(08-02-2017, 07:42 AM)IĀ LikeĀ Gold Wrote: I'd sound like a nerd
Speaking of sounding like a nerd, the one BSD that I'm used to is RISC iX, a variant of 4.3BSD for the Acorn UNIX workstations and Archimedes - while I don't usually run RISC iX on my Archimedes, I do use it a good bit on my R140 and R260 workstations. You may ask why the hell this even matters, and that's because I run a UNIX-based PDP-11/73 for... reasons.
It's a nice OS, what can I say? It operates quite smoothly - compared to the AT&T workstations and their general PITA of a system that they are, it's nice anyways. For the time of its release, one bonus is that it's a multitasking OS - you can work with all of your standard UNIX tools, a Sun NFS, an ANSI C development platform, and it all runs on the good 'ol X Window system without a hassle of interrupting something to play with something else. Speaking of all that stuff, the in-built tools run smoothly, but if you want to get around and customize then they make it quite easy to do as you can customize to your hearts extent. (That is if you have a copy of the OS, it's really simple to screw up and back in the day it would cost £1000 for a new installation if you didn't.) Past that, underneath the fancy covers, it's good 'ol UNIX - I can't complain.
Now saying that, would I consider running a modern version of BSD based off of that? Not exactly... well, I take that back, the closest I'll get is MacOS on the Hackintosh. While I'm by no means much of a fan of Macs hardware-wise, I will admit that OS-wise they're solid from what I've messed with - they will do everything that somebody wants without too much trouble, you can screw with it a good bit of you know what you're doing, and it just works. I've looked into the other options as a coworker runs FreeBSD on his machine at work, but I don't think I'll be messing with that in the near future.