Are the various BSD's distros or OS's?

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I found this interesting comment on (dare I say) Reddit

" Remember that there are no BSD distros, as OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD aren’t merely variations of the same OS wrapped around a variable set of free software, developed for it by third party projects (like GNU/Linux); instead, each of them is a complete Operating System on its own. BSDs are very different from each other and as a consequence you can’t port software to “BSD” like you’d port software to Linux: porting something to OpenBSD is a task, porting it to NetBSD is another. FreeBSD differs from NetBSD nearly as much as it differs from GNU/Linux. "

If that is really correct, we have a huge problem with porting … we all know a Linux port will not run on any BSD, but it is worse, a FreeBSD port will not run on NetBSD or on OpenBSD. … because they are all different operating systems… the system calls are different in each BSD and in Linux.

Initiatives like Flatpak have, from a developers point of view, allowed the setting up of one package that will work on any Linux distro… but that does not work on the BSD’s… there is container technology in the BSD’s but it is different in each BSD. .

That partly explains why the BSD’s lag behind in package versions… there is more work in porting a package to say Freebsd, Netbsd, and Openbsd, than in porting it to over 200 Linux distros.

I think that is a serious problem limiting maintenance capacity in the BSD world. There is no obvious solution. They are all different independent OS’s

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Some free software projects still call their Linux code “UNIX”…

Take for example POVray the raytracer…

Five years ago I tried to compile it for UNIX on Sparc (Solaris) - never ever got anywhere near success… There were just too many dependancies to compile it - and - these were all pretty much Linux libraries…

The project still calls their Linux code “UNIX”. Good luck trying to get it to run on actual UNIX (I never tried to get it to work on any of the BSD’s - which for all intents and purposes, are essentially UNIX).

I gave up… In 1992 or 93 - I got POVray 1.x C source code, and we got it compiled to run on UNIX (DG-UX on Motorola RISC 88010 AViiON) and it worked…

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My experience matches that. System calls are a nightmare… not only are BSD system calls different from Linux, but the various BSD’s differ from one another. There is no common BSD kernel…each major BSD ( Free, Net, Open, Dragonfly) has its own kernel. GhostBSD might match FreeBSD if you are lucky.

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Just came across this :

Maybe of interest to those of us curious about furthering our knowledge of the BSD family…

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SmolBSD… yes it looks interesting and simple enough. It uses a particular NetBSD kernel.
I do believe most BSD’s can be built fairly easily using their own build system… I dont know, I just read it somewhere.

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