I feel ashamed asking this, but can someone point me in a good direction for knowing why I would pick (or not pick) bsd over a standard Linux like say Debian ? My Google searches have miserably failed in providing a decent unbiased/not marketing/gp3-generated recap.
Keep in mind, BSD is not one thing. They all have a common lineage, but FreeBSD and NetBSD both split from 386BSD around 1993. OpenBSD split from NetBSD in 1995, and DragonFlyBSD split from FreeBSD in 2003.
The first BSD release was in 1978, it was 15 years (1993) later when NetBSD and FreeBSD diverged, and it’s been 29 years since then. So there has been almost twice as much time since the BSDs went their separate ways.
They each have their own philosophies and priorities, so it’s about which one aligns with yours.
But I think there are a few things that tie them together.
A base system that is a full operating system, user land and kernel, all developed in a single code base. This is the biggest difference with Linux, IMO. And it can mean a much more cohesive feeling system. And IMO BSD man pages are of higher quality than on Linux. You can have the whole source of the base system sitting on that system.
A ports system that is fundamentally based on Makefiles and compiling from source. However they all now have pre-built binary packages that can be installed. That was not always the case, it used to be you always had to build ports from source.
My own take on their differences from each other:
FreeBSD still cares the most about being a good server and does have some big high scale use at places like Netflix, and was used heavily at Yahoo when they were still relevant. FreeBSD tends to maybe be the more pragmatic of the group, but that also can mean it’s a bit more messy. There is sometimes more than one way to do the same thing, even in the base system. They have advanced features like ZFS, and Bhyve for VMs. This can make for a pretty powerful hypervisor. This is here I use FreeBSD. FreeBSD probably has the most users of them all.
OpenBSD tends to be my favorite. Some of their development practices can seem esoteric. To get a patch included, you mail a diff to their mailing lists, and they still use CVS. They care a lot about security and do a lot of innovation in that area. They care less about things like backwards compatibility, often breaking their ABI between releases. Their developers use OpenBSD as daily drivers, so if you run OpenBSD on a laptop that is used by the right developers, pretty much everything will just work. Their manpages are excellent, and if you take the time to read them you can often figure out how to do most things you need. There is typically only one way to do a thing, and they tend to aggressively remove code that isn’t well maintained. Like OpenBSD doesn’t support bluetooth because that code didn’t work well enough, and no one wanted to fix it. So they just removed it. By modern standards OpenBSD has pretty old filesystems, you’ll need to fsck on a crash, and their multi-processor support and performance still lags far behind FreeBSD or Linux. I generally find that OpenBSD feels substantially slower than Linux when run on the same laptop.
NetBSD I haven’t used in a LONG time. But for ages their primary goal was portability. So they tended to run on many different types of hardware. I’m not sure if they have enough developers these days to keep a huge list of supported hardware though. They currently list 9 tier 1 architectures, where OpenBSD has 13. I think NetBSD still tends to be more used by academics.
DragonFlyBSD I’ve never actually installed, but I remember the drama when Matt Dillon split from FreeBSD in 2003. Their main claim to fame is the HAMMER2 filesystem and a different approach to SMP from what FreeBSD was trying to do in the move from FreeBSD 4.0 to FreeBSD 5.0 (~2003)
With all of the BSDs you’re going to have a little bit less software that works on it, though most things will be found in their ports collection. You’ll probably have a more cohesive system, but all the BSDs combined have a small fraction of the developers that work on just the Linux kernel.
At least the last time I ran FreeBSD there were at least 2 different ways of keeping ports up to date, both which were confusing and under-documented. Maybe the situation is better now.
I think it’s mostly a matter of personal preference. Here’s a list of reasons openbsd rocks: https://why-openbsd.rocks/fact/ but for me, I prefer the consistency over time of OpenBSD, the fact that my personal workflows haven’t significantly changed in 15 years, and that the system seems to get faster with age (up to a point). Also, installing and upgrading are super easy.
Long time OpenBSD developer here. I think @kelp’s reply is mostly accurate and as objective as possible for such an informal discussion.
I will add a short personal anecdote to it. As he says, all my machines were running OpenBSD before the pandemic. In the past I kept my online meetings on my phone because OpenBSD is not yet equipped for that.
Being a professor at the university, this new context meant that I had to also hold my courses online. This is more complicated than a plain online meeting so I to had to switch back to Linux after more than 15 years.
The experience on Linux, production wise, has been so good that I switched all my machines over. Except my home server. I don’t mean just online video meetings and teaching, but also doing paperwork, system administration (not professionally, just my set of machines and part of the faculty infrastructure), and most importantly running my numerical simulations for research.
Now that we are back to normal over here, I could switch back to my old setup but I am finding it really hard to convince my new self.
This is just a personal experience that I tried to report as objectively as possible.
On a more opinionated note, I think the trouble with BSDs is that there is no new blood coming, no new direction. Most of them are just catching up on Linux which is a hard effort involving a lot of people from the projects. It is very rare to find something truly innovative coming from here (think about something that the other projects would be rushing to pull over and integrate, just like the BSDs are doing with Linux).
If nothing happens the gap will just widen.
From my porting experience I can tell you that most open source userland programs are not even considering the BSDs. They assume, with no malevolence, that Linux will be the only target. There are Linuxisms everywhere that we have to patch around or adapt our libc to.
To conclude, in my opinion, if you want to study and understand operating systems go with the BSDs, read their source, contribute to their projects. Everything is very well written and documented unlike Linux which is a mess and a very poor learning material. If you just want to use it for your day to day activities and you want an open source environment, then go with mainstream.
Ready for general use on Apple silicon Macs. That’s pretty cool!
Personally more excited about the new “riscv64” RISC-V port.
“The iron fist in the velvet glove.”
I really like the SMP section, particularly:
Nice.
I feel ashamed asking this, but can someone point me in a good direction for knowing why I would pick (or not pick) bsd over a standard Linux like say Debian ? My Google searches have miserably failed in providing a decent unbiased/not marketing/gp3-generated recap.
Keep in mind, BSD is not one thing. They all have a common lineage, but FreeBSD and NetBSD both split from 386BSD around 1993. OpenBSD split from NetBSD in 1995, and DragonFlyBSD split from FreeBSD in 2003.
The first BSD release was in 1978, it was 15 years (1993) later when NetBSD and FreeBSD diverged, and it’s been 29 years since then. So there has been almost twice as much time since the BSDs went their separate ways.
They each have their own philosophies and priorities, so it’s about which one aligns with yours.
But I think there are a few things that tie them together.
A base system that is a full operating system, user land and kernel, all developed in a single code base. This is the biggest difference with Linux, IMO. And it can mean a much more cohesive feeling system. And IMO BSD man pages are of higher quality than on Linux. You can have the whole source of the base system sitting on that system.
A ports system that is fundamentally based on Makefiles and compiling from source. However they all now have pre-built binary packages that can be installed. That was not always the case, it used to be you always had to build ports from source.
My own take on their differences from each other:
FreeBSD still cares the most about being a good server and does have some big high scale use at places like Netflix, and was used heavily at Yahoo when they were still relevant. FreeBSD tends to maybe be the more pragmatic of the group, but that also can mean it’s a bit more messy. There is sometimes more than one way to do the same thing, even in the base system. They have advanced features like ZFS, and Bhyve for VMs. This can make for a pretty powerful hypervisor. This is here I use FreeBSD. FreeBSD probably has the most users of them all.
OpenBSD tends to be my favorite. Some of their development practices can seem esoteric. To get a patch included, you mail a diff to their mailing lists, and they still use CVS. They care a lot about security and do a lot of innovation in that area. They care less about things like backwards compatibility, often breaking their ABI between releases. Their developers use OpenBSD as daily drivers, so if you run OpenBSD on a laptop that is used by the right developers, pretty much everything will just work. Their manpages are excellent, and if you take the time to read them you can often figure out how to do most things you need. There is typically only one way to do a thing, and they tend to aggressively remove code that isn’t well maintained. Like OpenBSD doesn’t support bluetooth because that code didn’t work well enough, and no one wanted to fix it. So they just removed it. By modern standards OpenBSD has pretty old filesystems, you’ll need to fsck on a crash, and their multi-processor support and performance still lags far behind FreeBSD or Linux. I generally find that OpenBSD feels substantially slower than Linux when run on the same laptop.
NetBSD I haven’t used in a LONG time. But for ages their primary goal was portability. So they tended to run on many different types of hardware. I’m not sure if they have enough developers these days to keep a huge list of supported hardware though. They currently list 9 tier 1 architectures, where OpenBSD has 13. I think NetBSD still tends to be more used by academics.
DragonFlyBSD I’ve never actually installed, but I remember the drama when Matt Dillon split from FreeBSD in 2003. Their main claim to fame is the HAMMER2 filesystem and a different approach to SMP from what FreeBSD was trying to do in the move from FreeBSD 4.0 to FreeBSD 5.0 (~2003)
With all of the BSDs you’re going to have a little bit less software that works on it, though most things will be found in their ports collection. You’ll probably have a more cohesive system, but all the BSDs combined have a small fraction of the developers that work on just the Linux kernel.
At least the last time I ran FreeBSD there were at least 2 different ways of keeping ports up to date, both which were confusing and under-documented. Maybe the situation is better now.
I think it’s mostly a matter of personal preference. Here’s a list of reasons openbsd rocks: https://why-openbsd.rocks/fact/ but for me, I prefer the consistency over time of OpenBSD, the fact that my personal workflows haven’t significantly changed in 15 years, and that the system seems to get faster with age (up to a point). Also, installing and upgrading are super easy.
Long time OpenBSD developer here. I think @kelp’s reply is mostly accurate and as objective as possible for such an informal discussion.
I will add a short personal anecdote to it. As he says, all my machines were running OpenBSD before the pandemic. In the past I kept my online meetings on my phone because OpenBSD is not yet equipped for that.
Being a professor at the university, this new context meant that I had to also hold my courses online. This is more complicated than a plain online meeting so I to had to switch back to Linux after more than 15 years.
The experience on Linux, production wise, has been so good that I switched all my machines over. Except my home server. I don’t mean just online video meetings and teaching, but also doing paperwork, system administration (not professionally, just my set of machines and part of the faculty infrastructure), and most importantly running my numerical simulations for research.
Now that we are back to normal over here, I could switch back to my old setup but I am finding it really hard to convince my new self.
This is just a personal experience that I tried to report as objectively as possible.
On a more opinionated note, I think the trouble with BSDs is that there is no new blood coming, no new direction. Most of them are just catching up on Linux which is a hard effort involving a lot of people from the projects. It is very rare to find something truly innovative coming from here (think about something that the other projects would be rushing to pull over and integrate, just like the BSDs are doing with Linux).
If nothing happens the gap will just widen.
From my porting experience I can tell you that most open source userland programs are not even considering the BSDs. They assume, with no malevolence, that Linux will be the only target. There are Linuxisms everywhere that we have to patch around or adapt our libc to.
To conclude, in my opinion, if you want to study and understand operating systems go with the BSDs, read their source, contribute to their projects. Everything is very well written and documented unlike Linux which is a mess and a very poor learning material. If you just want to use it for your day to day activities and you want an open source environment, then go with mainstream.
No, it hasn’t. The page is there in preparation for the release but it has not yet actually been released.
It hasn’t been properly announced but sets/packages are already available on the mirrors e.g. https://fastly.cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.1/
I’d argue if it’s not announced it’s not released. Also sets and packages could in theory still be overwritten.
I’d argue further if the release date on the page itself doesn’t yet exist, it hasn’t been released.
They just actually released! :)
Including an announcement from The de Raadt:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=165054715122282&w=2
Maybe vermaden knew more?
Haha. Whelp, I’ll go back to my corner.
It’s all in the commits…
Received email from Theo (from the announce maillist).
Therefore I consider it officially released, now.
I assumed that if OpenBSD Webzine states that - then its released - sorry, my bad :)