"Marco" <marco@marylon.com> writes:

> may I ask why should I go for FreeBSD and why for OpenBSD?

You may, but the usefulness of the answers may vary widely. The best
advice I can give you is to try them both and see which one fit your
needs and working style best. If you really need to isolate the one
and only system to use, the decision can be tough. I dabble in both,
and frankly I would not want to be without either of them.

For FreeBSD, the original project goal was roughly "the best BSD on
PC-compatible hardware", which in modern terms translates to "a BSD
operating system optimized for x86 and close cousins". FreeBSD is
being ported to several platforms, but the main focus remains Intel
and AMD chips.

OpenBSD's project goal can be summarized as "a portable, secure
operating system".

FreeBSD appears to enjoy a larger user base and developer community,
possibly for historical reasons. Keep in mind that FreeBSD and NetBSD
started roughly at the same time, independently with slightly
different goals. OpenBSD then split off from NetBSD roughly a decade
ago.

Both systems have an active and innovative developer community, both
are seeing extensive field use, and 'good code travels well' between
BSD projects.

Some users report that FreeBSD is faster for interactive X desktop use
(possibly due to x86 optimizations), and the amount of ported software
accessible through the FreeBSD ports system is larger than the
corresponding number for OpenBSD. Off the top of my head I think
FreeBSD boasts something like 14500 packages, while OpenBSD has
something like five thousand[1]. Then again, you are rather likely to
find the bits you need among the five thousand on OpenBSD, and unlike
FreeBSD, where you are more or less expected to build your own
packages in between releases, updated OpenBSD packages for recent
releases are downloadable and installable from mirrors around the
world via the pkg_* tools.

OpenBSD is home to the wonderful PF (Packet Filter) and a leader in
providing blobless hardware drivers, most of which of course travels
well to other BSDs.

There are other angles and wrinkles, and there may even be things I
have forgotten to mention or do not really care about which may be
more important to you. Whatever you end up choosing, you will find
that both systems are high quality, versatile systems which are
excellent choices for most tasks.

[1] I fully expect to be corrected with more exact numbers within the
next few minutes.
--
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/
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