Lawrence Garvin wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 LG> Roy wrote to Lawrence at 04:06 22 May:

 RJT> What I have here for FreeBSD is probably kinda dated,  but... 

 LG> Current stable version is 4.8.

This one's like 3.3...

 LG> There is a release v5.0, but it's not been classified as "stable" 
 LG> yet. The v5.1 release is scheduled for this fall and at that time, 
 LG> you can probably expect v5.0 to be launched via the "stable" 
 LG> branch.

 RJT> I'm wondering,  when would I want to go with something like this 
 RJT> as opposed to say,  sticking with the Slackware that I'm running 
 RJT> on the other box and am already fairly familiar with?  Or maybe 
 RJT> when would I want to go with some other flavor of *BSD,  or even
 RJT> some other unix?

 LG> Roy, that's really a matter of preference.

Not a matter of this or that is better at certain things?

 LG> My choice for going with the *BSD product is because the BSD source
 LG> tree has been around forever, it's a true Unix, it's derived
 LG> directly from the original AT&T Unix, and it's very easy to
 LG> install.

I've not had any real hassles installing any of them,  but am not sure of
the reltative weight of the rest of those consideration.  Why would
something being "a true unix" be a plus?

 LG> With the dozens of Linux distributions now available, one could 
 LG> spend several months just "evaluating" them to find the right one
 LG> -- a project that I do have on my agenda for later this summer.

I've not gotten the impression that there are really that much in the way
of differences between them.  In a few cases,  you have
"packages" consisting of rpm or deb files that are supposed to
make dealing with dependencies easier,  and of course there are differences
in the assumed user (Mandrake coming with GUI install and GUI by default
being aimed at a different group of users than say Slackware),  and levels
of support,  but there aren't that many differences,  really.

 LG> However, I had an immediate need to update the box providing my DNS
 LG> services for eforest.net. I looked briefly at all three BSD 
 LG> products (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD) and didn't find any 
 LG> particularly pressing reason to switch, so I went with what I was
 LG> comfortable with -- FreeBSD -- which was installed at v4.3 on the
 LG> box I just replaced.

I remember reading somewhere that NetBSD (?) was supposed to be better for
things like firewalls,  though I can't recall why.  Dunno what the
differences are among these three,  anyhow.

 LG> Maybe later this summer/fall, I'll have something more useful to
 LG> say about Linux vs BSD. 

Understand,  I'm not looking for a "which is better" kind of
opinion from anybody,  I suspect that they're all good products,  and that
there might be choices as to which would be better in certain
applications...

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