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Old 25th December 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randux View Post
I moved away from FreeBSD after the major debacle with a new xorg and I'm thinking about setting up a new system. Still trying to decide between Free and Net.

Thanks.
Well it is kind a funny that you are deliberating between FreeBSD and NetBSD bearing in mind your experience with FreeBSD transition from
XOrg 6.9 to XOrg 7.0 modular. What do you expect will happen with NetBSD 5.0 when they move from XFree86 to XOrg 7.4 modular? You choice should be clear FreeBSD.

I wonder why didn't you consider OpenBSD? If you are as conservative user as you claim OpenBSD would be the perfect choice. I might be little bit bias since I used it but based on my heuristic experience OpenBSD is the most stable of all BSDs following closely by NetBSD. FreeBSD is by far the list stable of big three.

On the another hand real question you should be asking yourself is what will be the primary use for your system and what kind a hardware you will be dealing with.

Unlike many major Linux distros and Windows alike which claim that
are all-in-one solutions for all human computing needs each of four
BSD flavors has its own notch as you know.

FreeBSD is ultra optimized for multiprocessors i386 or amd64 machines (almost no support for anything else) and great solution for large data bases. Bleeding edge software.

DragonFly with kernel support for clustering.

NetBSD portability on old crappy hardware (very little support for
non i386 and amd64 on modern hardware), best virtualization in BSD world and fantastic solution for embedded devices.

OpenBSD most secure of all, most conservative and in practical terms most portable (sparc64 outstanding) great for embedded devices and
small servers.


Speaking of BSD on the desktop it is what you make out of them. I have used all of the above as my primary desktop OS. If you just want things
to work on the desktop probably should try PCBSD to see if it works for you. It is probably couple years behind Linux in usability but might work for you. On another hand you can just get a Mac if you want BSD on the desktop and you will be light years ahead of Linux users.

Last edited by Oko; 25th December 2008 at 07:41 AM.
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