[PLUG] Anyone using / can advise on FreeBSD/NetBSD?

[Amarendra Godbole]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Mayuresh <mayuresh at acm.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:54:56AM +0530, Amarendra Godbole wrote:
>> Oh, and missed one very important point:
>> * OpenBSD is not determined to dominate the world, and fast.
>>
>> -Amarendra
>
> Thanks. That was a very good summary.
>
> Also thanks to an earlier post by Shridhar on FreeBSD.
>
> I happen to have tried out both FreeBSD and NetBSD in the meantime. I will
> post my experiences in a separate mail.
>
> Can you just clarify above statement? You meant OpenBSD is determined or
> not to be fast?!

Haha, that was intended as a sly take on Linux - I remember Linus
mentioning "World domination. Fast." in an interview
(http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/36). OpenBSD has no such aims -
the developers write code because they want to write it, and compete
with no one or no OS. Hence, you will find almost no benchmarks done
for OpenBSD.

> Till now my impression of OepnBSD is the word security. Well I appreciate
> that where it is needed, though I am looking for a regular desktop that's
> not exposed to internet and is for personal use.
>
> Now, if OpenBSD is not _only_ about security, as compared to other BSD
> siblings, I'd kind of like to give it a try someday.
[...]

OpenBSD is about "correctness", so security, reliability and
robustness are included as a by-product. The code is clean,
frequently-audited, and bugs are fixed faster than any other OS I
know. Plus, there is not much debate on the severity and priority - a
bug is a bug, and it gets fixed as soon as someone sends the
bug-report. I've seen grammatical typos' in their man pages fixed
within 2 hrs. of being reported. So saying OpenBSD is just about
security would be incorrect. Their motto is to be "free, functional
and secure". I think you are concerned with functionality, which
happens to be one of their goal as well. :-)

I use OpenBSD on my laptop, and it works fine and does all jobs that I
want it to do - internet via firefox, word processing via LibreOffice,
mail via sylpheed/mutt/pine being important amongst them.

-Amarendra