With Linux distributions becoming increasingly bloated and dropping support for older hardware, while alternate operating systems like Haiku are only getting there, members of the BSD family ought to be considered as a possible alternative. But while there are fewer of them, the differences are still meaningful.
This page starts out by comparing NetBSD and FreeBSD back to back, after testing both in quick succession. NetBSD in particular had changes since previous versions. The remarks below apply to NetBSD 9.3 and FreeBSD 13.2, both stable production versions at the time.
Pros:
Cons:
pkgin at install time;Note: if you run NetBSD in Qemu, beware of this known issue with networking. Easiest fix is to run Qemu with -net user,ipv6=off.
Pros:
Cons:
FreeBSD has conveniences such as a mouse driver for the console, and a graphical console, but I couldn't get either of them to work in Qemu no matter what. X11 also sticks to VESA mode even with the VMWare driver installed, and handles the display oddly.
I didn't try the other major BSD until version 7.9 in 2026. A few impressions on OpenBSD:
xenodm manually post-install.) Otherwise it won't work; even startx will error out for some reason.On the plus side, post-install and administration tasks are simple and straightforward; documentation is compact and to the point. Reference:
Note: while you can install and run OpenBSD in a VM with only 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage, you'll want at least twice of both for fooling around, never mind serious work; this is true even in text mode.