Thursday, March 19. 2015
Open vs FreeBSD -- Night and Day
I have switched to FreeBSD after spending a few months banging my head against OpenBSD. OpenBSD is a nice O.S., and I really didn't want to switch, but now that I'm trying FreeBSD, here are some first impressions of the differences.
Reasons to Choose FreeBSD
- Would you like clear, well-written user documentation, instead of curt citations of man pages, and faq entries? You want FreeBSD.
- Would you like to experiment with hosting MS-Windows (or Linux, or another BSD, etc.) as a guest O.S. in a virtual machine, right out of the box? You probably want FreeBSD.
- You have an older machine with only 1/2 gig of ram, and you think you should be able to run firefox without hitting the swap file? Free is the O.S. for you.
- You have an older computer that runs at just under 1 gighz, and you think it's reasonable to expect an O.S. to deliver decent performance from that? You need FreeBSD
- You've invested a lot of time switching from MS-Office to OpenOffice and you don't want to have to now learn the latest other OTHER office suite? Definitely, you want FreeBSD.
- You're an experimenter who wants to install BSD on your Raspberry Pi? Most seem to agree, FreeBSD is a better fit for you.
Reasons to Choose OpenBSD
- You think PF (Packet Filter) is a really cool piece of software and you want to run it? OpenBSD is for you.
And Now, for Something Completely Different
- Are you a masochist who is excited by the idea of being beaten to a pulp, and left naked in the middle of the ethical, legal, and financial mine-field that is the GPL?. . . You want linux.
