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The slightly over-simplified version goes like this: OpenBSD is for firewalls, specialized routers, traffic management, and other internet-facing security appl

The slightly over-simplified version goes like this: OpenBSD is for firewalls, specialized routers, traffic management, and other internet-facing security applications. FreeBSD is a reasonable general-purpose server BSD. It was among the first to have support for "really big" filesystems, but Linux has since caught up a bit. ZFS on FreeBSD is pretty rock-solid though. NetBSD is intended to run on everything. Even toasters (http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php). There's a lot of overlap, and advocates for each will probably point out other things their OSes are good at. In general, Linux has won the race towards user-friendliness. The recent systemd thing has caused (or will cause) the BSDs to fall even farther behind, because it is fundamentally incompatible with BSD (see point 15 on http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html), and more upstream software will begin to develop dependencies on systemd. And, in general, Linux enjoys a greater amount of developer participation, which makes it faster-moving. But, in general, the BSDs have produced more stable operating systems ideal for set-it-and-forget-it servers. I have to regularly work with Debian, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD systems (and irregularly work with just about everything else, even the occasional Solaris). OpenBSD and FreeBSD kick the crap out of Linux when it comes to managing network traffic. But, for my personal machine, it's gotta be Debian.

makomk 13y ago
The desktop experience on Linux has actually got worse over the last few years though, at least for me, to the point that I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows. There's just too many regressions in fundamental things like audio support. I dread to think what the PulseAudio development methodology would bring to init-land, where bugs and crashes have a much bigger impact. (Did you know that there's no such thing as an official stable release of PulseAudio anymore? The latest release, 4.0, includes stuff like a patch that's literally incomplete and breaks audio resampling in some circumstances. This is going to be reverted in 5.0, but that'll come with more major changes and no doubt more breakage from those major changes. Lennart Pottering works for Red Hat and maintains a set of patches for Fedora that fix some of the problems - I've even encountered one major issue that was only patched there by him and not fixed upstream at the time - but from what I've heard Fedora's still not much better.)
- thaumaturgy 13y ago
  Part of the reason I'm on Debian for my daily machine is because the Debian team really seems to make an effort to tread carefully around a lot of that. I'm on the testing branch even, with KDE, and for the most part things work well. The stable branch would probably be better. I can't agree that the desktop experience has gotten worse in recent years. KDE 4 is a huge improvement, and other distributions and window managers are pretty OK too. But ... yeah. I'm not a big fan of HeisenAudio, and I'm really not looking forward to what seems to be the inevitable switch to systemd. My first experience with systemd, a couple of years ago, was horrible, and I altogether abandoned the distribution I was on at the time and fled to Debian. When Debian switches, I'll try it out again for a little while and then maybe give the BSDs another try for desktop use. Lennart is really not my favorite character in software, but mostly I think he's just a symptom of a growing trend in modern software development that's only starting to make real inroads into operating systems: as long as you can argue that the thing you're building is somehow technically better, and as long as you release frequent updates (and don't forget to blog about it!), then it's totally acceptable to break early, break often, and just when users think it's working for good, break it again.
- orkoden 13y ago
  pulse-audio has been a mess from the beginning.

makomk 13y ago

The desktop experience on Linux has actually got worse over the last few years though, at least for me, to the point that I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows. There's just too many regressions in fundamental things like audio support. I dread to think what the PulseAudio development methodology would bring to init-land, where bugs and crashes have a much bigger impact. (Did you know that there's no such thing as an official stable release of PulseAudio anymore? The latest release, 4.0, includes stuff like a patch that's literally incomplete and breaks audio resampling in some circumstances. This is going to be reverted in 5.0, but that'll come with more major changes and no doubt more breakage from those major changes. Lennart Pottering works for Red Hat and maintains a set of patches for Fedora that fix some of the problems - I've even encountered one major issue that was only patched there by him and not fixed upstream at the time - but from what I've heard Fedora's still not much better.)

thaumaturgy 13y ago
Part of the reason I'm on Debian for my daily machine is because the Debian team really seems to make an effort to tread carefully around a lot of that. I'm on the testing branch even, with KDE, and for the most part things work well. The stable branch would probably be better. I can't agree that the desktop experience has gotten worse in recent years. KDE 4 is a huge improvement, and other distributions and window managers are pretty OK too. But ... yeah. I'm not a big fan of HeisenAudio, and I'm really not looking forward to what seems to be the inevitable switch to systemd. My first experience with systemd, a couple of years ago, was horrible, and I altogether abandoned the distribution I was on at the time and fled to Debian. When Debian switches, I'll try it out again for a little while and then maybe give the BSDs another try for desktop use. Lennart is really not my favorite character in software, but mostly I think he's just a symptom of a growing trend in modern software development that's only starting to make real inroads into operating systems: as long as you can argue that the thing you're building is somehow technically better, and as long as you release frequent updates (and don't forget to blog about it!), then it's totally acceptable to break early, break often, and just when users think it's working for good, break it again.
orkoden 13y ago
pulse-audio has been a mess from the beginning.