BSD for Web Dev??? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FearlessOrder · 2019-04-22 22:08 HI! I've got over ten years HW experience (...strictly Windows, extensive Virtualbox...no Linux at all) and moved over to Web Dev (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL and CMS...studying PY, iOS and Android). I've got a WAMP but everything else is open source...GIMP, Inkscape, Paint.net...even Open Office. Started checking out FreeBSD and I understand it uses far less resources than any Win environment. Now I understand there are other flavors of BSD. I'm looking to go bare metal to BSD...goodbye Windows! Please advise...which flavor, am I looking for trouble...no offense. etc. Typical college student laptop; Intel i-5 7200 @ 2.5-2.7G, 8G RAM, 1TB HDD...NO SSD...Win 10. Nothing special, but it served me well and actually saved me when I bought it. Once again, this is my work laptop...so I'm not looking to put myself out of business...lol. Thanks everybody!!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DonovanNagel · 2019-04-22 22:48 First: BSD doesn't have "flavors". They're completely separate operating systems, not distros. Second: It's really difficult to understand what you're asking. Are you asking if BSD operating systems are good for web development? If so, yes. I use FreeBSD for this purpose daily. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FearlessOrder · 2019-04-23 00:02 Thank you! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-04-23 01:34 [removed] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Moises95 · 2019-04-23 05:54 If you don't have experience with any kind of UNIX OS you should first read and practice the command line. And be warned that using any of the BSDs OS it's not easy task for a UNIX newbie. So yes, if you install some BSD on your laptop, you're going to put your self out of business for a couple of hours/days. I encourage you to buy a small second hard drive to install and try the different BSDs on them before doing the definitive jump. This way you could easily swap drives and continue doing your work. I you want a install and forget apporach GhostBSD (which is FreeBSD with preconfigured desktop) should get you started. It's Ubuntu like in the sense its aimed towards newbies with want/need GUI for everything. But keep in mind you will probably need to use the CLI to configure BAMP stack. And when problems arrive you you will still need UNIX knowledge to solve them. I personally use [OpenBSD](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/), documentation is awesome and its a very simple OS. You configure almost everything (networking, automount USB, admin access) with plaintext config files and simple daemons. If you read and understand the documentation you should be able to get your head into easily. Keep in mind BSDs have less hardware support than GNU/Linux (and different between the BSDs) so maybe you will need to replace the WiFi card of your laptop. That's why I recommended a second hard drive to test. If none of the BSDs support your hardware you could always try Debian GNU/Linux (or any other distro). If you really want to get into UNIX I can't recommended enough *THE UNIX PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT* which explain from basic CLI to even some C programming on UNIX. Read this: https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 and probably this https://www.over- yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/winstupid/1 for and introduction to BSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FearlessOrder · 2019-04-23 12:45 THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED TO KNOW. Thanks again! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FearlessOrder · 2019-04-23 12:46 THANK YOU! THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED TO KNOW. ​ THANKS AGAIN! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VyseofArcadia · 2019-04-23 13:45 I myself recently installed openbsd on a laptop, and I found https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/ extremely helpful also. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- poshpotdllr · 2019-04-23 13:49 BCHS or GTFO learnbchs.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- greybeardthegeek · 2019-04-23 14:24 Start with FreeBSD [as a full-screen guest](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/virtualization.html) and when you are comfortable remove the virtualization layer and install directly on hardware. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gumnos · 2019-04-23 21:40 With those machine specs, any of the BSDs will do. I'm partial to FreeBSD (and its spin-offs, HardenedBSD for added security features & TrueOS/GhostBSD for the user-friendly features) & OpenBSD. With only one drive, you don't get some of the redundancy benefits of ZFS that FreeBSD gives you, but you can set `copies=2` on your datasets to mitigate somewhat (and it's still better data safety than not having ZFS). Indeed, I run several BSD machines (all with wimpier specs than your hardware) and do web-dev on them, both remotely (SSH'ed into them) and locally. If you're inexperienced with the BSDs, I'd recommend finding some junker machine (or at least an alternate hard-drive you can swap in/out) so you don't jeopardize your main machine until you're more comfortable with the base install, getting a GUI to your liking, and making sure that you can install & use all the software that you want/need. That way if you encounter difficulties, you still have your main machine (or can reinstall the previous hard-drive) to stay afloat until you feel comfortable enough to make the change permanent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-06-13 15:52 > Intel i-5 7200 @ 2.5-2.7G, 8G RAM, 1TB HDD...NO SSD...Win 10 I run OpenBSD on a ThinkPad T60 that only has a 2GHz Core 2 Duo and 3GB RAM, and that's enough for GNU Emacs, Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc. Since you probably aren't familiar with the Unix shell, I'd suggest creating a free [SDF](https://sdf.org) shell account so you can experiment in a safe environment. Or install Git for Windows and get ```bash``` (one of the many different shells/command lines you can run on Unix) on your current machine. When you're ready, there are howtos for [FreeBSD on desktop](https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/freebsd-on-a-laptop/) and [OpenBSD](https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/) you can use. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- losthalo7 · 2019-07-14 17:39 Trying out NetBSD on SDF is a great idea for someone new to Unix and the command line.