[techtalk] *nix comparisons?

Alex Yan flare at serv.net
Sun Jul 16 23:58:48 EST 2000


Hey, you know, I just realized that I made the mistake of not completing
the comparison fairly.  While everything I said about Linux versus *BSD
stands, people might wonder why choose a *BSD at all?

To the user, there is not really any good reason, unless you have a bunch
of *BSD friends who nag you all the time.  If you are a developer, you
might be more interested in NetBSD because you can then run your software
on a number of different platforms: NetBSD has been ported to a crazy
amount of architectures.  If you want speed and reliability on the i386
platform, FreeBSD is a good choice.  If it's security, you're looking at
OpenBSD.  If you want to learn how to be a system administrator, you want
to choose one of the *BSD's rather than Linux because you'll learn more
with them than with one of the pre-packaged and fairly broadly-used Linux
systems.

When I used NetBSD, the hardest thing about it was the installation.  The
reason was because you had to tell it very specific information about your
hardware and how you wanted it divvied up.  It was very unnerving to have
to know all that much about your hardware... but it was also very
enlightening to understand how the installer was trying to optimize your
system.  Most people who run NetBSD will re-compile their own kernel, for
example, to be optimized for just their own hardware.

With Linux, I find that as a programmer, I do not have to worry about
system administration as much.  I liked doing it and I respect sys admins
for doing their jobs, but I am just not one of them.  And I don't exactly
have the resources to hire my own sys admin for my home machine.  Anyone
with a Windows machine will tell you that even though it's meant to be
drag-and-drop, there's a certain amount of administration that still needs
to take place (disk space management, startup-processes, what DLL's have
been installed, which version of DirectX, etc.).  With the Linux
distribution systems, I can keep my system up and running without too much
hassle.  And I program in Perl, so I don't need to worry about
cross-compiling.  So I switched to Linux.  I still like NetBSD, I still
think it's cool, but it's just not for me.  I like Linux too.


-Alex Yan
 flare at serv.net

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Julia Coolman wrote:

> Thanks, Alex, that was exactly the kind of general overview I was looking
> for.
> 
> Lilly, comparisons between Linux distributions are somewhat easier to find
> (just do a search with your favourite engine for "linux distribution
> comparison" or something like that), but a nice short one from the Linux
> Journal folks is here: 
> http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/lj-issues/distable.html
> 
> 
> Julia Coolman
> 
> jcoolman at gladstone.uoregon.edu
> 
> 
> 
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