if I were to start learning more about one of the listed BSD operating systems, which would you recommend? Guessing the answer could be different if we're talking about daily desktop usage vs server, so maybe clarify your answer via a reply if you can (fwiw, probably more interested in daily desktop usage, but open to whatever too).
@andrew_chou I voted FreeBSD even though I prefer to use OpenBSD. FreeBSD seems to see wider use, and there's a ton to learn about it. OpenBSD is more niche, and it's a bit simpler.
For real use, on a desktop, OpenBSD all the way. Its devs commonly daily-driver it themselves, and it shows.
@tulpa this aligns with what I've gathered when doing research recently 👍 FreeBSD seems to be have a lot of usefulness in various areas that would be good to learn, but I've heard very mixed things about the desktop experience. Noticed some high praise for OpenBSD when it comes to daily desktop use.
@tulpa FreeBSD if you have nVidia, NetBSD is simpler (at least my point of view), OpenBSD is not any harder, but the performance is worse than Free/Net @andrew_chou
@peterkotrcka good to know! I was under the impression that NetBSD would actually be a pretty good candidate for me (for desktop usage). Hoping to see more folks confirm that 😄
Given that you said "learn about" and not "use", and given that you said that you had MacOS, I'd say learn FreeBSD first, then NetBSD, then OpenBSD.
It's worth learning them all.
But #FreeBSD is the closest to what you have in MacOS, with there being somewhat of a common heritage from many years ago; #NetBSD will expand your horizons from that, and then #OpenBSD is the furthest away from MacOS with very different ideas about almost everything and different abstractions.
@JdeBP yeah learning is probably the most realistic in the near term, given I don't really have a machine to spare for daily use (could dual boot I guess but I'm a newb 🤷♂️). probably would be living in Virtualbox/QEMU for a bit so I can easily explore them all 😄
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