this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Serious question, what is the use case for bsd? It just seems like Linux but with far worse hardware and software support
Secure devices for network, routing, firewall.
PF, OpenSSH, LibreSSL was developed by OpenBSD team.
I disagree with some approaches of Linux. Thinking of switching to a BSD.
That's the usecase.
Jails, bsd is really good at jails and networking
But Linux also has containers and I haven't found a networking setup I can't do with it so while this may be true it seems anecdotal
Really good network stack. Linux is catching up surely but places like Netflix run a ton of stuff on BSD simply for that stack. AFAIK ebpf is supposedly the thing that will have Linux compete in this space- https://dev.to/dpuig/understanding-ebpf-a-game-changer-for-linux-kernel-extensions-4m7i
For a normal person? I'd argue there's about zero benefit to running BSD over some Linux distro. Less people use jails compared to containers, networking doesn't matter like you said, and hardware support is far more awful in terms of drivers. There's a reason there's like 2-3 desktop oriented distros on BSD compared to hundreds on Linux.
Depends on the specific BSD, OpenBSD for example is only just now catching up to Linux.
Edit: Slide 28 for a graph
Well sure. I mainly meant FreeBSD. Thanks for clarifying.
Cluster computing. DragonflyBSD is structured entirely with a multiprocessing design philosophy, gives amazing cache coherency in Beowulf clusters thanks to the way the scheduler works.
Bit of a niche use case, but if you're doing gpu-unfriendly parallel compute operations like bidirectional path tracing or finite element analysis it really shines.
You can install it on a few megabites of ram, it has far better malware protection, due to its small userbase.
That's just security through obscurity though
Yea, kind of
It's fun to try new stuff.
The documentation is really good, hell they even go over assembly programming. And overall manpages for C functions I like more.
Also good for minimalist setups. Can have a graphical sway environment using vim with autocomplete and a browsing wikipedia while top shows 145Mb active ram.
(Does use cache a lot more than linux tho)
It's for when you're such a contrarian cunt that when you stopped using Mac over windows, you had to move to bsd over Linux.