Linux users coming to the BSDs — NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, MidnightBSD, MirBSD, and GhostBSD — usually need to learn a few important things. (Yes, and HardenedBSD, et al.. You thought that there were three BSDs? Think again!)
Always look in the manual. Coming from GNU land, you might have poor expectations of manuals. The BSD ethos has been, albeit that it has not universally been applied, to put things in the manual.
Third‐party applications are not mixed with the operating system.
But /opt was an AT&T System 5‐ism.
The BSDs do not do things that way, either.
Ironically, the BSDs do to third‐party applications what SunOS once did to BSD tooling.
They give them two entire sub‐trees of /usr.
The common filesystem format is Berkeley FFS. It was a 1980s BSD invention.
BSDs use the GUID Partition Table too. Don't fall for the ‘disklabel’ promotion in the doco. Being installable on PC/ATs and clones, the BSDs have long since been able to understand MBR‐style partitioning and have tools for that and the GUID Partition Scheme. You need never use ‘disklabels’ at all, and can use GUID Partition Tables just like you are used to.
The standard pax utility comes in the box.
It does more than make archives.
vis comes in the box, and the system uses it.
That the BSDs are now the place to find vis as standard, is particularly ironic given the origins of the vis command.
You download files from the Internet with the ‘Internet file transfer program’.
Configuration files are often Berkeley DB, not text.
~/.login_conf is the better shell‐agnostic way to do things.
And yes, it is another Berkeley DB thing.
© Copyright 2026
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard.
"Moral" rights asserted.
Permission is hereby granted to copy and to distribute this web page in its original, unmodified form as long as its last modification datestamp is preserved.