Rant warning.
I was interested in OpenBSD for a little bit. I eventually got turned off by the indignant attitudes and disregard for security understood to mean anything deeper than lack of vulnerability. No RBAC or ACL's, nothing like jails or zones except the insufficient chroot, it's kinda sad. I also can't stand hero worship. A community where dropping names and following drama is the norm is not a community worth participating in, and OpenBSD's community has a lot of name dropping and drama. You never see that in the FreeBSD community. The FreeBSD foundation puts out a
statement against the GPLv3, and it's very formal, with no bitterness or disrespect to be found. The analogous event in the OpenBSD community was when RMS himself decided to troll (successfully!) the OpenBSD people on their "recommendations" of unFree Software and stirs up the hive.
Who is the hero of GNU? Richard Stallman.
Who is the hero of Linux? Linus Torvalds.
Who is the hero of OpenBSD? Theo de Raadt.
Who is the hero of FreeBSD?
...
Who
is the hero of FreeBSD? The biggest names you'll hear dropped aren't specific to FreeBSD, but generally to all BSDs and Unix in general. Marshall Kirk McKusick is sort of a visible name, but isn't anywhere near the relative hero stature for FreeBSD of the other people named. And he's been doing BSD for what 25 years, that aside he's not much of a hero anymore than Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson or Bill Joy, these are the names of prominent Unix developers, not of prominent FreeBSD developers. FreeBSD isn't a personality cult, it's a community.
The Linux community is full of microcosms of this, with every wannabe hero starting a new distro to try to scratch their itch. There's little standardization or consensus, everything is about you should do it this way and how everything else either sucks or is only "okay".
The FreeBSD community is more community than personality cult, which cannot be said of the other projects I named. The biggest fork of FreeBSD right now is probably PC-BSD, and PC-BSD is almost deferential in respect to FreeBSD, including a plain vanilla FreeBSD installer on their installation media.
They don't start up hissyfights about the terrible things that make one sound system suck (OSS) and try to reimplement an entirely new audio subsystem (ALSA) that has been nothing but problems since its inception but which remains backward compatible with the old API because nobody wants to use the new API despite marking the old one as depracated. (They're doing the same thing to X with Wayland. They're adding a new layer of complexity that nobody will use directly so they're going to be running X in Wayland anyways. Way to go Linux idiots.) They don't change their startup control mechanism every 3 years, they don't change device enumeration and abstraction every year, they don't change the userland sound system every time the wind changes direction, they don't acrete 50 incompatible filesystems nothing else ever uses, and they don't bump version numbers just to garner excitement after noticing it dying down. They don't reject great technology like DTrace and ZFS and GCD, they don't use gross misunderstandings and complaints of rampant layering violations to comfort them away from their cognitive dissonance, and insist that they can reimplement the same thing better because they're fucking Linux and they can be everything to everyone and power your router and the world's most powerful supercomputer hooah.
FreeBSD's community is open, collaborative, cooperative, respectful, and generally disinterested in stupid drama. It's the biggest operating system community with these traits. And the OS is nice too.
End Rant.
It's interesting how you get such different mindsets for software from people with different license philosophies. Copyleft software is generally quick and dirty, the implementation sucks and it's constantly being rewritten or reimplemented. Copyfree stuff is generally higher quality, even if it usually has less bells and whistles. Compare PostgreSQL vs MySQL, tmux vs screen, obviously BSD vs Linux, zsh vs bash, clang vs gcc.
I think copyfree software is winning in the long run. They appear to get 90% as much done with 10% of the effort and nowhere near the corporate backing and manipulation. A copyfree desktop would be great, I've tried to use enlightenment and was impressed by how well it does what it does, but it's still not at the point where I can replace my Qt apps and KDE with EFL apps and Enlightenment.
Didn't RTFM (read the...?), but I've got Ubuntu on this laptop. I'm decently satisfied with it, but try to avoid all of the commie, hippie BS behind it. So, is this BSD an OS?
It's more like a family of OSes, including the three big BSD's (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD), Mac OS X (mostly FreeBSD in the middle layers), and to an extent Solaris (less so since the end of the SunOS days). When people say BSD they're mostly talking about FreeBSD, NetBSD, or one of the various derivatives or forks (OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, lots of smaller ones).
The BSD's have none of that commie hippie BS. There is a little bit of distaste for Windows, but unlike most of the Linux community you'll find, they aren't under any kind of delusion that they're going to destroy proprietary software. I like to put it as, "BSD is for people who love free and open software. Linux is for people that hate proprietary software."
If you're thinking of playing with it get PC-BSD. BSD's are generally rough around the edges, but simple, and if you're like me in this regard you might prefer a simple and robust tool to a beautiful but fragile one. It does almost all the same stuff, and if you must have something that doesn't run natively on BSD it has a Linux binary compatibility layer and Wine for running Windows stuff.