The Top BSD News This Year: Ubuntu Atop BSD, FreeBSD 11.0, DragonFly's HAMMER2

[rabcor]

Very good for you nasyt, although maybe you should try looking closer at the security Linux can provide over Windows Server, just to be safe.

Eh... Most of the Phoronix benchmarks have shown them to perform within the same realm as each other except in a few benchmarks here and there, which are sometimes BSD losses and sometimes Linux losses, depending upon what in particular is being tested, and okay if you want performance of the kind that Linux has over *BSD that's fine, but just generally stating that Linux is faster than *BSD is a nope. The more honest reasons to use Linux over *BSD are:

• Better Hardware Support, which affects the slice of the population that happen to have hardware that Linux supports that *BSD don't, which may not be you
• Much more mature desktop support,
• Features that Linux has that *BSD really doesn't have a proper (read: Not a work in progress) alternative to right now (KVM, systemd, etc)
• (Generally Proprietary) Software that Linux supports that *BSD doesn't, most notably Steam

otherwise it's just a matter of preference and philosophy

Wasn't there some compatibility layer available for the BSDs to run Linux software like steam? I agree on most other things but while BSD benchmarks are certainly in the same ballpark as Linux and Windows, what I've read from them is that the BSDs all seem to specialize in a few specific areas and fall short in most others, whereas linux and windows are pretty good for anything (completely developed for general use and to work well for anything at their core) then there's macos... macos just isn't good at anything if you look at the numbers, but well I suppose it is more of a fashion product than anything else these days (they were good in the macintosh days tho).

[Luke_Wolf]

Very good for you nasyt, although maybe you should try looking closer at the security Linux can provide over Windows Server, just to be safe.


Wasn't there some compatibility layer available for the BSDs to run Linux software like steam? I agree on most other things but while BSD benchmarks are certainly in the same ballpark as Linux and Windows, what I've read from them is that the BSDs all seem to specialize in a few specific areas and fall short in most others, whereas linux and windows are pretty good for anything (completely developed for general use and to work well for anything at their core) then there's macos... macos just isn't good at anything if you look at the numbers, but well I suppose it is more of a fashion product than anything else these days (they were good in the macintosh days tho).

There is yes, however it is currently compatible up to kernel 2.6.32 with a CentOS 6 userspace, currently there's WIP on bringing it up to being compatible with Centos 7. I wouldn't be surprised to see TrueOS running Steam properly within the year of 2017, particularly given there was an effort that did manage to get it work but involves some dubious scripts and such.

As to more general usage, that would be FreeBSD (and really more TrueOS for desktop users, particularly now that it rides -CURRENT). OpenBSD is basically security focused, NetBSD is portability focused, and DragonFly had it's own opinions on how SMP should work and is mostly doing interesting work related to filesystems.

[aht0]

There is yes, however it is currently compatible up to kernel 2.6.32 with a CentOS 6 userspace, currently there's WIP on bringing it up to being compatible with Centos 7. I wouldn't be surprised to see TrueOS running Steam properly within the year of 2017, particularly given there was an effort that did manage to get it work but involves some dubious scripts and such.

As to more general usage, that would be FreeBSD (and really more TrueOS for desktop users, particularly now that it rides -CURRENT). OpenBSD is basically security focused, NetBSD is portability focused, and DragonFly had it's own opinions on how SMP should work and is mostly doing interesting work related to filesystems.

Linux ABI is 2.6.32 for FreeBSD, no longer exists at all in OpenBSD 6+ and is 3.18 in NetBSD (updated openSUSE 13.2 userspace AFAIK).

OpenBSD's major fault in my eyes is it's lack of TRIM support for SSDs and sluggish file system.
NetBSD, it's npf firewall is very interesting and Linux ABI is newer (if you need this thing at all) but I feel I'm lacking experience for forming any sort of definite opinion.
FreeBSD. Works. Setting it up manually from vanilla could be tedious but once you are done, you are done. Biggest lack, proper resume/sleep support for laptops (OpenBSD rules in this regard, even perhaps over Linux).