Forum Moderators: bakedjake
I'm looking at different Linux / BSD operating systems, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with NetBSD - I've read their web site, I like their design philosophy and overall attitude towards quality and security (although I'm hardly an expert), but there seems to be little information about them, other than if you're using wierd hardware. I would be running it on a standard Intel machine, so the portability is less of an issue. So, are there any advantages to using NetBSD rather than FreeBSD or Linux?
OpenBSD - Security Focused
NetBSD - Runs on anything
FreeBSD - Hyper-Optmized for a few, select platforms
I run NetBSD on a couple of Cobalt RAQ boxes over here, and it's great (these are MIPS boxes). I also ran NetBSD on my laptop (PIII Mobile) for a while because it supported a weird piece of hardware that FreeBSD did not at the time. IMHO, the major advantage to running NetBSD on an i386 box: If you're running a shop with a ton of weird platforms, and you want to standardize on one OS, NetBSD lets you do that.
Other than that, I'd probably recommend FreeBSD to you over NetBSD for i386, if you were going to choose a BSD. FreeBSD is optimized for serving on i386 (that's what it was originally designed to do!), it's super stable, and it has a very large userbase and software repository. All of my desktop machines (and now my laptop) run FreeBSD, and I'm very happy with it.
As far as servers go, the biggest drawback to using any of the BSDs WAS the lack of native JDK support. We do some development for clients in JSP, and that shortcoming forced us to use Linux. FreeBSD now has a relatively stable, recent JDK port, so that's no longer an issue. I'm unaware of the JDK situation with NetBSD, but last time I checked they did not have a recent JDK port. If you aren't using any sort of Java server development, this is a non-issue.
