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This morning a colleague told me he tried both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. He said he found them "strange." For example, FreeBSD doesn’t have the bash in the base system, and even after installing it, it’s not in "/bin/bash", "which it should be because all the scripts expect it to be there."

I explained to him that scripts shouldn’t have hard-coded paths, but unfortunately, they do. He said he gave up and that he might try again later since "the BSDs do things their own way."

One of the problems for those approaching a new operating system is they should consider it as a standalone entity rather than a "variant" of another. Linux users are often confused because they regard BSDs as just another "distribution." They don’t realize that having a shell doesn’t mean having the same operating system or procedures underneath.

I’m reminded of the famous saying by Oscar Wilde, that the English and the Americans are two peoples divided by the same language: paradoxically, for a new user, it’s easier to perceive the difference when the two operating systems are extremely different (like Windows and Linux) than when they are seemingly similar (like Linux and the BSDs).

I will try to have a "four hands" session with my colleague because I believe he would greatly benefit from using BSDs.

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #Linux #RunBSD