Hi,

For my own personal learning, I want to set up a *nix system that is lean and minimal. I feel that it will help me understand the internals of *nix systems a whole lot better. A system that is too bloated and has too much installed on it - I guess it's a little difficult to poke at its internals.

I've heard that the BSDs are a lot more conceptually closer to the original Unix, than a lot of Linux distros. And that the BSDs' design as an operating system is cleaner and more well-thought than GNU/Linux, so understanding the BSDs' internals would make a good learning experience. Is this true?

I've seen FreeBSD being recommended for the use cases of networking, or ZFS, or jails. I don't know if I'm going to need any of these features ... my sole use case at the moment is to understand the internals of a *nix system. Would the BSDs be a good choice for this use case, and which BSD would you recommend (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or some other)?

Thanks!

I am an Arch user, I recently have been into making VMs with Arch to use OS' which have better program support.

I use GPU passthrough.

If bhyve is as good as Qemu/KVM, I fail to see why more people are not just using BSD.

I have previously tested FreeBSD and it went quite well (before I was into passthrough VMs).

I heard bhyve is a type 2 hypervisor, how is that the case?

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day.

With BSD make(1), it's fairly straight-forward if you want the build-product alongside the corresponding source files:

.SUFFIXES: .html
.SUFFIXES: .md
MD2HTML!=which markdown lowdown | head -1
⋮
.md.html:
        $(MD2HTML) $< $@

However, I was trying to create a Makefile that will walk a tree of input .md files in a posts/ directory and produce the corresponding HTML output file-tree in output/ according to the same directory structure.

I'm currently hacking it with a combination of

FILES!=find $(SRC_DIR) -type f

Then iterating over it with a .for loop, determining the resulting output/ directory path filename, and creating a standard rule-pair to take posts/…/input1.md and turn it into output/…/input1.html (building the directory-tree in the process). This works well enough because some of the input files are already in HTML (rather than Markdown), so only need to be copied like

output/…/input2.html: input/…/input2.html
        cp $< $@

But the whole .for loop feels incredibly hackish. I'm struggling to come up with a way of doing this that feels right. Partly because most of the make(1) resources out there are for GNU make, and partly because this doesn't seem to be the make way/paradigm.

Is there a better/proper way to set up make to deal with different source/destination sub-trees?

posting to r/bsd because it's not really specific to any one BSD, r/make isn't what I wanted, it's not so much a r/cprogramming sort of question, and deals with nuances of BSD make instead of GNU make.

Hello all! I'm the author of fastfetch and I'm glad to say that fastfetch now supports all major BSD variants (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD)

For anyone don't know what fastfetch is. Fastfetch is a maintained, feature-rich and performance oriented system information tool, which aims to replace neofetch completely. This is what it looks like in GhostBSD

https://preview.redd.it/g4l4670thuyd1.png?width=1866&format=png&auto=webp&s=5419cf226c5bdb7b78e126619bc6fd86e9df8b0d

Personally I only use FreeBSD. I tested fastfetch for other BSDs in VM. If you encounter issues please file a bug in fastfetch's Github repo

https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch

Thanks!

Hello!

I'm coming from Arch Linux and been seriously contemplating the switch to a BSD derivative lately, so I want to make sure I more or less correctly understand some details.

My use case is somewhat generic - programming (mostly Java and Python but I do plan to learn Rust), gaming (only native or Wine/Proton compatible stuff), browsing, messaging, documents, etc. However, I don't expect all of this to be handled by the bare metal system itself, so I'm more than okay with managing virtual machines for specific tasks, and my PC's specs allow me to, thus virtualization is also a big point for me, especially with hardware passthrough (PCI and USB). Also, I like to tinker when installing to maximize security, so my Arch install uses Secure Boot signed UKIs, the rest of the disk encrypted with LUKS2 (password prompt each boot) and btrfs layout that allows taking snapshots to revert to in case of a faulty system change.

As far as I understand, OpenBSD is the most secure and "tightly" developed OS, which sounds very appealing to me since I'd like to have a rock solid bare metal OS and then just run VMs for stuff that it can't handle, but, unfortunately, from what I've learnt, OpenBSD doesn't support hardware passthrough yet, so it's a big disadvantage, because then there's just no way to use my Nvidia RTX 4060 at all.

FreeBSD sounds more appealing in regards to virtualization, general capabilities and compatibility, but less from the security and quality points compared to OpenBSD.

And then there's NetBSD, which I couldn't find if it supports hardware passthrough. For the rest, I've gathered that it's an in-between when compared to FreeBSD and OpenBSD, so, if its quality and security is better than that of FreeBSD and it allows to have near bare metal virtual machines, it'd be ideal to me.

Also, I should clarify - I keep using "security" as one of the main selling points for me, but I'm not actually running any critical infrastructure or anything. I just want to have a learning experience and satisfy some of that paranoia lol.

So I wonder, maybe there's another BSD OS I didn't notice that could satisfy my needs? Maybe there's a way after all to have hardware passthrough on OpenBSD? Should I give NetBSD a try? Or should I give up and just use FreeBSD? Thanks!

[SOLVED] Hello everybody,

I am new to BSD (but well-versed in many Linux distros, Win and a bit of MacOS), and I read through this sub many times looking to understand better what's the purpose of using BSD.
I wanted to give it a shot to use it as a server for a couple of projects, and to get a feeling of what is BSD like I looked up what was the suggested distro to start familiarize with it, and more than one person here suggested GhostBSD (also, cool name not gonna lie). I'm trying now to boot GhostBSD 24 (XFCE) ISO on an old desktop board I have, and everytime I get to the first menu (it shows option to boot multiple users, single user, back to firmware settings etc) the pc reboot, even when trying to select different options. Important mention is that I am using Ventoy, just to make my life easier I did not want to wipe an USB and write to it. What could I be doing wrong? Can it be hardware incompatible? (It's like a 3xx series mobo with an old chip) Maybe I'm doing something else wrong and I missed it.
Thanks in advance for the help to anybody, have a great day

This content is RESOLVED INVALID.

I'm curious to see other peoples opinions/experiences as I'm considering trying out and possibly daily driving (Free)BSD. I'm not specifically interested in just differences that you've noticed per se, as I've seen a lot (though that's still helpful regardless,) but actual advantages and benefits you've seen that you either didn't get or were smaller when using Linux.

I'd also like to see a list of cons that you experienced when moving to *BSD and how you learned to live with those negative differences if you'd like to share, and if there's anything you miss about Linux.

This post is moreso curiosity about peoples experiences with using it as a home computer/workstation, as *BSD is definitely not as popular as Linux and thus there aren't as many people passionate about daily driving it and documenting their experiences whether good or bad.

Hi there, im new to BSD community, i use an M3 Pro MacBook Pro and a Custom Desktop PC and an Asus Vivobook S15 as daily driver but im not much of a coder, just getting the hand of it. And i really like how MacOS looks and feels so polished but i think it lacks the freedom of Linux and compability of Windows. Is it possiblw for me to build an OS based on BSD? Sorry if it's the wrong subreddit but also to mention i have about 170k$ budget for it.

Hello folks !

Could a declarative BSD distribution ever exist ?

The two only current equivalent examples in the GNU+Linux ecosystem would be NixOS and GNU Guix System

Technical-wise, it surely would be possible ; but wouldn't it go against the standardization philosophy in the BSD ecosystem ?

Moving from GNU/Linux(Fedora) to one of the BSDs I'm open to recommendations. One that is beginner friendly and good for a desktop os.

Hello Everyone, How are you today?

I am doing a Case Study on Unix for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Research

I am a Computer Engineering Student who is also an aspiring Biomedical Engineer, I am currently working on a Case Study personal Project (Use of Linux in Biomedical Engineering and Medical Research) the goal of this to get deep level of understanding of Operating System enough for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Research.

I need a BSD Variant recommendation from Engineers of this subreddit.

I know Windows is preferred by Many Engineers but as a Unix Enthusiast I want to see it's usecase in my field.

Hoping to have a great day

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2024/09/30/msg040317.html

hey guys
i like debian for really small image in GCP available, so i can use smallest VM to use it.
i have another VM and try using freeBSD, and i feel like there is no turning back using bsd as server instead of linux. very stable.

the problem is the size.

any recomendation tiny bsd image that can be use as a web server like deb, without bloat package?

leave your channels invitation here if u talk about bsd or any anime in general please!!

On OpenBSD i needed to install the firmware for my Intel Card since its not included out of the box because of contractual and licensing Issues. This also explains why my go at FreeBSD went sour, i had missing firmware firmware. I read iwmfw but now am confused does it mean the firmware for my card is included already and i have to compile it into the kernel or load it as an Module or will doing that download it first and then work? Help i wish "fw_update iwm" would be valid on FreeBSD.

I know it isn't a good comparison as each BSD is a fully fledged OS while Linux is a group of many OSes that share a kernel, but in general is there more interoperability among the BSDs?

Is it easy to run programs built for one BSD on another?

One of the biggest complaints about Linux is how fractured it is; and as a newcomer FreeBSD seems much more solid, but then again I'm comparing a single OS to a general grouping.

is there a book on bsd