Why BSD?

AnotherDev · October 4, 2019, 11:43pm

If I may hijack and Necro my old thread

I stand by that first post, still

Recently you’ve heard of this new (lol) phenomenon known as Unix/BSD/Solaris or, as I like to say, X_BSD. What is X_BSD, you might ask? [image] FreeBSD FreeNAS OpenBSD NetBSD DragonflyBSD GhostBSD MacOS Solaris pfSense Junos OS TrueOS That’s just to name a few. Unix was created at Bell Labs a long time ago. It’s original intent was to have a mulituser operating system that programmers could work with and multitask on. This ain’t a history lesson, though, so feel free to do some digging or ask some community members you jive with to fill in the gaps if you’re not sure. Why use an X_BSD operating system? Well, if you go the FreeBSD route, native ZFS is KING. The Z(ed) File System is a crazy evolution in filesystems. Tons of man hours have gone into perfecting it into what it is today. It allows for integrity checking while reading and writing (a gross oversimplification), real time snapshots, data compression, and a slew of other benefits. BSD also has a pretty solid networking stack. But why listen to me butcher and stumble around it? Here’s some fun facts from Netflix: http://mirror.onet.pl/pub/mirrors/video.fosdem.org/2019/Janson/netflix_freebsd.webm FreeBSD has scalability and power where it matters. Ask Facebook, Google, and Netflix. Sure, they’re easy to hate on, but they know how to handle modern web architecture. You’ll also be following your computation ancestors that wrote C and built Unix to solve problems. Like video games? Playstation3 and Playstation4 are running FreeBSD from what I recall. Like software development? Have an out of the way OS that allows you to write code with minimal headaches. Unlike Linux, X_BSD will have the kernel contained in the development and implementation of the operating system. Rarely will you have to recompile a kernel on X_BSD, you can import a module or work with the built in ports. Security more your fancy? OpenBSD is kn…