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Hi,

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

Thanks,
Marco

"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/
"First, we kill all the spammers" The Usenet Bard, "Twice-forwarded tales"
20:11:56 delilah spamd[26905]: 146.151.48.74: disconnected after 36099 seconds

Marco <marco@marylon.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> may I ask why should I go for FreeBSD and why for OpenBSD?

FreeBSD is fast, well-supported (most vendors will have a FreeBSD
binary; there is a lot of documentation; more people use it than
OpenBSD), and runs a wide variety of software. It's also a
mostly-complete desktop environment.

OpenBSD is very secure, very stable, and has very clean and well-written
code.

(Note that the above is relative; both systems are fast, secure, stable,
well-supported, and most of the code should be readable; in addition,
both can be used as a desktop - mine runs OpenBSD.)

It has a more strict stance on what is sufficiently open than FreeBSD;
this can be an advantage
(http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=a...de=expande d),
and is widely supported in the OpenBSD community, but it does mean that
OpenBSD will usually take more time to support hardware without free
specifications (reverse engineering takes more time than wrapping a
blob; OTOH, the OpenBSD community argues that the resulting drivers are
better, which is arguably the case).

OpenBSD has a simplistic threading model (work is underway to improve
this, but it will still take a lot of time), which means that for
instance MySQL won't run as fast. (OpenBSD uses an 1.3 Apache version -
with a lot of patches - which is not threaded, so Apache runs just
fine.)

Both have their merits; outside specific cases (a MySQL server would be
best handled by FreeBSD, if PostgreSQL is not an option; OpenBSD, on the
other hand, would be preferable for a firewall), the choice should
depend on what the administrator is most familiar with.

Joachim

Thank you all, very well written and detailed answers!
Marco


jKILLSPAM.schipper@math.uu.nl wrote:
> Marco <marco@marylon.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > may I ask why should I go for FreeBSD and why for OpenBSD?
>
> FreeBSD is fast, well-supported (most vendors will have a FreeBSD
> binary; there is a lot of documentation; more people use it than
> OpenBSD), and runs a wide variety of software. It's also a
> mostly-complete desktop environment.
>
> OpenBSD is very secure, very stable, and has very clean and well-written
> code.
>
> (Note that the above is relative; both systems are fast, secure, stable,
> well-supported, and most of the code should be readable; in addition,
> both can be used as a desktop - mine runs OpenBSD.)
>
> It has a more strict stance on what is sufficiently open than FreeBSD;
> this can be an advantage
> (http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=a...de=expande d),
> and is widely supported in the OpenBSD community, but it does mean that
> OpenBSD will usually take more time to support hardware without free
> specifications (reverse engineering takes more time than wrapping a
> blob; OTOH, the OpenBSD community argues that the resulting drivers are
> better, which is arguably the case).
>
> OpenBSD has a simplistic threading model (work is underway to improve
> this, but it will still take a lot of time), which means that for
> instance MySQL won't run as fast. (OpenBSD uses an 1.3 Apache version -
> with a lot of patches - which is not threaded, so Apache runs just
> fine.)
>
> Both have their merits; outside specific cases (a MySQL server would be
> best handled by FreeBSD, if PostgreSQL is not an option; OpenBSD, on the
> other hand, would be preferable for a firewall), the choice should
> depend on what the administrator is most familiar with.
>
> Joachim