What's the difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?

Lucas Holt luke at foolishgames.com
Wed Sep 17 06:01:22 PDT 2003


On Wednesday, September 17, 2003, at 08:35  AM, Andy wrote:

> Apologies if I should have found the answer already, but it would 
> appear
> from both sites that xxxxBSD is a marvellous operating system, very 
> secure,
> efficient, etc, based on Berkeley Unix, etc. Both are free and 
> maintained by
> really skilled technical people, etc, but what is the difference 
> between
> them, why would one use one in preference to the other?
>
>
Its simply a matter of preference.  Each project (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, 
NetBSD...) have their own goals, and ideas about security.

I tend to look at it like this:
FreeBSD is probably the best general purpose BSD for x86 systems.  
(other ports are coming along)

OpenBSD is great for those who are VERY serious about security.  The 
system is locked down by default, and has alterations the the system 
compiler to make it more secure.  It tries to prevent common attack 
vectors.  If you are using this for a desktop, you will need to do a 
lot more work to unsecure it enough to run apps. :)

NetBSD
I can't comment on NetBSD all that much as I only ran it on an old 
Sparc.  It ran great though.. they do support the most platforms 
though.  Linux people should feel at home in terms of porting to 
everything including your toaster oven.  You can even run NetBSD on 
Sega DreamCast.

Darwin (Apple's distro)  isn't done yet for x86 platforms.  Mac OS X 
runs the darwin system.


Lucas Holt
Luke at FoolishGames.com
________________________________________________________
FoolishGames.com  (Jewel Fan Site)
JustJournal.com (Free blogging)

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and 
I'm not sure about the former."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list