Yes they are. However POSIX is not just system calls. More info can be found here. Not even the *BSDs are fully compliant, though they are working on it, but they don't use all those extensions that GNU has come up with. I'm not saying Linux is bad, I've used it for years, but if you went from using Linux and were used to using all those extensions (i.e. extended functionality, long options, non-standard compiler extensions, etc.) and you suddenly had to use a compliant UNIX system you would be almost completely lost at the difference. When I went from Linux to FreeBSD I was almost lost at the difference, but now I know what to watch out for.

The *BSDs hardware support is lacking as opposed to Linux but it's not as bad as it was a few years ago. Like I said in a previous post the hardware they do support have very robust drivers. I have a moderately recent system 2010-2011 hardware and all of it is supported.

The *BSDs development is not as fast paced as GNU/Linux because they want to make sure the software they are releasing is complete and robust. You can still update your system to the latest bleeding edge of development, that's up to you, but before they release a point version they want to make sure it's good.

They don't hate the GNU/Linux community, they just don't share a lot of their views. The GPL vs. BSD license for one. All my time I've spent on the official forums I have very rarely seen "hate" for another system.

Debian reporting in!
Fairly new though, only switched from Ubuntu a couple days ago and I'm finding it so much faster on my netbook. More hands on than Ubuntu or Fedora.

Debian doesn't come quite as bloated out of the box so desktop installs should feel a lot faster. The downside is the server installs are super bare bones, a lot of tweaking to get stuff just the way you need it.

Agreed, a 1 CD Debian install was FLYING on my notebook!
... but one thing that made me mad back then was the lack of an automatic ethernet/wireless tool ala "Connection manager" in the default installation.
Aye, at the time I wasn't aware of dhcpcd eth0..
Other than that, I don't completely agree with their conservative ways..

I can do nothing but promote Fedora 15 KDE spin over Ubuntu for an absolute newbie, though.. it has all the bleeding edge things and is a blast to use! (Disable SELinux, though.)
Another really, REALLY interesting project I've been watching/using lately is Chakra Linux.
This was all before Slackware entered my life, when I though pacman was the absolute pinnacle of software packaging.. eh.


Sir, I passed 2 hours today documenting about the various BSD flavours/philosphy.
Okay, maybe not that much, but nonetheless it IS intriguing!
Out of curiosity, I'm downloading the last release of FreeSBIE, wich looks reliable and fun enough. Heck, I'm even planning about making a dual-boot pendrive with Knoppix and it!
I'll make you know about my impressions/questions!
(Just out of curiosity: what was your favourite distro?)

FreeSBIE is based on an old version of FreeBSD so it is not as up to date as the other ones. If you want to try FreeBSD with a pre-installed desktop I would suggest trying . It has KDE 4 pre-installed and a live CD/DVD to try it out. FreeBSD is probably the most generic out of the four main distributions. None of the *BSDs except PC-BSD have a desktop environment installed by default. I myself use FreeBSD with a simple window manager (icewm), and a collection of software. Mainly mplayer, GIMP, gpicview, vim, firefox and some other utilities. I also have NetBSD installed on my Amiga 1200. The nice thing with the *BSDs is they have software repositories that are kept well up to date and only one or two commands installs what you're looking for. Check out the [url=http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/]FreeBSD Handbook and hop on the Official Forums. The forum community is very helpful, even with people coming from Windows or Linux.

Mac OS X is claimed to be POSIX compliant, but I would not want to use it as a foundation for learning UNIX.

Solaris is free and sort of open-source; and it is POSIX compliant if you are careful to use the right version of things (like /usr/xpg4/bin/sh instead of /usr/bin/sh).

I think you will find that some experience with a POSIX-compliant UNIX will rapidly cure you of a desire to insist on POSIX compliance. The last POSIX standard is 10 years old, and the industry has moved far beyond it.

Mac OS X is actually a BSD descendant. OS X Leopard is the only one to receive UNIX certification.

Solaris was good until Oracle bought Sun. Now it's just going to go down hill.

Yes POSIX is quite old (if it ain't broke don't fix it), however it is still being updated. The last update was in 2008. I agree that you shouldn't have a desire to strive for compliance, but then what would be the point of having standards? Even Windows yes Windows is partially POSIX compliant.

The GNU team proposed (and, in an unusual burst of sensibility, declined) the use of #ifdef POSIX_ME_HARDER to identify code that had to violate what they saw to be sensible user expectations in order to comply with POSIX.

All standards are no more useful than the quality of code that can be created by compliance with the standard. POSIX is mainly of interest because it is a least common denominator for code that has to be widely portable. Not because there is any other desirable quality, such as feature richness or efficiency, to be had by compliance.

It is still an improvement over the situation with Linux, where developers feel the need to introduce gratuitous incompatibilities in minor kernel revisions. This is one of the main reasons for the ultra-conservative approach that Debian and CentOS take to accepting updates.

You know the funny part of it though. Stallman was the one who came up with the acronym POSIX for the POSIX standard.

Wow, I discovered the PC-BSD project yesterday at late, but didn't notice it had a live cd! Thanks! ...wich isn't exactly why the Illumos project was created?

Fedora and Ubuntu. Earlier I used mostly Fedora because it felt more professional than e.g. Ubuntu, plus I had some severe sound problems with Ubuntu for some reason.

But I am using Fedora less and less because it moves too fast to my liking, ie. support for earlier versions is dropped quite fast. After all, in practise Fedora is a beta version of RedHat Linux, and Fedora users are testing beta RHEL for free.

I must also say that the earlier Fedora was at first very very buggy, but later became quite stable and good... at which point it apparently became ripe for RedHat release, and support for that Fedora version dropped soon. :(

I'm looking into moving completely to Ubuntu, as far as Linux goes. I still use mainly Windows (XP), though, mainly due to games.

I've also briefly tried some other distros like some SuSe and whatnot, but I didn't care that much for them. Ubuntu seems to be the Windows of all (PC) Linuxes. Android is a completely different matter...

Yeah but it's just not the same you know?

Ubuntu 10.04, although I'm sure they can see so from the website stats..

I have an older version on an 1000h in the dinning room atm. I've been meaning to replace it for a while since the lack a true multi-user environment bugs me. Puppy can be real handy in a pinch, however.

I'm using mint 10 on my desktop right now, but I'll probably be switching to debian or Arch soon. Fedora 8 was probably the distro release I enjoyed using the most.

Sadly : /