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Comment by tclancy | Hacker News Reader

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

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Calling FreeBSD "just a distro" is verging on insulting. It's an operating system.

Apologies, "OS". I am not a native speaker of whatever place that considers these fightin' words.

Distros are operating systems.

But operating systems are not distros.

Less laconically, distros generally refer to the userland parts of the operating systems rather than the actual kernel. FreeBSD does not use the Linux kernel so calling it a distro, which typically refer specifically to Linux distros, wouldn't be accurate.

Where are you messing with userland-only options? In my experience a Linux distro not only comes with a kernel, it's almost always a kernel specific to the distro. So I don't understand that reason.

As far as Linux versus not Linux, "distro" feels fine to me for Unix systems.

FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)

Darwin is its own thing really. There are parts from BSD, there are also parts from Mach and there are also unique parts.

Of course. Linux does not share any heritage with BSD though.

Except that they are both based on Unix and (generally) made to run on x86 processors. Which is a pretty big similarity

Linux is not based on Unix. AFAIK it was inspired by Unix, but does not actually share anything.

And BSD is UNIX, at least technically.

Well, as they're a FreeBSD dev, I would be surprised if they pointed anyone in a different direction.

FreeBSD is not a distro

What does the D in BSD stand for again?

Distribution. But it’s not a Linux distribution.

Distribution. Which is a different word than distro, with a different meaning. Like smart and smartass.

While you’re correct that FreeBSD is not a Linux distribution, the word “distro” is literally short for distribution. It doesn’t have a different meaning like smart and smartass, it’s more like repo and repository.

That's more of a historical artifact. The BSDs started as just "BSD": a set of patches for AT&T Unix that were _distributed_ by Berkeley. Eventually the patches became complete enough to be an entire operating system. _Then_ the various BSDs that we know today (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD) all forked and became completely independent operating systems. For decades, FreeBSD's kernel and userland has been developed independently from the OpenBSD kernel and userland which is developed independently from NetBSD's kernel and userland, etc. You could not take an OpenBSD program and run it on FreeBSD. Even recompilation from source isn't necessarily enough since the BSDs support different syscalls.

They are completely independent operating systems with a distant shared history.

Whereas on Linux, the distros are taking a common Linux kernel source, and combining it with their choice of common userlands like GNU. Debian has the same kernel and GNU userland that Arch and Fedora use. You could take a program compiled for Debian and run it on Arch, which is common these days due to Docker where you're pulling another distro's userland and running it on your distro's kernel. That is how Linux distros are "distros" whereas the BSDs are independent operating systems.

This seems too long and it does not even answer the question. The question was specific, and the answer could be only one word long.

Do you honestly think stackghost doesn't know what the "D" stood for? They were making a point, not seeking information. My answer directly responded to the point they were making.

And the U in GNU, while we're at it.

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