Base Operating System Platform

I am in the process of getting several computers up and running that I've had sitting for some time as I got my life together. I find myself short on time and finding a safe, secure, and slow moving operating system difficult.

This has especially been of concern for me with the certificate woes that have hit Debian, file breach with RedHat/Fedora, and general slew of issues with existing operating systems.

I've been leaning towards a BSD lately, but have discovered that they all have many outstanding bugs. Consider these links:

Current FreeBSD problem reports
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-...y.cgi?category=

OpenBSD Bug Tracking System
http://cvs.openbsd.org/query-pr.html
(Note that to view the open bugs you must click on the third button "Query PRs")

NetBSD Summary of Problem Reports in State "open"
http://www.netbsd.org/Gnats/state/open.html

While not all of these may necessary be remote bugs, they all contain problem that can certainly lead to stability problems. Moreover, unusual problems can often be blamed on bad hardware or unsupported software.

With these considerations, which OS should be used as a good general usage platform?

Solaris is not really an option since it is not available on many types of hardware.

But really is there any OS that is 100% free of issue?.. When I read your question it was like some in NY asking for the prefect time to travel to Miami.. so as to only get green traffic lights for the journey..


General usage you ask? not really sure where your at with the *nix's..

You have the Debain based OS's -:ie Ubuntu..
You do have Open Solaris...

all that you have mentioned are fairly decent open OS... But none are perfect.. but many are better than the Redmond offerings so it may seem that they are (prefect)

I've been running Freebsd now for about 10 years on all sorts of different hardware.
Never really had any major issues. Currently I've got 4 machines running fbsd-7 24/7.

Oh.. And to add a little further...
Do note that the fbsd PR system encompasses all versions (-release, -stable and -current) on all supported (Tier-1, 2 and 3) architectures and any issues regarding the 19.000+ (!) ports.

Might I recommend--

Linux Mint:
http://www.linuxmint.com/
Mandriva:
www.mandriva.com/
Open Suse:
www.opensuse.org
PC-BSD:
www.pcbsd.org/
All wonderful os's

I wrote a thing in the OS forum for BSD and Linux. If you're worried about bugs, then go with Windows 3.11. I think they've have the time to actually find most of them in that one by now...

If you're going back to reality then I'd say go with SUSE or FreeBSD. Bugs are in every app and OS on the planet and thinking you'll find anything that isn't somehow screwed up in some way is just flat out un-realistic.

Mac OS X is a great OS, and it's written specifically for the hardware it runs on, and even IT has bugs and problems.

Also, most bugs have a fix.

I've ran almost every OS you can install on a PC, and after 5 years of testing every OS I find, I've come to the conclusion that FreeBSD is better for PCs, and has much better support than what that walking turnip egomaniac Theo whatever from OpenBSD has done.

I've also noticed that while Linux distros sometimes come and go, it's probably safe to assume RedHat, Mandriva and OpenSUSE will outlive trends.


I've also decided that when it comes to a machine I'm going to work on, I want either SUSE, Slackware, or WindowsXP on it. I won't normally use anything else for production. Windows XP being there mainly for when I have to use Windows for something that's ONL going to work on Office which isn't much anymore after a little heart to heart with the school I'm at.

Slackware and SUSE make up almost every machine in my network.

Solaris is awesome. I don't need to say anything else other than I'd love a REAL Sun box to run it on that isn't PC based.

That is all.

I agree with all of your responses: nothing is perfect, and there are certainly some operating systems that are better than others.

As an example, I've seen in the past that some Slackware packages are not updated frequently; although the expectation may be that this is the responsibility of the end user.

RedHat is a bit expensive, so that's out of the door. I once purchased the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, but found that it was missing many critical libraries and had to upgrade to RedHat Enterprise Edition, which was a considerable jump for myself.

As for FreeBSD, I recently configured geli with an encrypted root partition, and found that it was unavoidable to enable visible passphrase (which drove me ****ing crazy) with one of my computers due to some unknown reason that I still have not had the time to discover.

I guess I'll give OpenSUSE a try. I haven't heard too many bad things about this OS.

I'm using a geli encrypted external usb HD. Password doesn't show up when I type it. Not sure why yours does?

Don't see much use for an encrypted root partition anyway, it's the data you need to protect with encryption not the OS.

I would make sure /tmp is encrypted if you want better security and sometimes you want to encrypt root part. because personal data is sometimes stored in /usr and such...

I would agree with the /tmp bit and also the swap, You could also encrypt /var as that's where most of the logging ends up.
But I do not see the added security of encrypting /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin etc. Just a lot of hassle.

User (personal) data should be in /usr/home. Nowhere else.

One of the reasons I do not like Linux, it stores stuff everywhere without any clear guidelines.
Third party apps that add things to /usr/bin and even /bin... The horror.. Eww..