On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 11:52:59PM -0400, Peter King via talk wrote:
On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 10:45:09AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
So for me, bsd is only a necessary evil to be used if linux won't run on the hardware, and the last time I had to resort to netbsd to get a machine running and doing useful stuff was about 18 years ago.
The *BSD software ecosystem lags behind Linux in hardware support; as far as I'm concerned, the ports/packages system is years behind Gentoo, Debian, Arch, and others; the communities are smaller and much less open.
Oh you had to bring up ports. I had nicely forgotten about the existence of that. :(
For all that...
OpenBSD is where we get things like openssh from. Their packet-filtering system, PF, is a joy and a delight. The continuous code-auditing means that kernelspace *and* userspace programs that make up the system are often rewritten to get rid of cruft, and run cleanly and efficiently. They are a remarkable implementation of UNIX, without the ``better ideas'' such as systemd, and they are all phenomenally stable -- even more so than Linux. Granted, some of that comes from not having drivers for the latest hardware and innovations. But if clean and debugged code matter to you, if you want better deep ideas like privilege separation and default security, then I'd say there is a reason to have a look at OpenBSD. If you run a server, then you should definitely look at it. There's a reason why the internet ran on *BSD for so long, and why much of it still does.
I think a lot more runs on Linux these days, and it seems you don't need that high end a server before you exceed the capabilities of BSD to even support these days. I see the openbsd release notes for version 5.9 says that installing to a GPT partitioned disk is new in this release, from this year. So they didn't support installing on UEFI systems until this year? No support for installing on larger than 2TB disks before now? Really?
FreeBSD is the most common platform but has fewer distinctive features.
NetBSD runs on almost anything, including toothbrushes, but is otherwise pretty plain vanilla.
-- Len Sorensen