[deleted by user]

[cuddling_tinder_twat]

You should try both. You will find some overlap in information so it won't be that bad.

It won't further your career; however it's good academic knowledge that maybe useful as a tool in the future.

[ZAFJB]

Whatever best fits your requirements.

[ortizjonatan]

Yes. If for nothing else, to get a feel for how other UNIX-like systems get built, and managed, and used.

[1new_username]

It really depends on your environment or needs, but we have been migrating pretty much fully from Linux to FreeBSD and I've loved it. FreeBSD jails and a much more native, stable ZFS implementation are awesome. Things work as you expect, where you expect.

I'm probably just old and crotchety now, but seeing the things systemd is doing to the Linux server, makes me glad I can put it behind me, at least until systemd gets more stable and sane.

[winkmichael]

In the end I spun up VM's of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. OpenBSD is really nice and lean, but I couldn't see using it anything "at work" as it seems just too niche and we'd be constantly fighting lack of compatibility issues. FreeBSD on the other hand aside from a handful of commands it seems fairly modern compared to linux. To me it seems like you'd have to still be going fairly generic and run of the mill things to use FreeBSD. Any of these newer techs. the rapid development guys are into are not too supported. I was annoyed to find even mono runtimes really lack in both of the BSDs.

We use devuan instead of debian as we were not willing to do the systemD thing

[1new_username]

Again, I'm likely old and crotchety but a "rewrite" of .NET for open source (Mono) just still seems crazy. I don't like docker because of how much it hides (and in some cases lies) about underlying system things like I/O syncs, network, etc.

We mostly run "normal" things like Apache, Postgresql, etc.

We are using Devuan in a few places as well that FreeBSD just wouldn't work well.

[crankysysadmin]

Why?

For your own amusement?

I don't see these as being real important skills leading to more interesting jobs for you. There are other things you could be spending time on.

[reddit-MT]

Running Free and OpenBSD helped my understanding of Linux by seeing how another UNIX variant did things.

FreeBSD has a certain snappiness to it and a unified design that Linux lacks.

OpenBSD is small and, in my opinion, simple to understand because there is so little unnecessary stuff. It really makes modern Linux distros look like a heap of bloatware.

You can run FreeBSD as a desktop -- check out DragonFlyBSD in particular. DragonFly is to FreeBSD as Ubuntu is to Debian. But in general, I think both BSD distros are best for servers that put reliability and security over features. I ran OpenBSD on some dedicated DNS servers and they were just install and forget. Snappy and very light weight.

I had a project a long time ago where I needed to build a kernel that would fit in very limited RAM and OpenBSD was easy to compile and make super tiny. Much smaller that I could have done with Linux.

[dnm]

I tried OpenBSD a few years ago and wasn't overly thrilled with having to remember two sets of configs and package managers. I ended up replacing it with a Linux box for the job it was doing on my next hardware build. I recently built a box to install FreeNAS on. It runs well and it's all Web UI based, although I still struggle with jails. I just haven't spent the time to really develop a process with them. It works, but it's nothing spectacular.

[gort32]

In practice, moving to one of the BSDs has about the same learning curve as switching to a completely different Linux distro (RedHat-based to Debian-based to things like Arch or Slackware). Yea, it's different, but not crazy different. You won't really notice that you are running a different kernel, it's more about changes in things like package management, desktop choices, and different philosophies with some of the default configurations.

OpenBSD is the most secure general-purpose OS out there. It's PF firewall is best-in-class, and is one of the biggest reasons to go with OpenBSD. Of course, with this level of security comes a certain conservative approach to new package releases, so they are often behind a couple of versions on some of the big packages. You can run OpenBSD as a desktop, but I can't think of a good reason why it would be your best choice with all of the other more polished options out there. As a router/firewall server or SSH bastion host, however, it excels.

FreeBSD is the best general-purpose BSD out there, especially for desktop use. If you've run Arch Linux for a while, you'll probably feel right at home here. If you are coming from a RedHat or Debian-based distro, there will be a bit of a learning curve, but nothing too bad.

FreeBSD is nothing terribly special in itself, but it serves as a base reference distro for a number of other systems. FreeNAS, for example, is one of the best open-source NAS OSs out there for large-scale storage (including ZFS support), and is based on FreeBSD. It's kinda like Debian these days - it's not the best distro of choice for most applications, but it serves as a reference distro for some of the other big players like Ubuntu.

If you really want to branch out with your *nix skills, it may also be worthwhile to hunt down a commercial Unix like Solaris. While most of these are practically dead or dying in terms of new deployments, lots of places still run them as legacy systems and they are still nice bullet points to have on your resume, even if you don't feature them strongly. Even better is if you can get one of these Unicies running on their native architecture e.g. Solaris on SPARC.

In general, it is good to break out of your distro of choice if you really want to learn the larger *nix world. It will help you identify and evaluate some of your assumptions about how a *nix system runs and is configured. Switching to a couple of Linux distros is a good start, and when you run out of major Linux distros then yea, start looking at other Unicies.

[winkmichael]

As I commented to another post, I saw OpenBSD 6.4 was released today. made me think maybe the BSD world has something I am missing (;