Last week, I needed to pick a BSD Operating System which supports NUMA to do some testing, so I decided to give Dragonfly BSD a shot. Dragonfly BSDonly can run on X86_64 architecture, which reminds me of Arch Linux, and after some tweaking, I feel Dragonfly BSD may be a “developer-friendly” Operating System, at least for me.
I mainly use Dragonfly BSD as a server, so I don’t care whether GUI is fancy or not. But I have high requirements of developer tools, i.e., compiler and debugger. The default compiler of Dragonfly BSD is gcc 8.3, and I can also install clang 8.0.0 from package. This means I can test state-of-the-art features of compilers, and it is really important for me. gdb‘s version is 7.6.1, a little lag behind, but still OK.
Furthermore, the upgradation of Dragonfly BSD is pretty simple and straightforward. I followed document to upgrade my Operating System to 5.6.0 this morning, just copied and pasted, no single error, booted successfully.
Last but not least, there are many out-of-box packages which I can explore in the future.
It sounds interesting, right? Why not try it yourself?