BSD. Good or bad?

What are the pros and cons of BSD. It seems like half of Jow Forums likes it and the other half hates it. Please share your experiences and opinions.

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wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/zfs/
netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/index.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Depends widely on the particular OS. Every tool has its uses and requires expertise. If you use the wrong tool for the wrong purpose with insufficient training, you will have a bad time at the very least. If you use the right tool for the right purpose with the right knowledge (or will to acquire it), you will enjoy it.

OpenBSD is rock-fucking-solid and secure. Feature updates are regular but sparse, twice yearly, with continuous security patches. Easy to set up if you know what you want. Filesystem is a bit on the old side. Maybe someday will port HAMMER2.

FreeBSD is pretty solid too, and secure. Updated more often, more features, more ports. Not as much focused on security as OpenBSD, but focused on features and performance instead. ZFS is awesome if you have 16GB of RAM to spare. Community may be starting to get infected by Linux-like CoCery, some allude being averse to virtual hugs.

NetBSD: Father of OpenBSD. Didn't try it. I'll let somebody else describe it. Focused on features, small community.

DragonflyBSD: ditto.

TrueOS: is to FreeBSD kind of like what Ubuntu was originally to Debian. Derivative with fancy features and commercial support. Has branches for desktop, server, and embedded. You could start here if you haven't tried BSD at all, but be aware of localisms.

Special mentions: focused distros:
FreeNAS: FreeBSD distro focused on NAS (oh surprise). Awesome, nice web UI. There's paid support if you're into that, or you can query the community.

pfSense: FreeBSD distro focused on a variant of OpenBSD's pf firewall. Of course, has more features than that. There's paid support too or the community.

securityrouter.org: OpenBSD distro with a similar purpose. Didn't try it yet. It has a way smaller community than pfSense.

I use NetBSD. Give it a try if your hardware supports it, user.

Used to use OpenBSD on a laptop. Stopping using it because it didn't have as much support as Linux. :(

Better userspace than modern Linux distributions, but not as fast or popular. I still miss OpenBSD's god-tier manpages.

here. Maybe you could give OP a short overview of it? Lacking experience there, I couldn't include NetBSD with a fair enough depth.

OpenBSD bad if you have nvidia GPU

NVidia GPU bad if you have OpenBSD.

very correct, sir, have an upvote!

>Maybe you could give OP a short overview of it? Lacking experience there, I couldn't include NetBSD with a fair enough depth.
Sure user!
Okay, so NetBSD is a really under-looked system, but it is usable as a daily driver if your priorities are straight. It's getting modern WINE soon, and it's Linux compat layer is maturing along with the slow addition of AMDGPU drivers so it's getting better for games if you're into that kind of thing. Otherwise, it's a solid, light yet complete UNIX environment similar to OpenBSD. The fact that it runs on any architecture under the sun isn't necessarily the prime focus it's development is explicitly influenced under, but rather, it just so happens to do that because of good, modular design choices. Lots of Desktop Environments and Window Managers are available. I use WindowMaker myself, which isn't exactly a tall order for any BSD, but it's getting ports of stuff like Plasma 5 soon and I believe GNOME 3 works if you're that much of a fucking homosexual. XFCE and MATE are also tried and true options. pkgsrc is one of the best things out there, and I highly encourage you to check it out because I certainly fell in love with it.
Anything is bad with an Nvidia GPU. They don't call it Novideo for nothing.

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The bad thing about BSD isn't something concerning all BSDs; just OpenBSD.

OpenBSD's "security" model depends mostly on throttling CPUs with hyperthreading, in a bid to prevent exploits from taking over the system. BAsically, OpenBSD's concept of security is "Oh; I see you're using a Dell R710 server with 2 Intel Xeons... Enjoy your Pentium 4 speed."

It also doesn't ship with a reliable file system format; OpenBSD uses UFS and relies on users to patch the file system after the fact, rather than the OS shipping with this patch by default. FreeBSD and even NetBSD have better file systems available to them. And if you're using OpenBSD on a computer with a hard drive (not SSD, but HDD,) your OS won't support TRIM, but that's only a matter for hard drive fanatics who worry about their Seagate drives failing on them.

What's the best filesystem for netbsd? Should I worry about keeping all my files on it?

Further to this, OpenBSD sorely lacks in updated drivers. Aside from throttling CPUs with hyperthreading, you have to make sure that your hardware can be supported by generic drivers. For example, if you have a laptop with a wireless module, you need to make sure that it will work with generic drivers (i.e.: the wifi module being able to operate with a driver from circa 2003, regardless of manufacture date). The OpenBSD project site has more information on configuring it, but basically, it's the Arch of BSD OSes.

ZFS would work nicely.

>ZFS would work nicely.
Does ZFS work on NetBSD? First I've heard of it.

wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/zfs/
It does. This was just completed as of NetBSD 8.99.37.

pro: it's like linux and actually works for the most part
cons: it lacks a ton of shit that you have in linux and any other modern OS, and has not much support from third party developers

Can you access a ZFS filesystem over the network with OpenBSD?

Of course you can. OpenBSD just formats to UFS locally by default.

>Anything is bad with an Nvidia GPU
Except if you actually care about firmware blobs, then anything AMD is out of the question.

Don't ask him, don't heed him. Trying to talk with him is like playing chess with a pidgeon.
Sure

>and has not much support from third party developers
Technically, the various BSD projects frown upon third-party development & would rather have developers actually join their projects directly, especially where it concerns driver development & OS/kernel development.

>Upset over facts
Weren't you one of those guys who got banned from the OpenBSD general thread that got shitposted to oblivion yesterday?

>Trying to talk with someone smarter than me is like playing chess with a pidgeon
Your only problem is that you lose against pigeons since you can't even spell the word.

>lacks a ton of shit that you have in linux
The FreeBSD Linux compatibility layer works for most stuff that isn't married to the kernel itself or mode changes.

>bsd good or bad
netbsd, or as I have recently taken to calling, netbAsEd, has that rump kernel shit going on and its really cool

I'm curious about if there's a BSD that ships with a lean DE and can run smoothly on an Intel Atom N270 netbook.

NetBSD is extremely well built and designed. All parts of the kernel are tested in userspace so the entire kernel is extremely modular. They coined the term "Anykernel" which is their kernel's model. You can make the NetBSD kernel into an exokernel, microkernel, monolithic kernel, or you can even package applications along with a sliver of kernel code into a RUMP kernel (runnable userspace metaprogram). NetBSD can literally be made to be packaged with one program and you can run that whole thing under a hypervisor. So you can potentially package the JVM (or any language VM) along with the RUMP kernel and spin it up to provide cloud services.

No other BSD can claim this. NetBSD is the best designed BSD BAR NONE. But that doesn't make it a good desktop.

>lean DE

Project Trident

>No other BSD can claim this
Nope, but there's also VMware ThinApp.

OpenBSD ships with fvwm by default. FreeBSD/NetBSD dont ship with a desktop environment/windowmanager by default, but you can install any window manager or desktop environment you want with a few keystrokes (as to not force a common UI on you.)

Does Lumina and TrueOS run smoothly on an Atom CPU?

There's literally no reason to use TrueOS.
All you have to do on a clean FreeBSD install is the following:
pkg install yourfavoriteDEorWM
pkg install filemanagerofchoice
pkg install firefox
and then enable dbus and youre good to go.

Thanks... I think fvwm, cwm and twm are just awful, though they're pretty lean. But I'm wondering if I should go with Lumina or MATE with FreeBSD or TrueOS... I mean Project Trident is TrueOS with Lumina, but I don't know how well it would run on a 2008 netbook.

>pkg install yourfavoriteDEorWM
That's pretty much what I'm asking here; what's a decent DE that can run comfortably on an old netbook.

That's pretty awesome. Never knew about this. Thanks, user.

No problem. I think VMware ThinApp's more suited for Windows and Linux, but I'm not sure about macOS or BSD. Then again, ThinApp's also proprietary and costs a pretty penny. I'm sure you can find a crack for it.

As for BSD, NetBSD's RUMP kernel's the safer alternative to that and outshines Windows' Hyper-V.

Why not run TrueOS?

>what's a decent DE that can run comfortably on an old netbook.
Try WindowMaker, or XFCE

I was interested in RUMP when I heard that some group was able to write an Erlang VM and spin it up on demand. Very quickly, I might add. I think as it matures it can be used to write really strong, robust, and secure microservices. I like the idea of that little sliver of kernel and one or more services running on it with little or nothing to hack. Almost nothing to hack because the surface of attack is tiny. Very fast because there's so little code to boot. The idea of the RUMP kernel merits exploration. Hopefully Linux will adopt the anykernel model.

As a matter of fact, RUMP in a sense is more secure than ThinApp because with ThinApp, you can still exploit the host OS because the program itself still has disk access. If I recall correctly, RUMP can be configured to prevent such things.

Nvidia is just bad for not making their shit work on other OS's.

Linux and BSD have enough enterprise traction that nvidia should maybe consider supporting it one of these generations....

fish good window bad penguin good gnu good intel bad amd good long hair good short hair bad stem good religion bad america good europe bad google bad altavista good old good new bad russia good india bad

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I've never had bad luck running Ubuntu with nVidia or GeForce GPUs on bare metal. I guess that would depend on what binary blobs are available for each OS, Linux or BSD.

NetBSD is testing nouveau, see how that pans out and whether theo is willing to bury the hatchet long enough to port it downstream...

wtf

All of you Jow Forumsuys have been extremely helpful and it has convinced me to try out BSD.

OpenBSD for network and outward facing devices.
FreeBSD for mass storage.
Linux>BSD for anything else.

I just start to learn Unix systems.
Tired of Linux gay shit distros.
I love cold bare metal no-user-friendly openBSD.
All BSD's are good for laptop daily use.
Installed it on x230 without any problems.
Intel works, wifi works, Flashed Seabios. Fast as hell. Free and secure.
I use suckless tools. Everything is written in c. Simple and fast. Really enjoy. And there is no python shit scripts. Lol

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Very nice

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>no-user-friendly openBSD
Why do you think openBSD isn't user-friendly?
>And there is no python shit scripts. Lol
But pkg_add is written in perl, which is arguably worse.

>OpenBSD for network and outward facing devices.
Enjoy your catastrophic data loss during a power brownout.

Elaborate plz

I like netbsd for being small and incredibly portable but that's about it.

I should try BSD on my x250. Which favour of BSD has driver support for it and what would you guys recommend?

See Also, even the pro-OpenBSD trolls from the last most active OpenBSD general said that you're not supposed to use OpenBSD in a production environment with UFS.

Tried using it as a desktop os.
Never again.

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>he doesn't have a UPS

>OpenBSD
Retardedly old. Has 10 partitions for unbelievably ancient shit.

>FreeBSD
Basically a worse Linux with ancient packages

>DragonflyBSD
One person project with no support for hardware.

Of the 3 I like the last one the most.
It has cool ideas and Filesystem.

garbage software
garbage license
garbage city

Impressive

Or at least have a documented interface. That would go a long way.

If you have RUMP running on the bare metal then I don't see how you could exploit it. Its such a tiny attack surface and you wouldn't be installing anything.

Closed source hardware will always be a problem.

I love the BSD's. freebsd is very nice as a desktop OS (netbsd looks good too but I didn't have much luck with my hardware) and I've been messing with them for years. I don't know why Jow Forums dislikes them. they're minimal and don't have systemd but everyone has their own opinion

It's not that Jow Forums hates every BSD; it's that Jow Forums hates how pretentious the OpenBSD fanboys are when they shitpost their threads, to the point of brushing off every other BSD and calling people "trolls" for pointing out the major flaws behind their OS. That's why I'm glad we get threads like this one once every blue moon.

I am just trying to understand what i will get in to when testing out BSD. Op btw

When testing BSD, be prepared for making sure your hardware can work with generic drivers from the 2 decades ago. Other than that, everything should work if you do your setup right.

Hopefully it does. I will be using my x250 for testing. The question is what flavour should I use as a gateway drug into the BSD ecosystem?

Honestly, I'd say NetBSD. FreeBSD's also good.

Ok, will try it tomorrow.

Is good on my Mac. Is working good, sir

NetBSD coming through

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What are some good websites/pdfs for the documentation on netbsd considering the potential features of it from earlier in the thread?

The official NetBSD handbook is clean, concise, and will give you magnificent control over they system if you'll take the 2 hours or so to skim through it.
netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/index.html

The netbsd documentation has definately got a lot of detail. It seems a lot like the old gentoo wiki.

comfy

>I still miss OpenBSD's god-tier manpages.
What's this 'manpage' everyone's always mentioning around?

>What's this 'manpage' everyone's always mentioning around?
type
man man
into your terminal