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BSD
BSD, standing for Berkeley Software Distribution, is a family of libre (BSD license) Unix-like operating systems.
The BSDs are a direct descendant of the original Unix operating system, unlike Linux which could be considered a clean room implementation of Unix.
Compared to Linux, BSDs have managed to keep the bloat in check and a reasonable codebase.
Unfortunately due to not being as popular as Linux, hardware support is lacking, even for old computers more than one thing is broken (suspend-to-RAM, audio, Wireless cards...), so unless you run really old hardware (or just a computer that happens to work) BSDs are not a very reasonable choice. For servers maybe, but note that BSD more insecure than Linux. { Installed FreeBSD on a thinkpad, resuming from suspension is broken and after installing the graphics driver, the console just broke, now the installation is bricked LMAO. Now I get it, BSDs aren't mean for desktop usage but for insecure servers :DDD ~tocariimaa }
Main BSD distros
- FreeBSD: the most popular, quite "Linux-like", plans to drop support for 32 bit architectures.
- NetBSD: focus on portability, main user of pkgsrc, supports Lua in the kernel for driver prototyping and kernel configuration.
- OpenBSD: quite hysterical with "security features", but functional as its contributors actually daily drive it (on thinkpads). Was forked from NetBSD.
No, MacOS is not a BSD. FreeBSD users, stop coping.
Historical BSDs
- 386BSD: first version of BSD for IBM PC like computers. It was ready before Linux was released but due to legal issues with AT&T it couldn't be released until 1992, a year later after Linux initial release. FreeBSD and NetBSD were forked from 386BSD.