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Comment by _rs | Hacker News Reader

As someone who hasn't used BSD, but is considering it for a small server (not mission critical, so OK for me to be learning with), could you expand on the major differences to you between OpenBSD and FreeBSD (vs possibly other options)? When you say you like OpenBSD "for the edge", do you mean cutting-edge, or edge network equipment? Thanks!

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OpenBSD is more conservative and security-minded, so I'd say network edge. Interestingly though, its laptop hardware support has historically been better.

OpenBSD devs actually tend to use OpenBSD on their own systems (and most of them own ThinkPads), which, weirdly, is not the case with most FreeBSD devs, who run something else on their desktop.

This isn't necessarily a fair characterization of FreeBSD devs, although it's probably pretty close. I'd guess about 50-50 FreeBSD vs Mac users.

This has noticeably changed in past years. More and more thinkpads, more and more dogfooding

I'm guessing this is because macOS pulls from FreeBSD on a semi-regular basis.

Maybe they pull some things sometimes but I get the sense their command-line tools in general are just unmaintained and collecting dust. Do you have a citation that they pull regularly?

FWIW:

~ man rm | tail -n1

BSD January 28, 1999 BSD

They pulled at least once, historically, but don't seem to pull on a regular basis. Anyone who wants newer tools than the few they keep updated installs homebrew.

> It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux

Not your quote, but I would add: ... and think of OpenBSD to FreeBSD as diamond to granite, 'rock solid' is understatement :)

"We have fixed many simple and obvious careless programming errors in code and only months later discovered that the problems were in fact exploitable." https://www.openbsd.org/security.html

I would use OpenBSD for my network "edge" and FreeBSD for my general purpose servers and desktop.

FreeBSD is focused on being a good server and appliance operating system and OpenBSD is focused on security and correctness of their code base.

Given the symbiotic use of C on the UNIX world, the way OpenBSD devs care about security is quite valuable.

Well, they contracted "edge" with "internal", so I think they mean network edge?

NetBSD is for network edge.

and your toaster

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