[techtalk] *nix comparisons?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2000 at 09:23:38PM -0700 or thereabouts, Julia Coolman wrote:
> Kind folks:
> 
> Please don't be mad. I am thinking of installing netBSD, to play with and
> to keep my linuxppc partition company.
> 
> Before I leap I would like to look over a comparison between the unices,
> or maybe just a superficial "similarities and differences in UI"  but I
> have looked to no avail. Has anyone run across a quickie comparison, or am
> I gonna need to dig deeper?

I emailed one for the Linux distros here back in February. It is now
of course out of date :) But it's in the (old majordomo) archives at
http://linuxchix.devin.com/techtalk/2000-Feb/0451.html as are a lot
of other messages in the same thread (several correcting some of what
I said, so be warned :)). They're mostly about Linux, though.

I haven't used BSD well enough to know. I have a FreeBSD CD at home, 
but the partitioning involved turned out to be a little more than I
felt I could cope with at the time. One of my Things To Do if ever
I get the time is simply to stick it onto a separate disk rather than
trying to get it to share with something else. I gather than's a
fairly common solution. I hear that NetBSD and OpenBSD are harder
than FreeBSD when it comes to partitioning.

One of the *BSD people was explaining the updating process to me
at LinuxTag. What has long put me off is the same reason I keep
delaying Debian: you either wait for a new CD or you do big upgrades
over the net via CVS checkout. I have a titchy modem. Apparently
this is ameliorated for at least the BSD flavour he was talking 
about (which I forget) by periodic (daily?) deltas being made of 
the CVS differences so you can grab those, which is apparently faster.

I would think the most immediate UI difference after installation is
package management: you have the BSD 'make world' versus RH and others'
rpm, Debian and others' apt-get install and Slack and others' tarballs.

If you're a "power user" when it comes to the shell, I suppose the
bash (Linux) and ash (BSD) differences might bite you when you're
not expecting it. The only clever things in the shell I use are 
^A/^P etc for line-editing, backticks, and changing window titles
with escape codes, so I don't worry about that kind of thing too much :)

It's so long since I used a commercial UNIX that I daren't guess
the state of them now. I know that in the way of UI, Solaris still
comes with CDE. (Could be worse: I remember Sunview.) The original 
UNIX I met first was ULTRIX. Everyone is very rude about that now, 
but at the time I thought it was wonderful and magical and stuff :)

Telsa