are built off of U

I guess my question was more about something like Debian which would be more comparable to FreeBSD. Ubuntu is based on Debian. PopOS and Mint are built off of Ubuntu. They are all separate, but still pull the code from their upstream. Why isn't there a situation like that with the BSDs? As far as I know the only ones that exist like that are GhostBSD and HardenedBSD. Why do the BSDs split for good instead of just pulling from upstream and making some changes? There are also private linux distros. I wasn't really getting into them since they aren't available.

toast0 3y ago
OpenBSD split from NetBSD about philosophy, and the changes go deep. I never used PC-BSD, but I gather it is (or was?) mostly a few changes on top of FreeBSD, so it would fit your model. FreeNAS/TrueNAS core is more or less a specialized distribution of FreeBSD. Otoh, DragonflyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD; there were big differences in opinion on how SMP should be implemented, and then big differences in implementation, making it hard to just pull and make changes.