OpenBSD Journal

Short comparison of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OS X.

Contributed by grey on from the 10,000 mile (or more?) view dept.

Martin Brown takes a high level look at several BSD derived operating systems with some favourable words regarding OpenBSD in his article "Differentiating Among BSD Distros".

While this will no doubt bore those looking for an accurate technical comparison, perhaps you can point it to individuals asking the newbie "what's the difference between OpenBSD and ..." question. Personally, I like the short, if a bit generalized description from Soren Kristensen for such purposes, found at the bottom of this page.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.190) on

    No offense, but does everything anyone ever posts anywhere that mentions OpenBSD deserve to be mentioned here? That article is pretty much just an OS X fan who doesn't understand it, trying to pitch it to unix users. The information is pretty inacurate, and even contradicts itself in places. The author clearly doesn't have the knowledge required to write such an article. And OpenBSD is pretty much glossed over anyways, with its security benefits pretty much dismissed as "they don't enable anything by default", which isn't even true, let alone being the whole story. I doubt the author has spent any time using any of the systems mentioned besides OS X.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (67.68.216.89) on

      Don't enable anything by default... Pfft, if you ask me, they enable too much by default... ;-) But hey, this isn't RH or some other bloat-distro with EVERYthing under the sun enabled by default.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.190) on

        I like having an OS that is secure even if you use it. If you think turning everything off is a good security strategy, try NetBSD.

    2. By mouring (208.27.203.127) mouring@eviladmin.org on

      I would argue that he hasn't spent enough time with OS/X. He think it is based off of FreeBSD. Which is incorrect. It was based off of NeXTStep and they picked up a lot of FreeBSD userspace tools to shore up the old 4.3BSD age that was affecting it. But I guess if you read all the Apple hype they are trying to scrub clean the NeXT history (which is sad because I loved NeXT.. Heck I still have an old black slab in my office at home!).

      Sadly, there are places in OS/X Panther that are still unimplemented for common BSD features (getpeeruid() being a good example, but I was told it has been implemented in Tiger).

      But I have to admit that OS/X has been one of the few UNIX desktops that I 've actually fallen in love with for use. Granted the code still needs to be gutted and cleaned up. =) But one can't get everything at once.

      - Ben

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.190) on

        Like I said, "an OS X fan who doesn't understand it". He says various things about OS X that aren't accurate, but that doesn't mean he hasn't used OS X enough, it means he doesn't know what he's talking about. Using OS X more isn't going to help him realize that its not "basically freebsd", he would need to also use freebsd.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (211.30.147.144) on

    The author is too lazy to even try out each OS. He only gave overviews of each OS (which anyone can figure out for themselves) and put some recommendation up that is pretty much generally agreed by most folks. So it brings nothing new to the table. Another WOT article. WOT = Waste Of Time.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (24.130.94.62) on

      Geez, and all this time I thought WOT stood for Wide Open Throttle. Freaking acronym mangling Internet users. ;)

      Comments
      1. By tbuskey (65.213.77.129) on

        I'd use WFO == Wide Open

  3. By Anonymous Coward (2001:618:400:ae1f:20e:a6ff:fe6e:d2f6) on

    "Differentiating Among BSD Distros"....

    There's no BSD distros,they are complete independent operating systems by them self, they just share roots and have some similarities but that's all.I think this article is nothing but crap.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (24.130.94.62) on

      True that! Just like you said, they're not distros. The kernels are different, the userland is somewhat different, and their goals are different.

      They might have some things in common, but they're still different. I think people need to understand that.

      Although, how would you classify them since they're not distros? I don't know, I tend to like calling them "BSD Flavors". Rocky Road and Vanilla might both be ice creams, but they're still very much different flavors. You know what I mean?

      Some of you might consider the artile to be pointless, but I figure some good press is better than no press.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (63.90.190.232) on

        True that press is good but I don't stand by the philosophy that all press is good press. Accurate press is what's needed.

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