[techtalk] *nix comparisons?

[Robert Wade]

there's also ports, which is my favorite feature of *BSD. There're several
package systems for Linux (RPM, DEB, slack, whatever), but none of them
work too good if you're using both the package system, and you're
compiling tarballs, the key libs don't tend to work to weel. This is
esspeccially true with rpm (which is why I happily threw red hat out the
window when I had the chance). 

But with ports, it takes a more 'normal' installation route, by compiling
everything from source (that the soruce is available for, of course) and
then installing it and keeping track of the installation. You can add,
remove, and do all that neato stuff with ports, but everything seems to
work fine.

Another thing I like about *bsd (and the one I use, FreeBSD) isn't as
segmentated as Linux is. Sure, the bsds have been segmented forever, but
they're completely different operating systems. Linux, for all it's
popularity is too damn segmentated for me. With the bsds, you learn one
command in freebsd, and it sticks. If you're using red hat one day, and
slack the next, you've got quite a few things to get down (this works the
other way too, slack to red hat or whatever), which is why I like *BSD,
the unification.

Robert Wade

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Alex Yan wrote:

> 
> 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
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > techtalk mailing list
> > techtalk at linuxchix.org
> > http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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