BSD is an authentic Unix, Linux is a clone. I will tell you that part of the success of Linux was due to the legal problems that BSD faced in the late 80's and 90's by AT&T.
If BSD had not faced these legal problems, perhaps Linux would not exist today.
The BSD operating systems are excellent, the main branches are:
- FreeBSD, the BSD system par excellence, is where more innovation in all aspects, to consider its magnificent integration with ZFS (the best on the market), its virtualization system and isolation Jails that predates docker and derivatives and its ports system (package manager). It also stands out for its performance, where in some aspects it surpasses Linux as in web servers.
- OpenBSD, the most secure operating system in the world, as it is the one that reports the fewest vulnerabilities, only followed by AIX.
- NetBSD, one of the systems that supports more architectures. Pioneer in integrating certain technologies such as IPv6, a great quality, a very well written and organized code and compliance with standards and a great file system such as BSD FFS.
- DragonFLY BSD, a great unknown but a great operating system, many FreeBSD nerds have switched to it. Hybrid kernel like Macos, Hammer file system (snapshots, compression and deduplication), LWKT (Light Weight Kernel Threads) implements lightweight threads in the kernel for better concurrency management, native virtualization in the kernel with vkernel and native swapcache.
Some fun facts that will interest you.
BSD licenses are more permissive than the GPL, allowing your code to be included in other projects and the resulting code to be licensed under other licenses, including proprietary or closed licenses.
Macos is a derivative of FreeBSD and uses many parts of it, although the core of Macos called Darwin is opensource (APSL). Macos on the other hand is a certified Unix.
Other systems that use FreeBSD are Playstation 3, Playstation4 and Nintendo Switch.
Netflix, WhatsApp and FligthAware are other examples of companies using FreeBSD in their infrastructures due to the incredible performance of their TCP/IP stack under high loads and web servers.
When Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft, they were using FreeBSD servers, no need to tell you what an ordeal it was for Microsoft to migrate their architecture to Windows Server.
Finally, the integration and cohesion of BSD operating systems are due to their development as a complete system, with the kernel and user space designed and maintained by the same team. This contrasts with Linux, which is primarily a kernel around which distributions add software and tools to form a complete operating system.
Long live BSD, the UNIX.
quotingOpenBSD 7.5 released
note1wgv…6lvm
https://www.openbsd.org/75.html