I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?
I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So I put up with the downsides and am quite happy with it as a desktop system.<p>Naturally I also use obsd as my firewall, a role I would recommend it in. at least if you don't mind a bit of old-school unix administration.<p>I have a freebsd fileserver and never got around to trying netbsd, But between fbsd and obsd I found I prefer obsd as the desktop system, it is a subtle thing hard to describe, but it feels better focused for desktop use than freebsd, not as performant and the filesystem sucks in comparison(thus the fileserver) but somehow feels better. I don't know.
For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy.<p>I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.
OpenBSD exploits (defined as bugs in both OS and typically-deployed applications on top of it) are (or used to be) low-value but scarce and hence prestigious.<p>Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.
I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem?<p>This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.
OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, and the project maintains many pieces of software people take for granted, like pf, openssh, and libressl. FreeBSD is definitely the most robust, and is a very good server OS. NetBSDs niche is how many platforms can run it. If it's supported by GCC, theres a decent chance NetBSD will run on it
<i>OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there,</i><p>I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.
> I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD).<p>DragonFly BSD ([1], [2]): "Am I a joke to you? :-("<p>;-)<p>By the way: If you look for a BSD-based desktop OS, have a look at GhostBSD ([3], [4]) (based on FreeBSD) and/or MidnightBSD ([5], [6]) (forked from FreeBSD). Both are under active development.<p>---<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dragonflybsd.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dragonflybsd.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.ghostbsd.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ghostbsd.org/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostBSD" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostBSD</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.midnightbsd.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.midnightbsd.org/</a><p>[6] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidnightBSD" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidnightBSD</a>
One of NetBSD’s strengths and emphases is portability. They have a motto- “of course it runs NetBSD.” IIRC NetBSD was ported to Apple Silicon slightly before Asahi Linux succeeded.<p>Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.<p>As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.<p>Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.
The fediverse has a very vocal group of BSD users. Many of them hang out here: <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/public/local" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/public/local</a>
I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.
I recently switched my router from pfsense to OpenBSD. I wanted a “vanilla” OS as opposed to a specific router OS like Opnsense.<p>The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.<p>I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.<p>The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.
I´m using NetBSD on a couple of x86 machines now that Linux distros have mostly dropped support for them.
I use NetBSD on several systems as a small server platform. I find it easier to understand and customize, and it keeps a lot of this stuff out of the landfill.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the BSDs got an increase in users purely due to AI models making it far more accessible / easier to hack on.<p>i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.
I’m using OpenBSD as a daily desktop. The main motivation is that it’s a complete system instead of several projects. So you got simpler userland tools as the kernel interfaces can be easily adjusted.<p>Also the subsystems are way simpler (packet filtering, sound, network management). Linux is full choke of abstraction which aim to serve a huge range of devices. And I truly believe that there should have been a bifurcation somewhere.<p>Most software are easy to port around, but there are some that relies on linuxisms (udev) and some on glibc-isms, which can require some patching. Some of the pains I encountered are about device files (usb) and the fact that openbsd relies on root a bit more (mounting with fuse).<p>You can read the “Absolute OpenBSD, 2ed” book, published 13 years ago and almost everything still holds. You can even read the “Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD” and still have a good understanding of the OpenBSD design. Linux is chaotic land compared to that.
are you asking these questions sincerely or is this just your passive-aggressive way of saying that netbsd is dead and nobody uses it? and why does everything have to be compared to linux? isn't the whole reason we developed free and open-source operating systems is to have lots of different choices and not just one universal corporate-controlled OS that everyone thinks of as the yardstick by which all other OSes are measured?
The current status? If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.<p>But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the road less traveled.
> If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.<p>Can you expand on that?
Compared to Linux, all of them lag pretty badly in one or multiple areas (performance, features, hardware support, available software...).<p>They can be excellent in very, <i>very</i> niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.
Serious like a great file system that is ZFS?