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Re: [LUG] Linux v BSD

 

On 11/09/15 22:38, Neil Winchurst wrote:
> When talking about Windows 10 in a recent thread some one mentioned
> that BSD had some advantages over Linux. A long time ago I did look at
> one version of BSD, and no I can't remember which one.
> 
> Can anyone tell me what these advantages are, if any? I just do some
> ordinary computing, no games and certainly no fancy screen stuff. So
> what would be the best version of BSD to try out, via VBox? I am sure
> that one list member at least suggested that BSD is more secure even
> than Linux.
> 
> Thanks for any advice,
> 
> Neil
> 

I can field this one, especially as it was me that said 'that'...

BSD has a long and illustrious history (all of which you can read about
elsewhere) but the long and short of it is:

FreeBSD - the motherlode: original version, probably best choice.
General purpose OS.
OpenBSD - Theo's infamous fork: security obsessed. Home of openssh and
libressl (my personal favourite - it is a bit hardcore though).
NetBSD - the most portable OS in the world, runs on countless
architectures from x86 to MIPS to toasters. For tinkerers.
PCBSD - a "user friendly" version of FreeBSD, probably the lowest
barrier to entry of all versions thanks to slick wizards and GUIs.
DragonflyBSD - Dillon's fork of BSD, orientated towards server admins:
decidedly not for end users unless you insist on testing HAMMER fs or
something
BitRig - super cool project to port KVM and some other critical linux
stuff to BSD, switch project to LLVM/Clang away from GCC, etc. Sadly
might be stalled, I had very high hopes :[

Your best bet honestly would probably be to grab a PC-BSD installer and
check that out - it will be relatively gentle on you with a GUI
installer and so forth. I'd personally recommend getting a OpenBSD
installer too, finding one of the countless online instruction guides
and following that through: it's very satisfying setting up an OpenBSD
install from scratch because you lovingly hand-craft everything yourself
(unless you script netboots like me but that's a major escalation in
effort).

All BSDs, OpenBSD in particular, are renowned for having astonishingly
complete documentation, either on their respective websites or just in
system. There is pretty much no function, API or kernel call not
exhaustively and precisely documented in the man pages: compared to the
chaos of Linux, it's a thing of beauty.

One word of caution: as excellent as the pkg tools (BSD's many versions
of apt/yum/pacman/etc) have slowly become, it's highly likely that
before long in BSD-land you will find yourself rsyncing a ports tree and
setting compiler flags: if you're not pretty confident with manual
software building and hacking makefiles potentially things can get real
pretty quickly. Stay away from shadowing pre-release or dev versions
until you're happy, because although it's nice to have the latest
versions of software maintaining them yourself entirely from source can
get a bit... well, difficult. Or just clone and snapshot, throw away
your failures until you've got it down.

This is just one of many, many awesome resources out there on the
internets for BSD - arguably the BSD community is a lot, lot friendlier*
and 'purer' (in FSF terms) than what's left of the schismatic Linux
community, or what's left of it:

https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/

That's an excellent walkthrough to make yourself a cracking FreeBSD box
from scratch - you could certainly test in VBox, I maintain several
myself. But personally I love OpenBSD the most: only the insane Plan9
>From Bell Labs interests me as much in the world of operating systems.
Yes it's hard, pf makes your head hurt vs iptables until it finally
clicks and then it's much better and /usr/src/ports will make you rage
until again, it finally clicks in and makes perfect sense. I reckon I'm
about half way converted currently, and as my main workstation Ubuntu
14.04 box is being a total dick and frequently segfaulting xorg etc I'm
seriously considering switching that over for the mother of all
in-person tests. Nothing beats using an OS as your only genuine daily
driver for a week or two to see if you can live with it.

Feel free to ask anything else about BSD chief, big fan and user for 15
odd years now: no guru or anything but I don't mind sharing what
knowledge I do have.

Cheers and good luck with your experiments!

* There is one awkward exception to this: the OpenBSD dev mailing lists
are notoriously very, very, VERY hostile to idiots. Do NOT post things
there, ever. Just google Theo De Raadt for a taste of how he makes Linus
look positively kind, sweet and not angry...

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