BSD

What is a BSD?

A BSD is an operating system based on the original BSD operating system developed in the 80's. BSD distros include GhostBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. That is, nobody installs the BSD, but a BSD distro based upon it.

Is BSD Linux?

BSD is not Linux. It doesn't have the Linux kernel.

BSD, Linux, and macOS have familiarities because they're based on Unix, specially when we compare them to Windows. For example, they all have use forward slashes (/) as directory separator instead of Windows' backward slash (\). They all have a /etc/ directory for configuration files, and /bin/ directory for system binaries. Some terminal commands may be available across these systems, but it isn't guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that a same command will work the same way with the same arguments. For example, ln may have different arguments in BSD compared to your Linux distro, so if you make a shell script in your home PC then SSH into your BSD-based web server, you may have unexpected trouble. Some may say you should use Docker or a VM for this sort of thing. I recommend just using Python instead.

A key difference between BSD and Linux is that Linux is extremely fragmented. Linux refers only to the kernel, so a Linux distro isn't guaranteed to have ANY program that isn't included in the kernel. This includes bash, the shell, and the GNU tools necessary to compile C programs. Most desktop distros have systemd, but that isn't guaranteed either. BSD on the other hand is meant to be a complete operating system, not just the kernel, so it doesn't have some of the problems that Linux has.

On the other hand, BSD has an extremely small market share on desktop. Linux, which has a much larger market share, has many problems with drivers not working for certain devices. On BSD, that is an even bigger problem. If you want to see what BSD looks like on the desktop, try GhostBSD on a VM, which at least comes with a desktop environment preconfigured. If you don't know how to use a virtual machine, start by learning how to do that before trying to use BSD as a desktop OS.

Quotes

[Referring to NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD] The three BSD operating systems are all descended from the BSD version of Unix developed at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1980s (''BSD'' stands for Berkeley Standard Distribution). They're also the descendants of Project GNU, started by Richard Stallman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There's a lot of infighting among the groups developing these three systems, but there's also a lot of cooperation, since all are distributed in source code. All can run most programs that are written for Linux, and frequently they can run the programs faster than Linux itself.

Even better than Linux, By Simson L. Garfinkel, 09/16/99 [http://www.mit.edu/~xela/simsong_bsd_story.html] (accessed 2024-09-2024)