
BSD vs. Linux - rohshall
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
======
rmaccloy
This page appears to be positively ancient, referencing FreeBSD 5 and Red Hat
8, and a bunch of the technical differences are incorrect now; the Linux
kernel hasn't used stable/unstable versioning in forever and is entirely on
git, every GNU/Linux distribution has easy binary package dependency
resolution and retrieval, etc.

~~~
dalke
Agreed. It describes how Linux kernel development (recently?) moved to
BitKeeper. That places it between 2002 and 2005.

------
comex
It's my impression that the discussion about ports, "full range of bits",
"assurance that it works" vs. "decentralized" misrepresents Linux distros, or
at least Debian - apt provides the full range of dependency tracking, package
configuration, etc., and Debian maintains a centralized repository, often with
local patches (just like ports), where things are guaranteed to work. The only
real difference is the emphasis on source vs binary, which is important but
not as fundamental as the article suggests.

Edit: And later on...

 _The individual releases of a given distribution are much more independent of
each other, so it's harder to turn your RedHat 7.3 system into a RedHat 8
system. [...] With a Linux system, however, you tend to find yourself trying
to keep a handful of obvious things upgraded, while others get further and
further behind, until eventually you just reinstall with the latest version to
bring it up to date._

That may be true for RedHat (which I've never used), but Debian has always had
good old _apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade_ to bring everything up to
date.

Edit 2: Whoa, randomly changing site theme.

~~~
nakkiel
Not to mention that the BSD community as a whole is being slowly taken over by
pkgin..

~~~
piotrSikora
Only pkgsrc part of the community ;)

Also, it's only used for packages distribution and the packages are still
build from the ports:

    
    
        pkgin is aimed at being an apt / yum like tool for managing pkgsrc binary packages.

~~~
Wilya
FreeBSD is (more or less) moving towards pkgng, which has roughly the same
goals. I'm not sure what the OpenBSD guys are doing

And yes, it's only for distribution. But if it works well, it's the only thing
end users should care about. Though I'm not exactly sure the BSDs have basic
end users in the way linux does.

~~~
piotrSikora
> FreeBSD is (more or less) moving towards pkgng, which has roughly the same
> goals.

Yeah, but the BSDs always had pkg_add and other pkg_* tools, pkgin is just a
nice alternative that works on more than one system... I don't believe it
provides any crucial feature that was missing in the pkg_tools.

> And yes, it's only for distribution. But if it works well, it's the only
> thing end users should care about.

From OpenBSD's FAQ:

    
    
        The ports tree is meant for advanced users.
        Everyone is encouraged to use the pre-compiled binary packages.
    

Basically, if you're running unmodified OS (i.e. official release) and don't
enable any options disabled by default in the ports then you're just wasting
CPU power rebuilding stuff that you could easily grab from the nearest mirror.

~~~
Wilya
As far as I can tell, there is no tool in FreeBSD base that provides a simple
way to check and update all ports using binaries. FreeBSD's pkg_add only
handles direct installs of new packages. Upgrade management, things like
"update everything" or "update this package and its dependencies" is usually
done through one of the external tools like portmaster, portupgrade,
pkg_upgrade, etc. Which interact with the ports tree and pkg_add behind the
scenes, but with additional info on dependencies to keep the whole thing sane.
They do the job okay, but they all have their quirks.

From its man page, it seems OpenBSD's pkg_add supports updating (and a lot of
other things), so I guess they don't have this problem to start with. That's
interesting, I wonder why the feature is lacking on the FreeBSD side.

~~~
piotrSikora
Ah, indeed, it seems that FreeBSD is a lot less package-friendly than OpenBSD
& NetBSD.

------
ek
I used to be an Emacs user and felt rather mediocre about it, and then I tried
Vim at the recommendation of a colleague and after some discomfort (like maybe
an hour's worth), I was absolutely enamored with Vim in a way I had never been
with Emacs.

Based on similar reasoning, I've been trying to get into trying BSD lately, as
a current and avid user of Linux. I wish that this article would have
addressed a bit more about the author's subjective experience of using BSD, as
this is currently the sort of thing that would be helpful for me in
considering FreeBSD as a desktop OS. The main thing that I have to reconcile
currently is the fact that BSD isn't on the bleeding edge like, say, Arch
Linux. To give a specific example, until recently, mesa lacked full support
for the Sandy Bridge mobile GPUs, and so I couldn't play Minecraft on Linux.
Pretty much as soon as a version of mesa with support for Sandy Bridge was
released, Arch had it in the repositories where other distros would have
lagged weeks behind. Of course, I could alter my lifestyle so that I wasn't
always using such new hardware or didn't care so much about being able to play
Minecraft without using Windows, but that would require FreeBSD being worth it
in some other big way.

------
pixelmonkey
I find it strange that I used to enjoy debates like this, around the time the
article was written. I was so fascinated with operating system kernels and
base system layouts then.

I've been a Linux-on-the-desktop user since 1998 or so, and started using it
full-time in 2001. Having grown up on closed & proprietary operating systems
with "black box" operation, I found it amazing how transparent everything in
the UNIX world was, and how much control you had over your machine.

Lately, I've just been happy that my laptop hardware finally works "out of the
box" and with minimal tweaking, so I can get on with my life and focus on the
things that matter (I'm a software engineer, so get on to coding & designing
software).

I fear that simple usability and hardware frustrations caused many people who
would have been Linux/BSD users over to Mac OS X -- a proprietary & closed
system that at least has BSD roots. Linux may not be the best kernel design
ever, but it's a Free operating system with serious UNIX roots and
astoundingly good hardware & software support.

In my current work as an engineer of large-scale web applications and
distributed services, I find that kernels and base operating system layouts
are playing decreasingly important roles. We are automating these details with
tools like Puppet and Chef. We are spinning up Linux machines in virtualized
providers like Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Service. We want to forget about
these details and get on with our lives.

We just need something that runs on our physical or virtual hardware and runs
our stack of open source databases, programming languages, and services. We
need something that just works.

I only came across one place, recently, where operating system choice seemed
to matter -- and that was in the deployment of a pair of physical network
router boxes in a colocation facility. For that, we chose OpenBSD over Linux
due to its out-of-box better support for high-availability networking, packet
filtering, load balancing, etc. But I can't think of another time -- desktop
or server -- in the last 5 years where it has made sense to choose BSD over
Linux.

~~~
derleth
> Lately, I've just been happy that my laptop hardware finally works "out of
> the box" and with minimal tweaking, so I can get on with my life and focus
> on the things that matter (I'm a software engineer, so get on to coding &
> designing software).

For me, that's Ubuntu on Lenovo hardware. I'm not trying to push this setup,
just respond to the idea that 'just works' means you have to use a Mac.

~~~
FlukeATX
Just want to toss in that Lenovo likes to cripple certain features in
hardware, e.g. limiting SATA II speeds
([http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=84953](http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=84953)),
disabling stereo mix ([http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-
series/Is-...](http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/Is-it-
possible-to-use-Stereo-Mix-on-my-T400-T410/td-p/173463)) and whitelisting wifi
cards
([http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_Mini...](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_MiniPCI_network_card)).
I think at this point they stopped mucking with SATA, but new models still
require "approved" wifi cards and disable stereo mix in hardware.

For those who enjoy the ideas behind Linux, Lenovo is not exactly the greatest
manufacturer.

[Edit] And apparently HN does not use Markdown, or I was doing something wrong
before.

------
tsahyt
Interestingly, his conclusion about why he uses BSD matches exactly with why I
use Linux. Personally I haven't used BSD very often or much. In the same way
the OP says he's picked the right OS for him, I've picked the right one for
myself and could underline my choice just as strongly.

There just is no one true answer to this debate. Each to his own liking.

------
belorn
Is it valid to lump together all system with a linux kernel and then talk
about the user experience? The user experience differ quite a lot depending on
if you use debian, redhat, ubuntu, android, Mandrake, and so on. Sure, they
can all be modified to be more or less the same experience, but the amount of
modification needed to make a redhat user experience the same as a debian user
experience is so large that you may just easier start with compiling your own
kernel and go from there.

It is 2012, it is time to stop comparing BSD with Linux and start comparing
FreeBSD with Debian, or OpenBSD with redhat, and so on.

------
Newky
My only problem with split articles like this is when reading with Pocket(Read
it later) I end up having to follow the rest of the links and add them
individually.

Give me the offer of a full page article please.

------
howeyc
The main reason I got into the BSDs years ago was because of the ports system.
I remember having a fun time with dependency hell that was on all Linux
distributions. Then a friend showed me OpenBSD and did a "make install clean"
from the ports tree, downloading all dependencies and installing them too. I
was hooked.

Linux distributions eventually caught up and made software easier to install,
but I've stuck with the BSDs.

------
l0nk
I think it's funny (and great) that's a lot of OSX users "support" FreeBSD and
BSD in general because of OSX using part of the userland of FreeBSD. And it's
funny when they said "not been able to get it with Linux".

------
jiggy2011
I've often wondered why BSD is not more popular as a desktop system. Since it
seems more "stable" it would surely make an easier target for development?

There must be a reason Apple chose it instead of Linux to be the core of OSX.

~~~
gecko
OS X is not really a BSD. True, its userland comes from a mish-mash of NetBSD,
FreeBSD, classic big-U Unix, and OpenBSD, in roughly that order, but xnu is
not a BSD kernel, and while it supports many FreeBSD APIs (e.g., kqueue),
that's done by reimplementing those APIs in xnu, frequently via gratuitous
copy and paste, but definitely not by using a BSD kernel.

I mention that not because I want to be pedantic, because there's a huge gap
between "OS X is using some BSD components" and "BSD would make a great
desktop operating system." The one doesn't imply the other.

That said, there is a fairly nice desktop OS, called PC-BSD, you can take a
look at, that _is_ FreeBSD with a KDE-based UI. Not my cup of tea, but you can
check it out at <http://www.pcbsd.org/>

------
metatronscube
OSX BSD (or XNU based) is my operating system of choice. I used Suns and OSX
during university and never been able to get into Linux.

~~~
rohshall
It may be just me, but I tried using FreeBSD on my laptop. But sadly some
software do not have distribution for BSD. I could not get eclipse working.
And Android SDK is not available for BSD too. And it was a downer for me.

------
peterwwillis
_"But when BSD integrates it, _it works_."_

Even my limited experience with FreeBSD shows this is a falsehood. New major
releases should basically be ignored due to all the bugs, especially
concerning device drivers.

~~~
rohshall
Yes, I find that BSD stability claim does not hold true. My FreeBSD
installation crashed sometimes.

------
mlvljr
But isn't BSD gay? :)

~~~
mlvljr
And those downvoting are homophobes!

~~~
mlvljr
Or just Linux fans? Oh wa..

