

BSD and Linux Differences  - liangzan
http://www.rootbsd.net/blog/2009/freebsd-and-linux/

======
keyist
Strange article -- half polemic half unnecessary (anyone who spends 5 minutes
reading up on BSD would have heard of ports).

For a more detailed take on BSD vis-a-vis Linux: [http://www.over-
yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin...](http://www.over-
yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php) . BSD user's point of
view, target audience Linux users.

------
thingie
In the first part, they are comparing apples and oranges, and in a very
meaningless way. Compare FreeBSD to Debian or Redhat or Suse or Ubuntu or
anything, if you want to. What sense does this make? If you were going to use
Linux, you would use some distro, so compare FreeBSD to that distro.

Performance part doesn't really say anything. It's far too vague and
incomplete.

And ports could be easily compared to, say, Gentoo system, or something
similar. Just describing them doesn't make much sense, given that you are
targeting mostly current FreeBSD users. I wouldn't even rule out a possibility
that there is some Linux system using NetBSD pkgsrc, as it should be quite
portable (and comparable to the ports).

In summary, the article is quite bad :-)

~~~
nailer
There's some technical inaccuracies too - eg, FreeBSD has ACLs, implying that
Linux doesn't in Linux-based OSs. RHEL/CentOS and Fedora have had ACLs by
default for years now and they're easily enabled on Ubuntu/Debian if you need
them.

'Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the
same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library
incompatibilities. ' is just as true of Linux OSs too.

------
Zarathu
As an avid FreeBSD user, I must say that the article didn't really provide an
unbiased comparison of Linux to FreeBSD. It didn't offer any of the advantages
Linux may have over BSD.

Linux has an amazing community with better application support. Linux also has
an optimized C library. For example, you should take a look at BSD's strlen()
versus GNU's strlen().

~~~
dchest
BSD implementation of strlen() is handwritten in assembler for most
architectures, and _is_ optimized. The misunderstanding about it not being
optimized is probably because someone read the fall-back non-optimized C
implementation and missed architecture-specific directories.

This was discussed in this thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510832>

Edit: glibc also doesn't use the generic optimized version in C on some
architectures, see for example: [http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-
bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i3...](http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-
bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i386/strlen.c?rev=1.8&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-
markup&cvsroot=glibc)

------
Zev
The article is comaring FreeBSD to Linux in general (not BSD-in-general vs
Linux-in-general as I had thought from the title).

