[rescue] bsd's

[Sridhar the POWERful]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Dan Williams wrote:

> I thought this list might be the best place to ask without starting a
> flame war. I was wondering what the differences are between the
> various bsd variants (netbsd, openbsd and freebsd particually). Which
> versions are best supported on various hardware (sparc,i386 and vax).

I don't even look in the general direction of OpenBSD.  It's NetBSD's
idiot brother.

That leaves us with NetBSD and FreeBSD.  FreeBSD works marginally better
on PC hardware than NetBSD.  On other hardware, though, NetBSD comes on
top, by virtue of it being designed for multiplatform use right from the
start.  Much of NetBSD is machine-independent, and that helps when you are
running multiple platforms.  FreeBSD doesn't run on VAX at all.  I am not
sure if it runs on Sparc, because I get conflicting reports, but I doubt
it's stable.  NetBSD runs fine on both.  I would recommend NetBSD, unless
you are *only* running PC's, and then it's a toss-up between FreeBSD and
NetBSD.

Peace...  Sridhar