You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.
(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)
This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting?
Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works.
These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design.
Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't)
In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability.
I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3