[rescue] bsd's

[R. Lonstein]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 07:32:11AM -0400, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
    [snip]
> I don't even look in the general direction of OpenBSD.
> It's NetBSD's idiot brother.

Sounds like a troll, Sridhar, but I'll bite. :) 

OpenBSD is a fork from NetBSD and the two cross-pollinate. The code has
been audited for security and the track record for vulnerabilities is
good. Despite the focus on security, the environment isn't spartan. The
networking and firewalling (yes, I mean PF) is good. The system tends to
work without a lot of tweaking and, in my opinion, the installation
routine is better than that of other BSDs. The man pages are
exceptionally good. The port system works well (that can be said for all
the BSDs, really). What's not good? The size of the base system is
growing but NetBSD can still be run comfortably in 40-70MB. And then
there is the attitude of the core developers. I think this is the idiocy
you're referring to.

> That leaves us with NetBSD and FreeBSD. FreeBSD works
> marginally better on PC hardware than NetBSD. On other

FreeBSD has the popular attention, reportedly the largest collection of
packages, and- if that matters- SMP on x86 in the stable branch.
NetBSD's SMP on x86 is reported to be stable and has nearly as many
packages. Most things that can compile on another BSD will compile on
NetBSD. The FreeBSD installer is idiot friendly but seems like overkill
to me and it tends to install too much unnecessary stuff, bloating the
system requirements.

> 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
    [snip]
> are *only* running PC's, and then it's a toss-up between
> FreeBSD and NetBSD.

I'd put it as a toss-up between Open and Net.

+$0.02

- Ross