About a month ago, while talking with a colleague who had experience only with Linux, he mentioned that he knew of the BSDs but had never "had the courage" to try them. I suggested he give them a shot, reminding him not to think of BSDs as "just another Linux" but as entirely different operating systems. Focusing on security, I recommended OpenBSD - also mentioning HardenedBSD, sure it would pique his interest.

A few hours ago, he called me about something else and confirmed that for weeks now, he's been using OpenBSD on his laptop (disk encrypted), FreeBSD on two servers, and NetBSD on an embedded device at home. He plans to experiment with HardenedBSD and DragonflyBSD in the coming weeks.

However, he did have one complaint: we've known each other for five years, and I never encouraged him to try this earlier! 😀

#BSD #OpenBSD #FreeBSD #NetBSD #HardenedBSD #DragonflyBSD #Security #Tech #FOSS #RunBSD

@stefano will Free/OpenBSD work out of the box for programming on the laptop though?

@psyhackological @stefano In my experience, OpenBSD tends to Just Work(tm), but you may hit snags if the hardware is new enough that no developer has had their hands on the kit or if it's otherwise somewhat exotic.

Hints can be found in this piece which is mostly about planned obsolescence https://nxdomain.no/~peter/blog_wild_wild_world_of_windows.html (also links therein).

The Impending Doom of Your Operating System Going to or Past 11, Versus the Lush Oasis of Open Source Systems