Oddbean

Many people are unaware of BSD systems. BSD is an authentic Unix, Linux is a clone. I will tell you that part of the success of Linux was due to the legal problems that BSD faced in the late 80's and 90's by AT&T. If BSD had not faced these legal problems, perhaps Linux would not exist today. The BSD operating systems are excellent, the main branches are: - FreeBSD, the BSD system par excellence, is where more innovation in all aspects, to consider its magnificent integration with ZFS (the best on the market), its virtualization system and isolation Jails that predates docker and derivatives and its ports system (package manager). It also stands out for its performance, where in some aspects it surpasses Linux as in web servers. - OpenBSD, the most secure operating system in the world, as it is the one that reports the fewest vulnerabilities, only followed by AIX. - NetBSD, one of the systems that supports more architectures. Pioneer in integrating certain technologies such as IPv6, a great quality, a very well written and organized code and compliance with standards and a great file system such as BSD FFS. - DragonFLY BSD, a great unknown but a great operating system, many FreeBSD nerds have switched to it. Hybrid kernel like Macos, Hammer file system (snapshots, compression and deduplication), LWKT (Light Weight Kernel Threads) implements lightweight threads in the kernel for better concurrency management, native virtualization in the kernel with vkernel and native swapcache. Some fun facts that will interest you. BSD licenses are more permissive than the GPL, allowing your code to be included in other projects and the resulting code to be licensed under other licenses, including proprietary or closed licenses. Macos is a derivative of FreeBSD and uses many parts of it, although the core of Macos called Darwin is opensource (APSL). Macos on the other hand is a certified Unix. Other systems that use FreeBSD are Playstation 3, Playstation4 and Nintendo Switch. Netflix, WhatsApp and FligthAware are other examples of companies using FreeBSD in their infrastructures due to the incredible performance of their TCP/IP stack under high loads and web servers. When Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft, they were using FreeBSD servers, no need to tell you what an ordeal it was for Microsoft to migrate their architecture to Windows Server. Finally, the integration and cohesion of BSD operating systems are due to their development as a complete system, with the kernel and user space designed and maintained by the same team. This contrasts with Linux, which is primarily a kernel around which distributions add software and tools to form a complete operating system. Long live BSD, the UNIX. nostr:note1wgvhmxzrvkry2sr4yeyemetfy3uy3neqjxd74f5339zjv2ke7vaqyg6lvm

For starters, you have several FreeBSD distributions that simply make it easy to install, once installed, it is a FreeBSD system as is. - GhostBSD - TrueOS - MidnightBSD - NomadBSD Although the installation of FreeBSD is not far from the difficulty of installing Debian in text mode. Besides, the official documentation of FreeBSD is much better than that of any Linux distribution, so I recommend that if you dare to start directly with FreeBSD.

Thank you! I do not have issues or difficulties installing OS also via text mode… I’ve been doing it for decades… my main concern is that, as far as I know, there are several issues with BSD regarding hardware support especially on laptops… WiFi, keyboard backlight, touchpad, graphic card, etc…

Hardware support is less than in Linux, it is a matter of testing with the hardware you have. Also don't discriminate the option of using virtual machines, here you won't have hardware problems, BSD is one more tool you have available.

Both Linux and FreeBSD comply with the POSIX standard, most Linux programs compile with little or no modifications to BSD and vice versa, all Linux software is in BSD and vice versa. Without going any further, openssh is an OpenBSD project and is used by all Linux.

i choose CC0 because it's recognisable and because once that's out in the public domain it's easy to fight a patent i think that people who prefer to hide their source code are stupid, and ultimately are not going to do very well in the long run how many open source exploits has there been? i think you can count them on one hand closed source? how many grains of sand in the ocean?

I understand the concerns about the license, I myself would not use it in my code, but I am not God, I do not have to understand all human positions, and that does not detract from my appreciation of the greatness of BSD.

Great read .. I remember the Unix licensing wars that ultimately led to the need for Linux, and the resulting groundswell of information, applications, documentation, and usability that underpins its adoption today Hadn't realised some of the FreeBSD usage .. lolz on MS porting hotmail to their hotmess of windows server 'architecture' 🙏

“Unix certified” aparently is a thing to mainly get on US government contracts. BSD systems are good for their own reason but the hyper focusing on the “true unix” thing anachronism at this point. Linux *is* the Unix of today. Even the version of ZFS FreeBSD uses is developed first on Linux nowadays! You can’t say I’m wrong when most of those systems spend time and resources developing and maintaining “Linuxlator” layers to run Linux binaries. What about innovation then? FreeBSD scheduler doesn’t support big.LITTLE architectures in current year. Linux got multiple new file systems since FreeBSD ported ZFS from Solaris. Have fun running BSDs but disregard the slogans.

Sure is opaque to new users, though. I just put GhostBSD on a thumbdrive, and it started the boot and then errored almost immediately and stopped. Then I put NomadBSD on it. Boot startup went for a good length, then dropped me out at a command line asking the location of a file. Then I put DragonFlyBSD on it. Finally, one that finished booting, but the most recent release comes with no GUI! It left me at the root login with no idea how to see if my network was working, or how to find a GUI to install, or even what GUI's were available. I'm still trying to find a guide to get a GUI going on Dragonfly--haven't found one.