I don't know why, but I never felt at home with FreeBSD. On the other hand I really liked OpenBSD, and it actually did really well with support for my laptops components (most of which are intel), but the fact they only half-implemented UTF8 support was a show-stopper for me.

Last time I tried it, regcomp()/regexec() in OpenBSD's C library still didn't recognise a multibyte utf8 sequence as a single character. The result is that any programs that make use of these regex matching functions (including many of the utilities in the OpenBSD base install) will misbehave when running in a UTF8 locale.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't dropped support for ISO8859-* locales leaving the choice of only POSIX "C" locale or partially implemented UTF-8. 7bit US ASCII just doesn't cut it for me.

So, here I sit, using Slackware and CRUX.

i have an old version of OpenBSD running on an old 32-bit SparcStation 5.

The thread title is so silly, I chuckle every time somebody even bothers to reply.

...

Oh no, I did it myself now!

1 members found this post helpful.

Here is a reply for ya.

I don't know what I am doing when in OpenBSD. I own chromebooks. I'd learn if if had to if offered no other choice. I have choice still so I don't.

I'd say that BSD has fewer users for the same reason that Uclibc (or is it µclibc?) has fewer users.

Both are invented in the Excited States and inherited the myopia of the Excited States. "US ascii is all the typefaces anyone needs." Contrary to popular (American) belief, there is civilised life which will not settle for US ascii as a typeface. I will concede that BSD is very secure and possibly uclibc is also; uclibc is certainly small, with only one locale. But they achieve this at the price of functionality viewed as necessary in other areas.

I gather the isps here keep a few BSD boxes for things like the firewalls, etc. and have a nerd to sort them out while the heavy lifting is done on linux. I can't speak for the data centres here, of which we have more than a few. You'd have to get on the irish linux users group forum to ask them.

Actually much of the core GNU development is on BSD, the work then ported to Linux.
Also, while it may have started and be homed in the USA, it attracts developers form all over the world. (Yes, even Ireland!)

It just comes down to the usual thing. "I need to use ≤this app≥ and, lo and behold, it runs on BSD." So you grab a copy of BSD and install it someplace, and learn enough about how to use it to get the job done. The OS is the horse, but the cart is what you're interested in. BSD is a very competent implementation of Unix.®