MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Looking at other OSs......

> So in visiting the QMC page, I found all these supported operating systems (Windows
> is but not tested - HAH), and was looking them over, and have two questions:
>
>
> - Void Linux, openSUSE, FreeBSD, openBSD: why, and which for what?
>
> - extracurricular: when I go to the openBSD page, I get an IE warning saying to turn
> on TLS 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, (they are) and if that doesn't work the site may be using
> RC4 encryption. Are they? And why would they?

As with most OS questions the answer is 'it depends'. What are you trying to do?

BSD distributions tend to have a linage that traces back to the original AT&T BSD. http://image.slidesharecdn.com/fosshisto...g?cb=1239883734

BSD distros tend to use the BSD license which is basically here is some code just credit us if you us it. You can contribute back if you want or keep it if you don't. Just make sure they get credit.

The wiki pages for each have a better description. For example MacOS is a derivative of FreeBSD and NeXT. Both being BSD they could freely smash them together. They then put a proprietary GUI and API on top of that. Some parts they share others they do not. The PS4 is a BSD derivative. They only have to have a credit screen somewhere. Everything else is closed source. They share nothing.

The BSD guys tend to be very slow in updating things. That is for 2 large reasons. One is lack of mindshare, everyone is playing with linux. The second is they review the hell out of everything. They want to root out bugs before they hit the distro. So they tend to be more security conscious. This is not true for all distros.

Linux is a whole different ball of wax. It is GPL which is you make changes and distribute you must share back. This is not true for all packages included. But is for a majority of them.
This page has a good graph of what you are dealing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distributions

You have SUSE, RedHat, Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Android, and Slackware as the major current distro main trees. The main thing that glues them all together is the linux kernel. With BSD you could have different kernels. The deciding factor is usually is your software supported. As each distro tends to put things in different places. Some parts are the same but things like startup (initd vs custom vs systemd) are not. The biggest difference in all of them are their package managers. Each has their own idea of how to package and distribute things (Pacman vs tgz vs yum vs apt vs playstore). Another big difference can be rolling release or big package ones. For example Arch is a rolling release while ubuntu/debian is not. openSUSE is a derivative of SUSE and it looks like its biggest thing is the rolling release.

So which one to pick is probably your biggest question? Well that is up to you, and your hardware. But a first place to start would be to download a few ISOs fire up virtualbox and get installing. Find out what you like and do not like and how much time you really want to sink into this. Do not worry about the GUI too much. Those are usually ported to all of the distros. With a BSD you may have a couple of bits of hardware that may or may not work. Same with linux but less likely at this point. You can pick a niche OS that can get you 'street cred' but does not help you when the disto maintainer decides 'this sucks and is boring' and leaves you with a release that has not seen an update in 2 years. Some of the bigger ones like ubuntu are kinda slow as debian their upstream is kinda slow with its package updates. Something like an Arch or Gentoo can be a bit of pain as they will go sideways once and awhile as they are rolling releases but are usually fixed pretty quickly. So you need to pick something you are willing to support and willing to put up with its quirks.