Dale writes:

> I know one thing, BSD is secure as heck.  I installed it once on a old 
> rig and typed the password in wrong during setup.  I never could get 
> into that thing again.  I had to start over.

That's what you thought :)  Normally, all you have to do is to boot in
single user mode, this gives you a root shell without asking for a
password. Unless you have changed 

    console  none  unknown  off  secure

in /etc/ttys to:

    console  none  unknown  off  insecure

It will then prompt for a password, but even this will not help much. As
long as you have physical access to a machine, you can simply boot it from
a CD or via USB, mount the partitions and remove the password
in /etc/passwd, or simply chroot and do whatever you want. To make it
really secure, you have to encrypt the whole system. Which is fairly easy
BTW.

> lol  That is why I chose 
> Linux in general.  I want something that is secure enough that I don't 
> have to worry about some script kiddie messing with me.

Just make sure to block or disable flash content when surfing the web.

> BSD is one option I will be looking into if I move from Gentoo.  After 
> all, they are fairly close maybe even a step up.  Especially now.

BSD is elegant, simpler, and has some nice features like a file
system that can be checked in the background while being in use already.
With the drawback of being quite slow compared to others.

But I would miss many things. I think portage is much superior these
days. Builds that continue when a package fails, or even parallel builds
are not possible AFAIK. The driver situation is worse I believe, when it
comes to graphics hardware. And I just read [*] that some KDE guys are
rethinking whether they will support other operating systems than Linux
for the plasma desktop, because it may not be worth the effort.

        Wonko

[*] 
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/08/thoughts-about-kde-plasma-on-non-linux-systems/

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