Anyone using BSD?

[WarFox]

Hey all, just wanted to ask the community if anyone has any experience using one of the BSDs? I have gotten into it a lot recently, actually replacing most of my Linux systems with NetBSD. Or I guess if anyone is interested in BSD and wants to ask a question, reply here and Ill answer as best as I can.

[cwade12c]

I've wanted to try openbsd, but I haven't tried any of the BSDs. I was given Windows on my company device, but found developing on it to be miserable, so I wiped it and installed Linux. I spend 90% of my time on Linux and have greatly increased my workflows.

I'd be curious to know what you think of BSD. What do you like about it? Has it made you more productive compared to other operating systems? How often are you using it? Any notable differences between BSD and other unix-like operating systems?

[WarFox]

@cwade12c

I also have been a long time user. Actually, you guys got me into arch and such when I was in highschool all those years ago. But yea, recently have gotten on the BSD train. What do I like about it? It is stricter to adhering to UNIX philosophy and is a direct descendant of UNIX, unlike Linux which was a clean-room re-implementation influenced by minix. The system designs are simpler. All of the BSDs have great documentation compared to 99% of linux distributions. The BSDs are each their own independent OS. Binary compatibility is not the same across and each have taken their own routes (for instance, DragonFly BSD is transitioning to a microkernel). The major selling point for me is they also own their stack from bootloader to kernel to userland, which makes it a really solid cohesive system. In contrast, the linux kernel is its own independent project of GNU userland tools, they just happen to so benefit by working together. The communities are also close knit compared to Linux and less toxic. Within a couple of weeks of running NetBSD, I was working with the audio dev of NetBSD to test a patch of their for a machine of mine. I do believe their developers (BSD in general) are much more involved in their communities. The ports systems are great. My favorite by far is pkgsrc (NetBSD project) since it can run across multiple operating systems. I actually use pkgsrc and pkgin on Mac OS Big Sur as a replacement for brew and macports.

The not so great part is hardware support. NetBSD is nice because all drivers are shipped with the generic image and NetBSD does not take a performance hit when unnecessary drivers are loaded into the kernel (where as FreeBSD and Linux are according to a few NetBSD devs I talked to). So that was on the easiest hardware wise to find out if your system is supported. The main issue would be wifi and GPUs. FreeBSD for sure does not have any 802.11 ac support (Adrian Chadd is working on it slowly), NetBSD and OpenBSD have a few devices that are supported for 802.11 ac. Otherwise, have a card with b/g/n that is supported or have a wifi dongle ready that is supported.

The patch I tested for the Audio netbsd dev was for my Macbook Pro. I've got a 2015 that is dual booted with Big Sur (mostly for school stuff) and NetBSD. I dont fully understand the audio workings, but NetBSD was defaulting to channel 4 when it should have defaulted to channel 2. So the dev made a patch to check to make sure channel 2 was the default and if not, to make it so.

My experience with OpenBSD has been on an old iBook G4 that I acquired last year. OpenBSD has great legacy powerpc support. It is a great system and Theo has done a great job with it since he forked from NetBSD in the early 90s. CWM is interesting and praised by users, if your not familiar, CWM is a window manager made by the OpenBSD community. And of course, OpenBSD has a legacy of great contributions like creating OpenSSH, Doas, LibreSSL, etc. I have also used it as a webserver. Their in-house HTTP client is nice and it integrates well with acme-client for automated LetsEncrypt SSL certs.