What is the best alternative to NetBSD?
Pro Open Source
Illumos is completely free and open source.
Pro ZFS file system
illumos uses ZFS as its file system. ZFS is also a logical volume manager besides being a combines file system. The main features of ZFS include: protection against data corruption, data compression, checking continuous integrity, high storage capacities support etc...
Pro Zones
Zones provide an isolated environment to run applications in. Processes that run in zones are prohibited to interfere or monitor any other activity in the system.
Pro Lots of support
As the most popular Linux distribution, there's a wide range of sources for support online if you ever need help, including the Ubuntu Wiki, Ubuntu Forums and the Ask Ubuntu Stack Exchange site.
Pro Simplicity
Ubuntu is designed to be used by everyday people. Because of that, Ubuntu has tried hard to make a user interface that's intuitive and looks pleasant and clean.
Pro Great Long Term Support release schedule (2 years)
This allows for users to always have a new supported release available without long unkown wait times in between.
Con Software can be outdated, if not severely outdated
If you try to download "unpopular" software, so you may find you're downloading a version that's several years old.
Con Relatively high system requirements
The default GNOME desktop environment is a resource hog which requires hardware accelerated graphics rendering in order to run smoothly, making out of the box Ubuntu unsuitable for low end systems and older hardware. Even mildly aged hardware, you'll get far better performance out of a lighter...
Pro Batteries included
Base system contains basic developer tools, including compiler, debugger and system utilities.
Pro Powerful ports collection
Ports provide a wide collection of software which are easy to build, install and modify. They contain recipes and patches to build various software, so you can simply run "make && make install" to build and install the software. You may also keep local patches and it would be pick...
Pro Jails mechanism
Jails allow for partitioning a system into several independent "mini-systems", a feature not found in many of the popular OS choices.
Con Inferior driver support for workstations
Lack of drivers for some modern personal devices.
Con Pathetic third-party application support
Need to run Photoshop? No luck. Even most software that's portable to Linux will have a hard time running on FreeBSD. You're stuck with ONLY running the free software.
Pro Powerful terminal
It's very similar to a Linux terminal.
Pro Polished UI
The UI of Mac OS is rather unrivaled. The smooth, responsive, and cohesive UI makes the system quite joyous to use.
Pro Based on Unix
macOS being a UNIX certified system means that you can install a lot more stuff with a lot fewer headaches than if you were on Windows.
Con Expensive
OSX is tied Apple hardware and Apple hardware tends to be expensive.
Con No native package management
A comparison of package managers available for OSX can be found here.
Con Most software is closed source
For people who like to use open source tools for their development work, this may be a problem. There's plenty of advantages to open source software, one of which is the ability to tinker with and customize the tools themselves that you are using. Although there's plenty of FOSS tools avail...
Pro Widely used
Windows is the most-used desktop OS in the world.
Pro Windows comes first
Windows is the most used platform in the world. If you build something and need a third-party software it will most likely run on Windows. Not because it's good, but because everyone uses it.
Con Weak default terminal
The standard terminal lacks basic features that Linux and OSX has. Alternatives to the default terminal for Window can be found here.
Pro Greatly favours stability over anything else
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else. Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and...
Pro Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
Pro Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications wh...
Pro Can be officially systemd-free
Gentoo's default init system is OpenRC. Gentoo also officially supports systemd-free Gnome and udev. Users are free to choose any init system they want.
Con Not beginner-friendly
You have to read a lot of instructions to start, even if you are familiar with Linux.
Con Customized package installation can take a long time and cause installation failures
The Gentoo package management system allows you to configure what compilation flags packages should support - i.e. specific processor flag support (SSE, SSE2, etc.), -O1, -O2, -O3 optimization, etc. If you accept one of the default flags, Gentoo downloads binaries from the server. However, if you...
Con Has no live images with graphical interface
Full installation is hand-made with a CLI (Command-Line Interface)
Pro Designed to allow for multiple computers to work as if they were one
With Plan 9, computers are turned into terminals where you can access files and processing units which can be located elsewhere. Data storage is handled by another external server. This means that instead of each person having their own individual computer with all the required parts, all of the co...
Con Difficult to use software made for other systems
Plan 9 is very different from most other operating systems, and as such it's extremely difficult to bring in software designed for other operating systems ('porting').
Con No fully featured web browser
As indicated on the official Bell Labs webpage, there is no full featured web browser currently working on Plan 9.
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