In what situations is it advisable to choose BSD systems instead of Linux?

Question

For the everyday user with the new hardware Linux, it seems to me a natural choice if someone is looking for an alternative to Windows. But when does it make sense to give BSD options a try?

Answer 1

I have always found BSD more intuitive. BSD has several different philosophies than Linux. For example, Linux prefers GNU commands, while BSD selects either the classic BSD commands (which are similar but often have different options) or newly written ones return to GNU when nothing else is available. In addition, I find that BSD Man pages are more comprehensive and contain more examples than GNU man pages, since GNU usually prefers information pages (which I despise) for examples.

Many ISP system administrators swear by BSD. They claim that it holds up better under load, has not made so many compromises for the desktop, and that the network stack is more efficient and less buggy. I do not know if these are or not, but this is what they told me.

In addition, OpenBSD has a reputation for serious attention to security, and they have historically built a very good reputation when it comes to security. They take proactive measures (such as developing new R Runtime library routines) to prevent security breaches before they can be written.

NetBSD has a reputation that works in almost everything. They have a long list of platforms that they actively support. Linux, to some extent, is trying to do this, but as a rule, only a small subset of them is supported by mainline.

Finally, it often comes down to personal preference. Do the guys you have or are going to hire know BSD? Do you like this?

There are also some reasons NOT to run BSD. If you are primarily a desktop user, BSD may not be the best choice. Of course, you can install most of the same material on BSD as Linux, but you will not find a "distribution" similar, say, to Ubuntu, which focuses strictly on the desktop. In addition, some device drivers are not available in BSD because they were written only with GPL licenses.

Answer 2

I said that BSD is more ... coherent than Linux. I talked for a long time with my friend of the system administrator about why and why not BSD / Linux. Here is the link:

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php?dupe=with_honor

Having said that, I started using Debian in 2007, and I never looked back! :)

Answer 3

One of the big areas BSD has for Linux is licensing. The Linux GPL may make it difficult to use some of the other licensed features of other operating systems. The first thing that comes to mind is ZFS.

In addition, BSD is a slightly more mature operating system (being directly a child of AT & T System V UNIX).

The common wisdom is that BSD is more useful for the server OS, and Linux is more useful for the desktop OS. But do not take this as the truth of the gospel, as many people have successfully used Linux as a server OS, and many people have used BSD as a desktop OS.