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Comparing and Contrasting BSD/OS and NetBSD

Posted by timothy on from the let-me-see-your-license dept.

LiquidPC writes: ""Even though BSD/OS and NetBSD operating systems have been mostly developed by different developers with some different goals over the past nine years, they share many similarities due to their near identitical open source origins and the open source software that complements the systems" Read the article comparing and contrasting NetBSD and BSD/OS at BSDNewsLetter.com."

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. What's the point? by saintlupus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is a remarkably content free article. For those who want the Cliff's Notes version:

    * BSD/OS has a commercial license.

    * Some of the binaries in BSD/OS are slightly
    smaller.

    * The setup scripts are arranged a little differently.

    * BSD/OS has more stuff by default, and it might take as much as ten minutes in the package tree to bring NetBSD up to par.

    Er, that's about it.

    I'd be more interested in a comparison of the three free BSD operating systems; I've been running NetBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, but I've never installed FreeBSD. I've heard it's got something of a Linuxy bloat rather than the grim austerity of the Open and Net OSes... any comments from users? Might as well put _something_ useful in this wasted comments section.

    --saint

    1. Re:What's the point? by MobyTurbo · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Blockquoth the poster:
      I'd be more interested in a comparison of the three free BSD operating systems; I've been running NetBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, but I've never installed FreeBSD. I've heard it's got something of a Linuxy bloat rather than the grim austerity of the Open and Net OSes... any comments from users? Might as well put _something_ useful in this wasted comments section.

      Wasted comments section? It's not wasted if you want to read canned AC posts about BSD being dead. ;-D

      Seriously though, I haven't used OpenBSD, and have only used NetBSD via a shell account on someone else's boxen, but FreeBSD is a lot less bloated in it's initial install than all major Linux distributions. The main reason I chose it over NetBSD or OpenBSD is it's larger (in fact humongeous) ports selection - very useful since I use it primarily as a workstation. (Am I the only one that uses BSD as something besides only a server or firewall?) Most of ports is not installed by default however; though my system was even lighter than average since I installed using the 4.6 mini-ISO due to being a dialup user, which meant that I had to use ports to fetch X Windows.

    2. Re:What's the point? by Moridineas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've been running NetBSD and OpenBSD for a couple of years now, but I've never installed FreeBSD. I've heard it's got something of a Linuxy bloat rather than the grim austerity of the Open and Net OSes...

      I've used FreeBSD a good bit, and have one OpenBSD firewall box setup. They both have their good sides and bad sides imho.

      The main good things about FreeBSD imho are the bigger ports collection and more users (more chance someone has had your problem before ;) The install program for FreeBSD is a lot friendlirt than the Open (though Open went 100% fine for me) and to me FreeBSD config files are easier to setup. OpenBSD on the other hand as a Firewall type box can't be beat imho, the ease of seting it up and writing pf rules can't be beaten. I'm not sure I'd want my personal desktop running OpenBSD though.