The State of the Demon Address

Kelly McNeill writes "It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going."

Comments

Statement: "we're not dead...really"

[XpirateX]

I thought BSD was dead?

(please don't hit me)

Re:openbsd mistakes

[RealAlaskan]

OpenBSD isn't acceptable as a desktop system

Well, if we replace ``acceptable'' with ``optimal'', we might come a little closer to the truth, for most of us who aren't using it as our desktops.

Unfortunately, what they say about the future of OpenBSD is far too true:

One factor that mars OpenBSD's fair weather is its primary developer, Theo de Raadt. This individual is known to be highly unstable and even destructive at times. OpenBSD's very birth, as noted above, is owed to one of his infamous tantrums and many users have been flamed off the Internet due to his bad moods and compulsive control issues. Though excellent for network equipment, developers may wish to remain wary of this platform and its creator.

The attitude on the mailing lists is one of the big reasons that I've found OpenBSD not to be optimal for my desktop.

They've been dying so long

[RLiegh]

that eventually they'll get as good at it as apple is at going out of business!

BSD ported to Gentoo

[Ingolfke]

In a last ditch effort to save BSD it was ported to yet another meaningless paltform, a Gentoo BSD emulator. Unfortunately Gentoo has followed the path of BSD, straight into oblivion.