I really wanted to make this article short … but I failed miserably. At least I tried to organize it well so one may get back to it after ‘some’ reading because its not a short le…

This blog by Vermaden is probably one of the most cited in the FreeBSD community when someone in a forum/subreddit asks why FreeBSD. I think it does a good job encapsulating the reasons one would choose FreeBSD over Linux or other OS’s.

I’ve become more partial to the *BSD’s in the past couple of years and respect what each one brings. I do daily drive Debian tho ;)

  • whoamiOP
    3·
    2 years ago

    Edti: you’re original question is basically asking if one of the BSD’s has something like a linux-libre kernel correct?

    I believe OpenBSD won’t ship any binary blobs for things like wifi cards, for example. the microcode is something I would have to look up. Each one should function the way Debian does in terms of how it works out of the box. But getting certain hardware to work might require binary blobs, which I think is true in Linux, with things like NVIDIA cards.

    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenBSD-Sucks-Presentation

    https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

    If I understand correctly, the core of each BSD is free software (code you can see and modify), but to make things like certain wifi cards or GPU’s work you may have to use proprietary code. For example, NVIDIA releases drivers for FreeBSD, but I would imagine those are similar to what you get in linux—binary blobs.

    EDIT: I was going through a NetBSD mailing list, and it looks like they do ship some proprietary code, but that discussion was more than a decade old, so I don’t know for sure.