al3xu5 via Dng said on Fri, 14 Jun 2024 10:53:30 +0200

>Hi all
>
>Yes, I know I'm OT and that talking about other OSs here isn't exactly
>elegant... and I apologize
>
>But I have an unused laptop available, and I am curious to try a BSD
>OS.
>
>The idea is towards a robust, multipurpose system, preferably also
>attentive to privacy and security, with wide availability of packages,
>with a lightweight environment (gtk, lxde/xfce...) ... well I guess
>you understand what I mean... (I have Devuan+LXDE on all my
>computers...)

Hi alexus,

This is one anecdote from one person, so please keep this in mind. Back
in the 00's I tried OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. I might have tried
some others.

The only one I could get running was OpenBSD. At the time I used Xfce
with it. On Linux Xfce was quirky and buggy. On OpenBSD it ran
perfectly. On OpenBSD *everything* ran rock solid and perfectly. For
awhile in 2014, in the midst of the systemd civil war, I planned to
migrate to OpenBSD. Only one thing stopped me...

OpenBSD didn't (and I think still doesn't) have a *hardware assisted*
virtual machine setup. As you know, every distro lacks a certain
software you need, and the solution is often a VM running a different
distro that has the needed software (usually Ubuntu). Once you have
hardware assisted VMs, no piece of Linux software is beyond your reach,
although you might need to accept systemd on that software piece's VM
appliance (and I really don't care about the internals of an
appliance). If OpenBSD had had a good hardware assisted VM, I wouldn't
be a Linux user today.

The other disadvantage of OpenBSD is Theo, who has a personality like
Linus, RMS, ESR and the like. With the OpenBSD community, always do
your due diligence before asking a question, and try hard not to state
opinions. It's a very much less welcoming environment than the Devuan
community.

My research from the 00's showed the other BSDs to be unsuitable for
any purpose. But that's just me --- I had plenty of friends using
FreeBSD.

If you switch, please, please, PLEASE don't become one of those BSD
fanatics who have nothing better to do than badmouth Linux. See this
1999 article I wrote: https://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/snarf.htm

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21