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Comment by oropolo | Hacker News Reader

What's the TL;DR breakdown of who the target audiences are for FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD?

There isn't one, at least not one that isn't superficial and wrong, as I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13948337 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17586058 .

FreeBSD: Created by people who run OS X on their computers for Sony and Apple.

NetBSD: Created and run by people on a huge variety of computers, big in Japan.

OpenBSD: Created by its own users, fork of NetBSD, run by everybody who truly cares about security and correctness.

Good rundown. Sent from my Arch Linux system.

edit: I have other systems. I agree with OpenBSD.

The thing with OpenBSD is that it's probably the most old-school even including its parent, NetBSD. Even though OpenBSD is a research OS, and has modern features often before any other OS, the way you administer and maintain it is much more old-school.

One great example is wifi, you create one config file in /etc/ for each interface, and then decide how you want it to be handled. To control wifi, you use ifconfig as you would any other interface. Why not just treat it as an additional interface and make it work with all the normal Unix type utilities and workflow?

This is correctness.

FreeBSD - You want to run an alternative to Linux

OpenBSD - You care about security

NetBSD - You want to hack on BSD

Hmmh? I thought NetBSD was the legacy/retro computing crowd. They still support (at least as 2nd tier architecture) SUN 2 with MC68K, which are more than 30 years old now. I don't quite understand the motivation for that, I must admit. If I would be curating museum machines, wouldn't I want the original software with it? You can't run modern software in a meaningful way on those ancient, quite limited machines, which have less RAM than today's CPUs cache.

NetBSD is a wonderful OS for embedded applications. Having support for a fully static port (the Sun2 port) and for old, generally slow architectures (m68k, VAX) means performance regressions don't go unnoticed, for starters.

I run NetBSD on a system with 24 megs of memory. I don't think this is possible with modern GNU/Linux - one would need an older kernel and something other than systemd, I think.

Don't forget Dragonfly BSD.

"I am on x86-64 and I want performance".

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