[Question] As a Linux user, why should I try a BSD? Which advantages do they have over Linux? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ANDROID_16 · 2019-08-22 08:49 You might like this video https://youtu.be/cofKxtIO3Is ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dancorbe · 2019-08-22 09:07 For some of us, it comes down to what exactly software freedom means. Ideologically, the GPL does not line up with my world view. I like the fact that the BSDs are collectively working to rid themselves of GNU software. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jaypatelani · 2019-08-22 09:08 These two threads might be interesting for you https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/an4l2b/why_bsd_over_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/9g3jxt/is_there_an_advantage_of_ using_bsd_over_linux/ https://www.over-yonder.net/%7Efullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DamienCouderc · 2019-08-22 09:19 If you don't know why you should try one of the BSD then don't do it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kyleW_ne · 2019-08-22 09:23 Depends on which BSD you are talking about. FreeBSD for one is rock solid stable. Think Debian conservative but to an extreme. Each point release has to be binary compatible with software from a prior release. So for example XFCE built for 12.0 should work in 12.1 through 12.4. Only when 13 comes are API allowed to change and even then the kernel has comparability modes to run binaries built for older versions. Then there is the network stack that receives so much fan fair. As an end user you probably won't notice the improvements but when operating 100gbe cards it is a huge improvement. The tight integration of ZFS as a first class citizen and not something extra bolted on is a huge factor too. It allows for things like boot environments where changes can be rolled back if something did break. The fact that the base system is one big package so to say and not a disjoint collection of packages like in Linux is huge. You might be aware of the Linux from scratch book about all the hoops to jump through to have a working Linux system at just the command line. In FreeBSD this is as simple as building the world. The freedom to choose between binary and source based package management could also be considered a benefit but this is already found in some Linux distros like Arch so isn't an exclusive. Turning to OpenBSD and what that gets you is more of the same but with some additional benefits. Open is also rock solid stable but comes with huge security features to make it the most secure Unix like operating system period. Features that are just now being talked about for Linux have been in open for years. Features like relinking the kernel at boot time, w xor x memory, stack protectors, etc. Systems I'm still learning about like pledge and unveil are unique to OpenBSD. Open also comes with a full desktop support baked in with a custom secure xorg implementation. Not to mention a super secure native http and ftp server. OpenBSD is also super portable like Debian or Gentoo and runs on tons of platforms. NetBSD shares many of the strengths of both OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It is even more portable than OpenBSD and is supposedly the most portable Unix out there running on anything from a Sega Dreamcast up to modern many core amd64 server processors. ZFS is still experimental here though. NetBSD is also famous for it's source based package manager called pkgsrc. Moving next to dragonflyBSD, I know the least a out it and it is probably the smallest BSD version. It is most famous for it's two original file systems called hammer and hammer2 that promise to be better than ZFS and btrfs. In conclusion, free or open or net BSD gives you a rock solid platform that depending on what flavor you go with has different pros and cons. This is also a good point to mention that all of the BSDs have access to a great file system called UFS or FFS that is highly performant and comparable to ext4. Now for weaknesses. All BSDs suffer from less hardware support than Linux with it being in general like this free → open→net in terms of hardware support greatest to least. For example, FreeBSD is the only one with a Nvidia driver and net didn't pick up USB 3 support till recently. Free and dragonfly focus a lot on performance and are frequently toe to toe with Linux performance, winning some benchmarks by a hair and closely loosing others; the same can't be said of open and net. Their focus on security in open's case and portability in net's means that objectively they perform worse than Linux. OpenBSD goes as far as disableling hyper threading by default in the name of security. I hope you can see that all 4 of the *BSDs have something unique going for them and valid use cases. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are frequently used as desktop OSes by a good number of people. It's just the projects have less manpower than Linux, but each have value nonetheless. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-22 09:31 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dancorbe · 2019-08-22 09:35 I'm an emacs user too but I don't do anything TO emacs that would run me afoul of GPL's distribution restrictions. It's also not part of the base OS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Xenepa · 2019-08-22 11:25 Used to run it for pf, zfs and jails. Now, however... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- craftkiller · 2019-08-22 12:07 So one of the cool features of the *BSDs is it adds a search function to Reddit where you can see the previous 500 times this exact question has been asked ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-22 13:24 To answer your first question, there are a few reasons. - You want to see the differences and similarities between Linux and BSD - You want to see what UNIX was like before Linux came along (modern BSD is far different than the various UNIXes that came before it, but it's much closer than most Linux distros) - You want to see how the "other side" of Open Source software works; the BSDs are not GPL licensed, it's a different philosophy on what constitutes "Free Software". As for your second question, I can only speak from my own experience, so here goes. OpenBSD has one of the simplest and fastest installers of all the Free operating systems out there. The only ones that come close in my experience are Slackware Linux, Void Linux, Alpine Linux (which basically copies the OpenBSD installer), and Haiku. OpenBSD is extremely secure in the default install due to the authors seeking correctness and security in their code. It also has some of the best documentation of any OS, built right in via man pages that are complete, concise, and easy to understand. OpenBSD is probably the only OS that you can figure out how to use completely without an Internet connection of any kind just by reading the built in documentation. Once you learn the base install, you'll find you don't need much more to have a complete, modern OS. Basically just install your web browser of choice, switch to CWM (if you like tiling managers) or install Xfce or GNOME if you prefer, and you're set. Firefox and Chromium are both available as packages, and there are a few other browsers if you prefer something less mainstream (I recommend Surf especially if you go with a tiling window manager). Since version 6.4 you don't have to do anything special before installing packages, just "pkg_info -Q *packagename*" to find a package and "pkg_add *packagename*" to install it and its dependencies. OpenBSD does have some disadvantages. The biggest is hardware support. Whereas the Linux kernel is a gigantic monstrosity of drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware made since the 90s, OpenBSD tends to focus hardware support to a fairly narrow set of common kit. Basically, if it's a Thinkpad laptop or a major branded desktop (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc) you'll probably run into no issues hardware-wise. Even on less well known hardware you're likely to be fully supported outside certain WiFi chips. The exception is any hardware that requires closed firmware to operate; the biggest one here is anything by Nvidia. The OpenBSD devs consider Nvidia to be extremely hostile towards open source, so they in turn are extremely hostile towards Nvidia. There's also the issue of perceived speed/responsiveness. Out of the box, OpenBSD is not optimized for desktop use but with just a few tweaks it can be as fast as or faster than Linux on the same hardware. I haven't mentioned the other BSDs because I don't have as much experience with them. I used NetBSD back in the early 2000s, and OpenBSD was created by people who split off from the NetBSD project early on, but they have since diverged quite a bit and are very different now. As for FreeBSD, I've only had negative experiences with it so I can't advise you there. It doesn't mean it's a bad OS, it's actually the most popular BSD by far, I just didn't have time to work out its issues with my hardware at the time, and haven't felt the need to try it again. Definitely check it out as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- beaknit · 2019-08-22 14:43 In short, it’s a smaller ecosystem but almost all of it is written by very experienced Unix diehards. So: far fewer security and stability problems. (Also: drastically-reduced-complexity-as-a-feature.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dlangille · 2019-08-22 15:40 This gets asked so frequently. Are the archives of no use to you? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-22 16:57 If anything BSD isn't free. It allows you to take freedom away from others. GPL preserves freedom so everyone has it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dagit · 2019-08-22 17:02 I don't currently have much experience with either FreeBSD or OpenBSD but I've been wanting to run a BSD on my thinkpad. From the reviews and googling I've done it seems like OpenBSD typically supports laptops better. There may be additional caveats I'm unaware of such as it supports fewer models of laptops but supports them better? Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there as a situation where OpenBSD may have better hardware support than FreeBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-22 17:09 I [wrote about this](https://old.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/c1qnjc/long _time_linux_user_want_to_give_bsd_a_try/ereygg5/) a couple of months ago. I know Reddit's search is crap, but would it have killed you to switch to "new" view and scrolled back through the last few months' worth of old posts? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- j0holo · 2019-08-22 18:23 So yeah, it's just what you understand as freedom. Different people, different opinions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-22 18:38 How is taking away other people's freedom considered a freedom? The GPL simply ensures that freedoms are preserved for everyone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Moises95 · 2019-08-22 19:16 https://www.over-yonder.net/%7Efullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- j0holo · 2019-08-22 20:58 You don't take away someones freedom by adopting open source software and selling it with your own modifications or keeping it closed. GPL has IMHO the problem that it thinks that everybody wants to look at the code and modify to give back to the community. In reality the amount of people that can program is really small. The amount of people that contribute to open source even smaller. So GPL is more freedom to programmers in a certain way. BSD licenses are more free for others to use their source code. A maintainer of FreeBSD said in a interview/presentation that most companies will eventually contribute back to FreeBSD because they want the new features but they are way behind. So the best way to get up to date is to introduce their custom code back into the open source community. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kyleW_ne · 2019-08-22 21:36 User dagit is right. Laptop use of OpenBSD out of the box can be better than FreeBSD because the drivers for newer intel integrated graphics chips is included out of the box and also suspend and resume I've read works better out of the box. I do believe that less wifi cards are supported by Open vs Free but don't have any links to back that up. Simply because OpenBSD doesn't do NDA agreements to get binary drivers into the OS. Performance wise I stand by what I said though because of the giant lock used by the OpenBSD kernel for multithreading and FreeBSD has more fine grained locking so in theory at least Free should be faster on the same laptop than Open. I'm not an expert on kernel multithreading though so admit I don't fully understand locking in the kernel. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-22 22:52 You are taking away a persons right to inspect what their machine is doing by closing the source. You may not be a developer that wants to give back but you can still be knowledgeable enough to read the code. You may want to hire something to audit to to make sure its really doing what a vendor says it is. You may even want to change its behavior in ways upstream doesn't want. Take Sony's PS4. The operating system is heavily based on FreeBSD but they don't give you access to any source code. Its difficult to even find a place where Sony admits this. People who buy a PS4 have no way to audit the code to see what Sony is doing. These users have lost their freedom and I can't find evidence Sony has given anything back. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- craftkiller · 2019-08-22 23:25 THEY are taking away that freedom from THEIR end users when they close the source. BSDs are not closed source, I have multiple patches I have written and apply locally to my freebsd tree. It's not like without FreeBSD you would get the source code to the PS4, they would have just written their own or used an off-the-shelf commercial offering. The way I see it, BSD licensed code can be used anywhere by anyone for anything so if I write BSD licensed code then I am solving problems. Like fully solved, like polio. GPL only solves problems for a subset of the population. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-22 23:40 No one should be allowed to take away freedoms from anyone else for any reason. We either live in a free society or we don't and that means we must all allow each other to have the same freedoms. Without FreeBSD the PS4 would of been much more expensive to develop and take far longer to create. They leveraged public knowledge which we all paid for(taxes helped pay for BSD development) and used it for their own gain without giving anything back. When I write GPL code I'm not only solving a problem I'm making sure others can see what I did and improve upon it. The only limit I put on it is you have to give others the same freedom I gave you. These freedoms should be given to everyone by law, not just by license. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- craftkiller · 2019-08-23 05:17 > the only limit I put on it There's the core of our disagreement right there. You're okay putting a limit on the freedom, I'm not. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- j0holo · 2019-08-23 06:55 Okay, the point about wanting to hire somebody to inspect the code is a solid point. That is realistic. But do most people really care what their ps4 runs? Most people don't give a fuck at all. They just want to use it. 99.9% of all people who will buy a console will just don't care. So how is it taking away freedom when people don't care or don't understand that it is even possible? GPL is assuming to much of people, and calling looking at the source code freedom is just weird when most people don't even understand HTML or 5 lines of Python. Lots of great software wouldn't exist if everything was GPL licensend or had a similar license. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dancorbe · 2019-08-23 08:34 This is fundamentally what it boils down to. My freedom to (or not to) share my work. But you won't be able to convince the Stallmanites otherwise. There's also practical problems with the GPL. The GPL creates a situation where if code was originally BSD-licensed, contributions become a one way street. Because you cannot take changes in the GPL'd branch and contribute them back upstream without running afoul of the GPL's distribution clause. There have been several real- world examples illustrating this problem. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- joed_ · 2019-08-23 13:25 Volume keys and brightness keys working out of the box is also a nice touch on OpenBSD (even without X11). > I do believe that less wifi cards are supported by Open vs Free but don't have any links to back that up. That's true. But the set of supported cards is pretty similar. I know that FreeBSD has at least one driver with GPL-components in base (bwn, but the GPL components are disabled unless you build your own kernel) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-23 16:42 You want the freedom to take away freedom from others. This is like a slave owner arguing you're taking away his freedom to own people. If you want to see the dangers of the BSD license look at wine. Originally it was licensed BSD. Cedega committed to add better DirectX support while the rest of the open source community worked on implementing other Windows API. Cedega released winex which included all the recent open source work plus their DirectX implementation. Cedega kept promising to release the DirectX improvements but kept post posing saying it wasn't ready for public view. While doing this they kept encouraging wine to ignore DirectX so conflicts didn't arise. It became clear this was a tactic to leverage open source work and prevent it from competing with their product(winex). wine changed their license to GPL which has resulted in a much healthier community and faster development. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-23 16:54 > But do most people really care what their ps4 runs? Most people don't give a fuck at all. They just want to use it. 99.9% of all people who will buy a console will just don't care. So how is it taking away freedom when people don't care or don't understand that it is even possible? > Tell that to the modding community. There are thousands of people trying to get their consoles to do more and have to exploit security issues so people can get the machines they own to do what they want. Just because the majority of people don't express a freedom doesn't mean it should be taken away. Most people don't own guns, does that mean we should ban them all? > GPL is assuming to much of people, and calling looking at the source code freedom is just weird when most people don't even understand HTML or 5 lines of Python. > Most people can't work on their house or fix their car. It doesn't mean we should prevent it or allow others to prevent customers from fixing the things they own. > Lots of great software wouldn't exist if everything was GPL licensend or had a similar license. I'd argue the Internet would function way better if everything was GPL licensed. Because anyone could view and modify any code there would be less vulnerabilities, faster development, and we wouldn't need 10 products that do the same thing because no one shares code. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- joelkp · 2019-08-24 12:19 To add something on DragonFly BSD: For most people, the main reason to look into it is nerdy interest and curiosity. It's been described as a "developer-friendly" OS, which has developed a somewhat OpenBSD-like feel over time. It's not only more experimental than FreeBSD, but also simpler. It's often behind in adding and updating drivers, but works well both for high-performance crunching and for older laptops where FreeBSD has good-enough support. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dancorbe · 2019-08-24 14:19 You cite wine as an example of why the BSD license is a bad thing, but what about the Atheros wireless driver? It was stolen nearly verbatim from OpenBSD and put into the Linux Kernel. And I use the word stolen accurately here, because the driver was improved upon and the author of the now GPL'd version refuses to contribute those changes back upstream under its original license. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nukem996 · 2019-08-24 21:21 The BSD license allows you to incorporate BSD licensed code and not give anything back. Thats one of the "freedoms" BSD users promote. The code is still open for anyone to inspect, modify, and use under the GPL. Its funny you complain about the Atheros driver being "stolen" when the entire Windows TCP/IP stack was originally from BSD and nothing was ever given back and you can't inspect or modify the code. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-25 03:13 Everything is much more organized and stable. FreeBSD treats you like the superuser, not like a child. Also, you can build FreeBSD however you want, similarly to arch ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-25 03:53 Some people prefer what's under hood with the BSDs versus a Linux distro. Right tool for the job, OpenBSD may be better suited for a DNS server than Linux for example, NetBSD might be more ideal for embedded computing. FreeBSD has a lot of tools that can make a sysadmin/devops job a lot easier. I use OpenBSD and find that getting x,y and z done is always easier to me than in Linux which I find to be overly complex in many ways. OpenBSD strives to be pretty simple and straightforward with most everything about the system. (plus better manpages). ​ The better question is what do you do with Linux? If it's just gaming and web browsing, Linux does those a little better and there are less options in the BSDs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dancorbe · 2019-08-25 04:24 > when the entire Windows TCP/IP stack was originally from BSD and nothing was ever given back and you can't inspect or modify the code. We knew we weren't going to get anything back from Microsoft. On the other hand, we never expected to be ripped off by software freedom hypocrites who run around trying to cram their world view down everyone's throats. The whole lot of you are just obnoxious as fuck. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mgladiethor · 2019-08-25 05:09 Probably none ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-25 21:56 It's none of your business what's on a PS4, just like it's none of your business what a video game's source code looks like. If you want a libre video game platform then you're out of luck because there's no profit in that from a corporate perspective. I would suggest abandoning video games because it's only going to get worse from here. Living in the delusion that a company like Sony would provide you a libre platform for anything is just being naive. Plain and simple. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShylockSimmonz · 2019-09-04 15:54 I would say that many of the reasons listed here are ideoligical rather than practical. I mean someone who isn't a coder may not care if the code is cleaner. Those who find Arch daunting aren't going to want to go for an Arch like experience. I have tried OpenBSD, FreeBSD and GhostBSD. Out of those GhostBSD is the only one I would stick with because the desktop environment comes presetup which saves me precious time. Even then I found it tough to stick with because I couldn't find anything a BSD system could do for me, the average user, that my Linux machine couldn't. I will continue to tinker with GhostBSD on a spare system out of curiousity though. That being said i'd rather see casual users on BSD than Windows or Mac due to privacy and security reasons. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chamcham123 · 2019-09-09 16:40 I don't think either is better than the other. But they do take different approaches. Linux is more bleeding edge and has much more extensive driver support. BSD is mature, methodical, well organized, and has excellent documentation. ​ Practically speaking, I don't think you need to convince yourself why you should try BSD. Just do it and see if you like it. Try as many operating systems as you can and decide on your preference.