Comparing Linux and BSD, Diplomatically 448
Joe Barr writes "Talk about a red-button issue. How do you compare Linux and the BSDs and keep the debate from turning into a friendly-fire flame-fest nightmare between bigots on both sides of the line? Linus Torvalds once handled a similar situation by wearing a BSD beanie at USENIX while delivering a Linux talk. Now he tries it again in this interview on NewsForge ."
Not About To Be Baited (Score:4, Insightful)
There are obvious merits to any operating system. Despite what many
The problem with comparisons is that once all of the products begin to operate at a level that makes them useful to their target audience, then the only thing left to argue about is the margins. Zealots exist on the margins and so are they are the most likely to carp and moan about the small differences between various products.
Linus is not a zealot. He is an advocate.
Since when is debating with "bigots" a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you have a "debate" with a racial bigot over which race is better?
Bigots of any type aren't worth the time of day.
IMHO
In short: (Score:5, Insightful)
What is appropriate depends on the situation and your experience.
Short Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a *good* thing people! I realize it's much easier to jump into Highlander mode ("There can be only one!"), but reality is rarely so simple. Until someone invents the "perfect solution", every decision will lead to a particular set of tradeoffs. If you don't have anyone else exploring alternatives, how can you know for certain that your own alternative is the best one? Cooperation always leads to better results.
That said, I have a feeling about the replies I'm about to get:
Girl: Don't even think about it!
Human Torch: Never do. (Jumps off building)
Human Torch: Flame ON!
The only line that matters: (Score:5, Insightful)
The gist of Linus's reply (Score:5, Insightful)
True leader (Score:1, Insightful)
umount -f (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things I'd love to see in Linux that exists in BSD is umount -f for any filesystem, not just NFS. On FreeBSD (and probably other BSD's?) you can force unmount any filesystem. This is especially useful when you need to foce unmount snapshot mounts.
Re:It's hard, Mac users are phanatix (Score:5, Insightful)
Your point of view is as utterly intolerant as the point of view of those you are criticizing.
"Mac users are phanatix. They are insecure and utterly intollerant.. Mod me up for being reasonable!"
Are you kidding us?
You asked Linus because...? (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, he raised some interesting points about the differences in philosophy between the two camps.
Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does, and apart from running on very large SMP systems, I can't think of *anything* that linux can do and BSD can't, much less "many" things.
Re:Since when is debating with "bigots" a good ide (Score:5, Insightful)
Truthfully, it's what keeps me coming back to Slashdot.
Warning: spoiler. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bothersome (Score:1, Insightful)
The 1/4" spanner doesn't compete with the 6mm spanner.
Time to step outside the business-plan box, and let the us-vs-them mentality go.
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:my black t-shirt can beat up your black t-shirt (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take the bait, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be referring to Solaris on Intel. I still don't think "immature" is the right adjective. The problem with Solaris on Intel is mostly hardware support, and that's not going to change with age. Hardware popularity shifts faster than Sun's ability to support it.
"Stodgy" and "crusty", maybe, but not "immature".
For vanilla hardware in a server, it does just fine.
Re:bothersome (Score:2, Insightful)
Linus says it all (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:bothersome (Score:3, Insightful)
Whocares? (Score:1, Insightful)
When will human kind get rid of this primitive tribalism, it's just seems as if people want to be label as a member of a certain club, how utterly pointless turning what you put on your machine into a religion, because to be honest they really aren't all that different.
USE WHAT WORKS! for you.
personally I use freeBSD on my server cos I find it easier to navigate without X than Linux distros.
I use Arch on laptop cos it's fast and fun to use and learn.
and god forbid yes I use windows on my desktop, cos the girlfriend and friends get a little bit freaked by anything *NIX, and I'm comfortable with that and prefer using it for certain things, seems a lot of modern Linux desktop distros are Window wannabes anyhow.
Re:Since when is debating with "bigots" a good ide (Score:5, Insightful)
A good computer scientist can look at any system and ask himself, "ok how does this suck?".
Because the answer to that question can be followed up with "how do we make it better?".
If you can't ask "how does this suck?" for fear of being an "troll" then you've effectively eliminated thought.
Telling Moment From the Interview... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, come on, you're not even trying... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, you've got to be able to come up with a better BSD daemon girl than that without even trying. What, is that your girlfriend or something? Pathetic.
Honestly, doing a google search didn't give me _just_ the image I wanted, but there are some pretty impressive examples in this collection [unixprogram.com], even if what is perhaps the best one is animated. ( Warning: not entirely work-safe, *and* contains flamefest-inducing images of penguins impaled on pitchforks ). You've been warned, now let's see that server melt...
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:4, Insightful)
Yould should heed your .sig: that it can be done doesn't mean it should!
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:3, Insightful)
The differences in the capabilities of the competing OS's is small compared to the differences in their philosophies.
MS and Apple both now have competent OS's - as of Win2K (in my opinion) and OS X - but they will always be driven by a different set of values than Linux and raw BSD.
So, I personally use Windows and sometimes even like it, but my hat goes off to those who use Linux, whether it is best or worst.
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:3, Insightful)
He was expressing an opinion. I agreed with him.
Arguing about our opinions is a waste of time. My definition of what Solaris is best at would have to do with stability. But others may have an opinion that contradicts mine. I wouldn't take issue with their interpretation of best.
Didn't you even read the Linus interview?
Please read the paragraph above then decide for yourself.
Re:Feel free to back that up. (Score:4, Insightful)
I usually find the BSDs might take a little longer to support the latest, greatest hardware. But that's primarily it. Or more support for more esoteric kernel settings and the like.
From an end-user perspective, by the time you install either, you have a nice UNIX-enough-for-me environment. They're both nice and robust feeling, and do well.
I use FreeBSD now simply because I'm lazy and I find the ports system to be the way I find easier/simplest to use. Do I care if you prefer to run Linux? Not really.
My FreeBSD desktop is behind a firewall, and I'm completely uninterested in regularly updating my OS. It just works, and doesn't ever give me any lip. I suspect many Linux users have the same stance.
If it's not out on the internet without a firewall, security patches are more of an issue. For a shockingly stable OS that I upgrade every year or so
I think Linus is correct though --- the BSDs focus on a particular design prinicpal, Linux encourages everyone to add in the things they need to make things work, and "just good enough" focues on actually providing functionality. Linux is highly successful because of that.
Was there any meat in this "interview"? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I learned just as much about open software from this article as I did from E!'s coverage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
Re:Short Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Strike 1: miss the point of the post.
Strike 2: miss the post itself (I think you meant this [slashdot.org] post)
So to save you the indignity of a third strike, I'll clarify the point of the post you were trying to respond to.
Hungus' point, IIRC, is precisely just because Linus does not, in your words, "take BSD code apart, analyze it and pass a judgement on the quality of the code" doesn't mean he isn't saying something worth listening to. To understand what he was talking about, you have go to the parent post:
Hungus was saying that this is a pretty crappy form of critical analysis: to choose several broad points from the linked article, paraphrase htem use the paraphrasing to stand for the entire article. Especially since Linus' point was the kind of analysis that people who love a good flamefest would consider "substantive" is just plain stupid.
Now, it's a short article. But Linus does make several points in the space of the article, which I think the original post completely overlooked.
Point 1: It makes more sense to compare operating systems in the context of an application you have in mind.
Point 2: Point 1 in mind, it's important to bear in mind that different operating systems can be designed for different goals.
Point 3: BSD and Linux each have their individual strengths and weaknesses. These need to be evaluated in light of point 1 and 2 rather than looked at in isolation.
Point 4: If you are looking for insightful comparisons between BSD and Linux, your best bet is to ask somebody who actual experience with both platforms, keeping in mind points 1, 2 and 3.
Now all of this should be dreadfully, painfully obvious. But to address the original post, saying something that is painfully obvious is not the same as saying nothing. Clearly, there's a lot of people who don't get these obvious facts, not the least of which are the people who think it would be a good idea for Linus to treat BSD the way a Microsoft exec might treat Solaris for example. So, these people need a clue; the logical person to give it to them is the person who they're goading into a debate. Especially since this would create a tremendous time waste, among people who are all doing more important work than amusing the hoi polloi's insatiable appetite for celebrity conflict. I see by the way in the supermarket headlines that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are feuding. Perhaps people could fixate on that instead.
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:1, Insightful)
He comes mine:
AIX is the worst Unix ever sysadmin-wise.
It's even worse than that since obviously it was developed that way out of pure malice just to make sysadmins suffer and fall in pains.
On the other hand, I'd bet those that say Solaris is the "uberunix" are those that only work on Solaris up from university and maybe Linux.
I find the zen of Unix on HP-Ux: quite good at everything, not bad at anything.
Still, I do agree that Linux being not only free but GPLed is such a terrible advantage that it will flush away anything else.
On proper time.
Re:Solaris is best at big iron (Score:4, Insightful)
That aside, you're right about support for really big iron being less advanced compared to that in Solaris, for example, but in a way, you're comparing apples with oranges here, because that only goes for the "vanilla", main-line kernel. I think it would be more fair to compare Solaris with what Linux versions are being offered by other vendors such as SGI or IBM; SGI at least has a number of patches that have not gone into mainline (yet?), because most developers aren't that concerned with tweaks that make the kernel run smoother on 512-cpu systems.
Of course, there still is a lot that Linux can learn from Solaris - but learn we will, because we don't strive to be better than anyone or anything, we strive to be *good*.
Re:apps is what matters, not kernel (Score:3, Insightful)
For the end-user, probably. But there's a huge amount of work and research left to be done with OS kernels. How about a standard driver API/ABI for OSS kernels? How about the ability to use the BSD TCP/IP stack with Linux (something I'd love to see, for reasons I won't get into here)?
How about a microkernel or an exokernel with decent performance? The HURD is essentially dead, but there's still an opportunity for a brilliant someone to come along and make a good microkernel OS, with all the security, stabillity, and maintainability that comes along with such an architecture.
Point is, there are many many opportunities for a creative kernel hacker to do new, useful things.
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:3, Insightful)
Even Windows 3.1 satisfied that criterion. The problems with Windows are, and have always been, the costs and risks of going with a proprietary single-vendor solution. The many security and technical issues Windows has are just one expression of those underlying problems.
The problem with comparisons is that once all of the products begin to operate at a level that makes them useful to their target audience
Quite right.
then the only thing left to argue about is the margins.
Not at all: the size and composition of the target audience become the primary focus of discussion. For example, is the fact that Macintosh market share is at 2-3% a result of evil market manipulations, or does it reflect the fact that Macintosh only satisfies the needs of 2-3% of the computer using population? Is the relative usage of BSD and Linux a result of Linux serving more people's needs, or is it a historical accident? Those are the real issues.
Zealots exist on the margins and so are they are the most likely to carp and moan about the small differences between various products. [...] Linus is not a zealot. He is an advocate.
You left out one important group: critics. Unfortunately, zealots often assume that critics are zealots for other causes, but they aren't. It is well worth thinking about what is wrong with Linux, BSD, Macintosh, Windows, etc., and how to do better in the long term. So, someone should point out the problems in BSD, it just shouldn't be Linus.
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:3, Insightful)
I have yet to see a usable XML editor. And I see no reason to browser kernel configurations in a web browser.
I think doing kernel configuration in XML could still be good, but only if the XML is designed to be human readable in a text editor. And the purpose would not be to use an XML editor, but to permit better manipulation of kernel configurations by scripts.
Re:Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD. (Score:2, Insightful)
(2) NVidia support FreeBSD officically. ATI is a mess, but that doesn't differ much from Linux.
(3) Mostly a question of money, so what? A lot of Oracle installations are not on Linux after all.
(4) YOU WANT HYPERTHREADING? Come on, get real SMP. HT just sucks.
(5) All BSDs have e.g. hot plugging in the kernel. Read: In the kernel, not some stupid userland dameon.
(6 There's a lot of hardware for very specialised applications. Heck, there's a lot of stuff only DOS drivers exist for. Most common devices are supported by both, with some big weaknesses in the multimedia sector.
(7) SELinux is a big hack. Compare that to FreeBSD's MAC framework (which supports the SELinux ruleset BTW), it's much cleaner. Like properly designed.
(8) *hust* I know that some of the Journaling Filesystems were mature before ported to Linux, but that doesn't mean that they are as mature under Linux as under the original system. JFS is the best example. Talking about mature, did they fix the filesystem corruptions under Ext3 already?
Actually, once you start choosing your hardware for your OS, the driver support becomes mostly mood. You are not buying IA32 for zOS afterall.