Comparing and Contrasting BSD/OS and NetBSD

LiquidPC writes: ""Even though BSD/OS and NetBSD operating systems have been mostly developed by different developers with some different goals over the past nine years, they share many similarities due to their near identitical open source origins and the open source software that complements the systems" Read the article comparing and contrasting NetBSD and BSD/OS at BSDNewsLetter.com."

on another note..

[josepha48]

NetBSD 1.5.3 is starting to apear on the ftp site. YEAH! There is a i386 port as well as several others...

What's the point?

[saintlupus]

This is a remarkably content free article. For those who want the Cliff's Notes version:

* BSD/OS has a commercial license.

* Some of the binaries in BSD/OS are slightly
smaller.

* The setup scripts are arranged a little differently.

* BSD/OS has more stuff by default, and it might take as much as ten minutes in the package tree to bring NetBSD up to par.

Er, that's about it.

I'd be more interested in a comparison of the three free BSD operating systems; I've been running NetBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, but I've never installed FreeBSD. I've heard it's got something of a Linuxy bloat rather than the grim austerity of the Open and Net OSes... any comments from users? Might as well put _something_ useful in this wasted comments section.

--saint

Re:What's the point?

[O_Sleep]

Throw OS X in the comparison of the three as well.

Re:What's the point?

[ffsnjb]

"Linuxy" bloat only if you choose to install FreeBSD that way. It would be nice to be able to not install the uucp, ppp and isdn utilities by default, but thats about the only unnecessary crap (in my case, others may use it...) I trash on a minimum install.

Re:What's the point?

[someonehasmyname]

I've been running FreeBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, and haven't ever installed NetBSD before.. It's true, FreeBSD does by default take a little more room than OpenBSD (not near as bad as Linux), but I think it's worth it.. FreeBSD's configuration files and everything make much more sense to me than OpenBSD's..

Re:What's the point?

[RevDobbs]

Wow, that's odd... maybe it was just documentation differences, but I took to OpenBSD much quicker than FreeBSD. I recomend OpenBSD to just about everyone looking to learn UNIX these days, the "intro email" and man afterboot provide all you need to get started playing with it.

Re:What's the point?

[MobyTurbo]

Blockquoth the poster:

I'd be more interested in a comparison of the three free BSD operating systems; I've been running NetBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, but I've never installed FreeBSD. I've heard it's got something of a Linuxy bloat rather than the grim austerity of the Open and Net OSes... any comments from users? Might as well put _something_ useful in this wasted comments section.

Wasted comments section? It's not wasted if you want to read canned AC posts about BSD being dead. ;-D

Seriously though, I haven't used OpenBSD, and have only used NetBSD via a shell account on someone else's boxen, but FreeBSD is a lot less bloated in it's initial install than all major Linux distributions. The main reason I chose it over NetBSD or OpenBSD is it's larger (in fact humongeous) ports selection - very useful since I use it primarily as a workstation. (Am I the only one that uses BSD as something besides only a server or firewall?) Most of ports is not installed by default however; though my system was even lighter than average since I installed using the 4.6 mini-ISO due to being a dialup user, which meant that I had to use ports to fetch X Windows.

Re:What's the point?

[dohcvtec]

FreeBSD is my top choice for a desktop Unix-like system. In my experience, it's "snappier" performance-wise than any other Unix or Unix-like system I've used.

Re:What's the point?

[benedict]

No, you're not alone. I used a FreeBSD
workstation for years, until Mac OS X came
out.

At work I use a diskless X terminal running
NetBSD.

Re:What's the point?

[Moridineas]

I've been running NetBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, but I've never installed FreeBSD. I've heard it's got something of a Linuxy bloat rather than the grim austerity of the Open and Net OSes...

I've used FreeBSD a good bit, and have one OpenBSD firewall box setup. They both have their good sides and bad sides imho.

The main good things about FreeBSD imho are the bigger ports collection and more users (more chance someone has had your problem before ;) The install program for FreeBSD is a lot friendlirt than the Open (though Open went 100% fine for me) and to me FreeBSD config files are easier to setup. OpenBSD on the other hand as a Firewall type box can't be beat imho, the ease of seting it up and writing pf rules can't be beaten. I'm not sure I'd want my personal desktop running OpenBSD though.

Re:What's the point?

[dohcvtec]

...something of a Linuxy bloat...
Hardly; even with full source code + the ports collection installed, it only consumes about 700MB IIRC. OpenBSD does have a very small footprint, while still being very complete, but FreeBSD isn't that far off. Besides, for all of the utilities installed, there is one and only one version installed. I've seen plenty of Linux distributions with 3 versions of application foo and 3 versions of application bar installed - what's the point?

Eh

[neroz]

This would have been a lot more interesting if they compared the kernels instead of userland.. all unixes can have the same userland. blah.