I thought I'd throw this question out there to get some interesting conversation going but what exactly would be the benefit of a company, organization or individuals to use *BSD as opposed to any version of Linux?

Tuff question.

Most of the answer is going to come down to personal preference and is subjective to any individual, based on their needs/goal/comfort/experience with any Linux/BSD/"Other Unix" distro.

For example, I have an ongoing debate with a friend who swears by Red Hat vs. OpenBSD (my pref, for most things) even in light of any advantages pointed out. In his eyes, any advantages brought to the table by another OS don't outweigh his reasons for using Red Hat. Subjective.

But if what you're asking for is reasons to use one over another, you're going to be #1 clutching at straws and #2 asking for a holy war.

My personal preference follows as such: for any server (defined by me as a host that will be available to the public or any group of individuals and which purpose is to provide network services solely, will need only the neccesary services running, along with local and remote shell access for administration) I will undoubtably use OpenBSD. It has a long, strong, lean, mean, tight, hard security history. It is stable. it is traditional BSD UNIX to the core. It is well documented. It has decent support for app availability. It requires a steeper learning curve than a lot of other Unix builds, but conversely will give you a better understanding of and more control and power over the system.

For a workstation or light intranet server, I go Red Hat. It's easy a and quick to setup for me, has easy support for about any package/program I can think of, and easy access to a clean X interface and powerful window manager. It's common, widely supported, and well documented (both on the 'net and in literature).

The problem with my point of view is that they rely on my preference, and influenced by the fact that they are the distros/builds that I know and use daily. There are other linux distros that meet the points I listed for Red Hat. I could just as easily use Debian and get the same options, for the most part. But I know Red hat and stick with it.

Same goes for OpenBSD. FreeBSD makes equally as good of an Internet-facing server, and except for the focus on security, has most other things in common with OBSD. What i know is obsd, though, and I will continue to use it. I swear by it, and it's the server I would install for clients.

If they need development stations or productivity workstations though, they'll get Red Hat boxes from me. It does the job, and it does it pretty well. openbsd doesn't, in that respect, and neither does red hat do the job that openbsd does on the server end.

I have heard from many 'NIX pros that a BSD variant is better suited for use as a high powered server than Linux, and conversly Linux is better suited as a workstation or small server OS.

It boils down to security and performance. The fact remains that the BSD have been designed for use on server systems, but Linux has ben designed to take on Micro$oft.

Aside from that OpenBSD requires only 265M of disk space for a fully functional server. I don't think redhat will go there anymore.

I have an old 486DX80 16M ram an d found *BSD cuz by 7.1 redhat started saying "not enough memory for installation"

I am using redhat for this post I do rather like it. In fact I seem to read articles like this http://www.linuxorbit.com/modules.ph...owcontent&id=8

all the time btu I know red hat gets slooow on an older celeron.


As for ease of install I've had no problem with OBSD at all. Granted it isn't as easy as redhat, nor does it do the pretty gui for you.

Just trying to get OBSD set up as a workstation now

Also therer is now a 'hardened' *BSD based mostly on openbsd. It's called microbsd. And it requires less than 100Megs of disk space.

Sancho5 wrote: "... if what you're asking for is reasons to use one over another, you're going to be #1 clutching at straws and #2 asking for a holy war. "

Actually I asked an open-ended question (as opposed to one that was "which one is better??" or "which one roolz your boxen???!!!" <<<------man, that is so gay :-) and hoped for some good benefits that a person could give for going either way. No need for holy wars and the like.

oops sorry fogot the main point....

Anything you can accomplish with a *BSD box, cant you do the same with a Linux distro? I mean this in terms of security...

Actually they are in varying states of evolution.

ie FBSD has some smp support. Not the level of linux though
OBSD doesn't yet. OBSD has kernelsystrace (application system call tracing) built into the kernel (some modification required at least til the next 'stable' rrelease).

So yes if you know C well enough you can do anything with either. So no not really, they have different backgrounds and different goals.

The OBSD installs have all been rock solid. Granted sparse, but for security reasons. Whereas RH 7.2 was an abomination(my opinion) 7.1 was great and 7.3 is welcome releif from the last one.

any how I like learnig about OSes from OBSD, but for a workstation I like the ease of use of RH

Personally I prefer FreeBSD over Linux because it's a nicer system to set up and work with (I only use it as a desktop so small differences in security / performance aren't major issues for me). It's not full of bloat and irritating GUI configuration utilities, but unlike Linux distros with that virtue (i.e. Slackware) it has a decent package management system. It also has a neat initialization script structure IMHO. I guess Gentoo has a ports system too, but it seems to emphasise building /everything/ from source, whereas FreeBSD gives you a nice precompiled base system to start with.

Alex

but... what CANT you do with linux that you CAN do with BSD?

im not making a challenge necessarily- in other words, what can BSD do that Linux can not? id be interested in knowing...

> but... what CANT you do with linux that you CAN do with BSD?

Basically nothing, but surely that's not the point - there aren't really any major differences in capability between Windows, Linux, UNIX etc. - but some OSs just do some things better than others.

what do these OS's do better than others? thats what i dont get... are yu saying in terms of stability? windows kernels are extremely unstable, this i get... but is there a major difference at that level between linux and BSD?

One of the first things that comes to my mind is kernel securelevels.

carry on.. i'd be interested to hear more about these.


And what can be *done* in BSD systems that cannot be done in Linux.. virtually nothing.

Take a distro like OpenBSD versus RH 7.x. OpenBSD provides native IPSEC support. RH does not, unless you plan on recompiling the kernel and installing FreeSWAN. OpenBSD provides a ports tree, which allows you to select a program you wish to install, run one quick command, and have it satisfy any needed dependancies, download the latest stable version available, configure with the switches needed for your openbsd distro, compile with the needed flags, and install cleanly, and apply patches, and clean up after itself. Under RedHat you have to deal with RPMs that don't resolve dependancies and have issues with correct libraries. And what about when the RPM database becomes out of sync or corrupted, as often does? RPMs can't touch a ports tree. A distro such as openbsd is audited, both in distro specific code, and in standard included utilities such as BIND and Sendmail (the default installs on most linux distros are current - meaning they contain the current bugs and vulnerabilities - while OBSD audits the code before inclusion in the RELEASE version. Result - a more secure system by default. Red Hat ships with WUFTP by default - quite a bane in earlier releases.

There are plenty of differences, most small, some significant.

to carry on - i guess another difference is that a lot of linux distros will include the GNU version of a certain utility, while BSD distros contain.. BSD versions (the version of the utility that has been in use since 4.4 BSD was in its infancy, for example). This means different options and arguments to commands for instance - take 'ps' e.g. - in RH you can specify a -f switch to view a full process tree view. the -f switch is not supported in OpenBSD (or others maybe.)

Why not read the OpenBSD Man pages? I don't think that you can do this with Linux, but then again, I was wrong once.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.c...+Current&arch=