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 ."
Good quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
I shows a lot about how he thinks. He seems to be more of a realist than I would have thought.
I find Linus's interviews to be very interesting.
I do think that Linux, and Windows seems to be more similar than Linux and BSD, since he keeps commenting that BSD wants everything to be perfect, whereas Linux tends to be all things "good" for everyone.
I would consider Windows to be happy with just being "ok" at all things, and not perfect. Which also works for a lot of people.
bothersome (Score:3, Interesting)
of course, this is my engineering mind thinking. Learn from what's out there and then do it better.
"BSD people are perfectionists" (Score:3, Interesting)
BSD vs. Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason is quite simple and probably uncommon: While I realize that Linux is easier to install and to configure (once you get used to the distro specific tools) and has wider hardware support, I just couldn't decide on which distro to use. For every review of a distro, there would be an equal number of comments arguing for or against it. To some, it was the most "polished", "advanced" and "easiest" distro ever, to others it was a "nightmare".
I didn't really feel like trying them all out just to see who was right. There's a plethora of distros all aiming for different objects, and I found that quite overwhelming. So I decided to spend some time exploring FreeBSD and pretty quickly fell in love with it. So, I enjoyed using Linux (SuSE), but I feel more comfortable with FreeBSD - and not for technical reason.
It's very subjective (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess that when I find something that I really need to do that Linux and/or Windows can't manage, then I will be forced to learn something else. Maybe BSD...who knows?
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think even the most hard-core Linux user would dispute that (well, maybe the zealots would).
As I wrote to the other poster who caught my gentle dig, I love Solaris for its stability. The only thing that I admire more about Linux is the open development. Sun cannot compete (for many reasons, mostly commercial) with Linux on that score.
Good enough? Anybody seen this? (Score:3, Interesting)
The movie biz is bitching about movie downloads. They're citing stats gathered from people's hard drives.
Hmmm?
With what degree of knowledge or cooperation from the people who's hard drives were scanned?
Or were these people just hacked? (Linux and OS X probably not just cooperate quite so readily to an invasive procedure like this, so is it just Windows that tattle-tells?)
An enquiring mind wants to know...
Feel free to back that up. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BSD vs. Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually tried all BSD flavors (i.e. the main three). I decided to go with OpenBSD for the router (OpenBSD's pf is an amazing piece of software and wasn't available for the other BSDs at the time) and with FreeBSD for my desktop machines - it just felt a little nicer to use than NetBSD, which, I am sure, makes for a nice desktop machine too.
As to why I chose to use BSD rather than Linux - maybe I wasn't clear in my comment above. I started out on SuSE and I enjoyed it a lot, but a few minor constant annoyances made me start thinking about switching to another distro. That's where the problems started, as outlined above. Choice can be a problem, and after reading tons of reviews of and comments on dozens of distros with an ambigious tone as to their specific merits and drawbacks which I didn't find helpful at all, I cringed at the thought of having to install them all and play with them for awhile to see which one I liked the best. With BSD, you don't have much choice, which really can be a blessing. You try them and either like it or you don't. With Linux, I knew if I didn't like a specific distro, I couldn't really blame Linux, but the distro itself, and I'd have to check out the next one. I found the thougt of that tiring. So I gave BSD a try and found it satisfactory.
Re:Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD. (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux beats BSD on the desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a linux zealot. I don't use Linux at home (I use OS X), and have no ideological reason to prefer Linux. I'm also at UC Berkeley, so, for "patriotic" reasons, I have a slight bias in favor of BSD.
That said, I have to admit Linux is more mature than FreeBSD for desktop use. Before you flame, hear me out.
Background
I'm a graduate student, and, with the help of another grad student and the College's head unix support guy, I'm stuck administering a small network of about 15 computers, all of which are vanilla Dell Precision 360s. Some run Windows, some run *nix. Our server is an Xserve G5, and it serves user home directories via NFS and does authentication & directory services via LDAP.
The FreeBSD story
We started with FreeBSD 4.9. Out of the box, we were able to get NFS mounting working, but there were a lot of problems. Sound didn't work. To get X working, we had to grab a special Nvidia driver. Even then, we only had VGA support, and not DVI. After much tinkering and kernel recompiling, I got DVI working, sort of (there were a few weird random "twinkly" pixels on each screen that showed up when in BSD DVI mode, but not BSD VGA or Windows DVI). Sound never worked. Then we tried to get LDAP working. No go, pam_ldap and nss_switch require FreeBSD 5.x.
So we upgrade to FreeBSD 5.2.1 (read, reinstall from scratch). That breaks DVI video, and the same kernel options as before don't work. No amount of tinkering can get sound working. Thus, we give up on DVI and sound. LDAP *does* work, after some effort, and so we have a mostly-usable system. There are still problems: KOffice apps crash on saving, and that the default PDF viewer doesn't work.
In an effort to fix KOffice and the PDF issue, we update & upgrade the ports tree. After a great deal of manual intervention to deal with broken dependencies in the pkg database, non-building ports, etc., the upgrade finishes. Now X is broken. It turns out the configuration file format for XFree86 changed when X got upgraded in the ports upgrade. A similar thing happens to KDE. After resolving those problems, the PDF and KOffice issues are resolved. Still no sound or DVI video, but we can live with that.
Then we upgrade our Xserve to Mac OS X 10.4 Server. All of a sudden, logging in via KDE as a "network" user on *some* of the BSD machines doesn't work. KDE complains that it doesn't have write access to the user's NFS-mounted home directories. A quick check on the command-line or with a failsafe session shows that users do, in fact, still have write access. I spend forever on this, and get nowhere. Some users can log in, others can't, on some BSD computers and not others. There are no clear differences, no explanations, and nothing makes sense.
I call in backup. The College's head unix admin comes over and spends a day on the problem. He contacts the KDE developers. I call Apple "Premium" Support. Nobody knows what's going on. In the end, we realize that the issue is that the NFS spec is fairly loose, and it's possible to have two nominally compliant implementations that don't quite talk to each other. Our theory is there's some sort of strange conflict between Apple's OS X 10.4 NFS implementation, the FreeBSD 5.x implementation, and KDE that causes some very subtle race condition with writing some KDE configuration file. At this point, we decide to try installing Linux on one machine as a test to see if it will work any better.
Total time about 100 hours.
The Linux Story
We install Centros 4.0 (a RedHat Enterprise Linux-derived distribution) on a machine. Everything works out of the box, except LDAP. After an hour or two of futzing around, that works too. Everything works. Sound, DVI video, NFS, KDE, PDFs, you name it. It all works.
Total time 3 - 5 hours.
Moral of the story
FreeBSD just isn't ready for the desktop. I wish it weren't true, because I like lots of things about FreeBSD, but it is. FreeBSD
Re:Linux beats BSD on the desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not About To Be Baited (Score:2, Interesting)
<begin rant>
XML with its fancy crap and, let me guess, java editors or whatever is not simpler. Why do you have to complicate things way the f*** out there when a simple text file "just works".
Now I have a strong feeling that I'm not the only one who gets BP up a few notches when someone presents a bright idea how to "simplify" things with XML. That's why he got modded up. In my opinion. (See threads above for opinion wars.)
competent OS's (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It depends on what you mean by "competent OS's".Though for the past several years I've used mostly Windows I rank it at the bottum of the heap in stability, with WinNT being the most stable to me, and I've used Windows from 3.x to XP though not Server 2003. Well actually 3.x gave me less trouble than the others, but then comes NT 4.0. Win95 crashed pretty regularly, and though not as much WinME still crashs too much for me. Of Win2000 and XP, though I've only used them in classes I've taken and not at home, I had 2000 crash on me a few tymes in a 16 week semester and XP crashed on me the very first day of the class I first used XP in. For now, I plan on getting a Mac Powerbook for my next computer/OS. I am wondering though if I should set it up to dualboot Linux or just use BSD.
FalconRe:Not About To Be Baited (Score:3, Interesting)
Say for a hypothetical "Gizmo daemon"
('scuse the squre brackets)
gizmod.configurator.xml
[gizmod option="port"]
[name]Select Port[/name]
[validate]
[lowerbound]0[/lowerbound]
[upperbound]10000[/lowerbound]
[default]79[/default]
[/validate]
[reject]That port was out of range[/reject]
[/gizmod]
and then
gizmod.config.xml
[gizmod option="port"]
[value]79[/value]
[configurator]gizmod.configurator.xml[/configurat
[stanza]port[/stanza]
[/value]
[/gizmod]
or shit, even
gizmod.cfg.template
[network]
port=%gizmo
Thus you have a configurator file for each config file.
Then from there you could have just one tool that looks at the xml config for whatever app is being configured and presents wizards, or whatever based on the configurator xml. Diferent distributions could have there own configurators or whatever
and to top it off, a top level config file could have something like
toplevel.xml
[softwareinstalled]
[package name="gizmod"]
[config]
[configurator]gizmo.configurator.xml[/c
[/softwareinstalled]
[configuration]gizmo.con
[/config]
[name]Gizmo Daemon[/name]
[blah....
[/package]
(etc)
[softwareinstalled]
Well you get the basic idea. It'd make life alot easier if it was done properly and adhered to.