What is your favorite BSD operating system?
Displaying poll results.6515 total votes.
Most Votes
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 18363 votes
Most Comments
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Poll credit (Score:2)
Can't vote! (Score:2)
Since I briefly used BSD. I use Linux though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Can't vote! (Score:2)
I have never liked BSD, I come from the System V lineage and Linux side.
Re: Can't vote! (Score:1)
Clearly not System V since that IS BSD
Re: (Score:2)
Given the family tree of Unix [netneurotic.de] I'd disagree. There are some interbreeding, but BSD is a fork from 1977 and it has taken its own path to a large degree.
Re: (Score:2)
Uh no.
BSD and System V are the two types of UNIX still in existence. Everything else is either based on one of them, or like Linux, sort of a mix of the two conceptually. Historically, Linux-as-a-concept has borrowed from whichever has been convenient.
If you had any experience with Unix, you wouldn't have posted that comment, period.
Re: (Score:2)
Me three, but you're supposed to name an alternative, so mine is "BetterPollOS", the version of BSD that is completely customized and optimized and improved for writing interesting polls. With great Cowboy Neal options! (Or did he complain about the last one?)
Actually, I have used a couple of flavors of BSD over the years, starting even before any of those distros existed, but never liked any of them enough to remember it as a "favorite". This just seems to be small niche poll.
Re: (Score:2)
This just seems to be small niche poll.
/. is a niche site where *nix is one of the primary topics.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but BSD?
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely. I mean, you even said that you had "used a couple of flavors of BSD over the years." ./ is one of the few places where that is a fairly standard response.
I switched my primary server over to FreeBSD when Red Hat decided to turn CentOS into Fedora. The combination of ZFS and jails alone is a huge upgrade over Linux. Imagine if Btrfs worked and Docker/LXC were simple. Now even my Raspberry Pi runs FreeBSD.
As a desktop you're basically where Linux was 10 years ago (you can make it work but be prepa
Re: (Score:2)
Just the ACK, but I wish I could find a good joke. Hmm... How about appealing to bash.org?
http://www.bash.org/?search=bs... [bash.org]
If I understand things correctly, that seems to indicate that there are fewer than 50 BSD references on the entire website. Where is your line for "too small a niche"?
Re: (Score:2)
I have never liked BSD, I come from the System V lineage and Linux side.
You can go much, much worse than System V. 100 times worse to be exact.
Re: (Score:2)
Clever :-) And, agreed.
Re: (Score:2)
Neal OS (Score:1)
None (Score:1)
I don’t know anything about BSD. That should be a poll option.
OSX (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes! MacOS all the way! And it becomes more and more compatible with every release.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It has BSD roots.
Well, it has BSD tools, but a Mach kernel. Not sure I would call that roots, It is more like the GNU in GNU/Linux, than the Linux in Linux.
I voted OpenBSD (Score:4, Interesting)
You may not use the OS itself, but you almost certainly depend on its development team for important secure software like openssh and libressl.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember 386BSD (Score:3)
It was my first experience with a PC-based UNIX and, for the time, it was damn good. Pity the Jolitz' were unable to continue it.
2.9 BSD (Score:2)
On my PDP-11. Love that 22-bit Q-bus.
But I use Linux on my new-fangled I7 thing.
Now all you damn kids get off of my lawn.
Other, because (Score:1)
Re: Other, because (Score:2)
Re: Other, because (Score:2)
The issue was wifi card support, not 'does it run'..
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know which is closer to BSD Linux or OSX.
OSX is based in part on FreeBSD (and NeXTStep, which OSX is descended from, was originally based on BSD 4.3-Tahoe, and later got code from BSD 4.4, and then still later BSD 4.4-lite.) Linux is typically more SVR4-like. You can build either a BSD-like or SysV-like system around the Linux kernel, though.
I'm surprised! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Similar to the NetBSD philosophy... It's not right because it works, but if it is right, it works. Or something like that.
PlayStation 3 (Score:1)
Yeah, It Runs On That (Score:2)
Who wouldn't like some yummy, scrummy toast?
https://www.embeddedts.com/blo... [embeddedts.com]
Umm (Score:3)
Netcraft Confirms: *BSD is dying (Score:2)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last
Re: (Score:2)
Commercial users (Score:2)
So, commercial users often times prefer BSDs because they are generally lighter weight than Linux distributions, and don't have the GPL.
BSD... (Score:2)
Currently running? TrueNAS core, which is FreeBSD.
I remember reading the Jolitz articles back in college. I've dabbled in both OpenBSD & NetBSD. The former has a grumpy curmudgeon community that even this grumpy curmudgeon can't abide, and the latter has too much feature lag and is a swamp of orphan hardware support.
BSD I spent the most time using? Solaris 1.x on Sun 3. :)
you forgot SunOS4 (Score:4, Informative)
Now that was a great OS.
Still voted for obsd though, which unlike any other *BSD has a reason to exist
Re: you forgot SunOS4 (Score:2)
Yes!
Re: (Score:2)
I think the major BSDs each serve a useful niche. Even Dragonfly is interesting from a technical perspective and I've been curious to try it out as a server. You can't say that about 99% of Linux distros.
I know people use OpenBSD but I think of it more as an R&D factory. A lot of good development happens there that benefits the open source community as a whole.
FreeBSD is useful. It makes for a great server and can even be used as a desktop. Every time a ./ story is posted about systemd you hear bitching
Linux (Score:2)
I said
Re: Linux (Score:2)
Please downvote me: I am a trollinux.
Other (Score:2)
3BSD for sentimental reasons...
NetBSD (Score:2)
Because I could install it in a Intel 80386 system with nothing more than a boot floppy and a serial modem!
Yes, it took a while, but I had to see it work... very cool in its day.
PS - isn't/wasnt SunOS/Solaris BSD-based?
Re: NetBSD (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Essentially correct. Sun also back-named the very last release or so of SunOS4 as Solaris 1.x (4.1.4, or maybe even 4.1.3?) and that's not confusing or anything.
Solaris 1.x: SunOS 4.x, BSD with OpenWindows /usr/ucb I think? Which thos [oracle.com]
Solaris 2.x: SunOS 5.x, SVR4 with CDE... and later GNOME 2. But also offered OpenWindows for a while, and you could install a whole suite of BSD-syntax commands into their own bindir for compatibility with BSD scripts (just put the right path at the start of the PATH variable).
Not much has changed since 2005 (Score:1)
pfSense / OPNsense (Score:1)
Other: MacOS (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Power of the BSD CLI & seamless user-friendly GUI. Amazing to have both power-users and grandma using the same OS.
This is becoming less true every year. Have you tried running macOS as a server recently? It's a pain in the ass. You have to jump through hoops to disentangle the services from Apple's security and then you're left with a system that has some strange configuration quirks. Like 10-15 years ago your post would have been dead on. Now Apple is actively discouraging using macOS as a server. They've discontinued their server app and you don't want to use any of their CLI tools. They used to provide extensive doc
MacOS (Score:1)
MacOS. The best bad distribution out there.
I thought that BSD was dead (Score:2)
Didn't Netcraft confirm this? I remember many discussions about this on Slashdot about 10 years ago.
Re: (Score:1)
According to https://w3techs.com/technologi... [w3techs.com], "BSD is used by 0.2% of all the websites whose operating system we know."
So, not a large portion of websites by any stretch, but it's also not dead.
Surprised there is not more BSD hosting (Score:2)
BSD is not great for desktop apps, but works great for running a web server.
TC/BSD (Score:1)
Missing Mac OSX (Score:2)
Based on BSD, it is *nix like but much more polished. It'd be most folks favorite BSD even if they don't know what's under the hood.
Otherwise, personally, it's OpenBSD. Really an amazing project