This community seems a little, uh, inactive, so here’s my shot at stirring up some discussion.

Me, I’m mostly a debian user. Stable for many, many years, but have been using debian sid recently on laptops without any issue.

  • @whoamiOP
    link
    22 years ago

    Wall of text incoming. If you do want any help with any BSD let me know I can try to help.

    I would say try out a BSD that appeals to you in a VM before installing it on hardware.

    With linux we talk about distros. Fedora, Debian, and OpenSuse are all different from each other, but they have so many similarities. After a while, going from one linux distro to another is pretty straightforward imo.

    In the BSD world, each BSD is it’s own unique OS designed by different people with different goals in mind. The three biggest ones are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.

    In general they break down like this:

    FreeBSD: The most popular of the three major ones. Reminded me of debian stable. Has lots of neat features like ZFS, boot environments, jails, bhyve, the linuxolator (allows you to run linux programs–including steam). Biggest community, easiest to find help/solutions for. Check out robonuggie on youtube, it’s a freebsd channel with lots of resources. It’s the operating system that Netflix uses to serve all of its content.

    This blog is really well respected the FreeBSD community:

    https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

    OpenBSD: Known for security. Smaller community. The OS doesn’t have some features you might want or be used to in Linux or proprietary OS’s. If you have an older thinkpad, everything works out of the box; it did for me on a T430. It was a little difficult to set up at first, but once I got used to it I really appreciated it for what it is. Their text based installer can get you up in running in less than 10 minutes. Has probably the best man pages; they actually update them with each new release and provide useful examples.

    Also, OBSD developers will develop their own tools that are smaller, easier to config via text files, rather then use something bigger and bloated. (I normally don’t like the word bloated in software, but it does apply sometimes). For example, they developed tmux, OpenSSH among others.

    This site has some resources for running OpenBSD, but it is not associated with the project:

    https://www.romanzolotarev.com/

    NetBSD: Smallest project and community of the three. Known for running on basically any architecture you can think of. Small but friendly and helpful community. Less online help available via web searches…can’t google for a solution like you might with ubuntu or freebsd. Known for pkgsrc, a powerful package manager that can run on linux, other BSD’s, MacOS.

    https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/90-netbsd-users-why-do-you-use-it-over-freebsd-and-openbsd

    • @y78fpXvK8Zxz
      link
      22 years ago

      Wow thank you for the pretty detailed comment. I’ll check out all 3 because they seem interesting in their own ways. I likely won’t switch from gnu/linux systems but I’m open to trying out BSDs.

      • @whoamiOP
        link
        22 years ago

        lol no problem. I didn’t plan on writing that much but here we are lol. I have installed and used all 3 at some point so If you have any questions feel free to ask.