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Comment by tclancy

10 hours ago

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

11 comments

tclancy

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dag100  9 hours ago

Calling FreeBSD "just a distro" is verging on insulting. It's an operating system.

shakna  6 hours ago

Well, as they're a FreeBSD dev, I would be surprised if they pointed anyone in a different direction.

LoganDark  8 hours ago

FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)

  • steve1977  7 hours ago

    Darwin is its own thing really. There are parts from BSD, there are also parts from Mach and there are also unique parts.

GalaxyNova  8 hours ago

FreeBSD is not a distro

  • stackghost  7 hours ago

    What does the D in BSD stand for again?

    • tom_alexander  4 minutes ago

      That's more of a historical artifact. The BSDs started as a set of patches for AT&T Unix that were _distributed_ by Berkeley. Eventually they became an entire operating system. _Then_ the various BSDs that we know today (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD) all forked and became completely independent operating systems. For decades, FreeBSD's kernel and userland has been developed independently from the OpenBSD kernel and userland which is developed independently from NetBSD's kernel and userland, etc. You could not take an OpenBSD program and run it on FreeBSD. Even recompilation from source isn't necessarily enough since the BSDs support different syscalls.

      They are completely independent operating systems with a distant shared history.

      Whereas on Linux, the distros are taking a common Linux kernel source, and combining it with their choice of common userlands like GNU. Debian has the same kernel and GNU userland that Arch and Fedora use. That is how Linux distros are "distros" whereas the BSDs are independent operating systems.