On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 01:41:09PM -0700, Jacob Meuser wrote:
> > It was absolutely tiny by modern standards, but it was a relatively full
> > CD which provided a pretty full system. What it didn't provide was the
> > huge redundancy the average linux user associates with "power" because it
> > interfered with what the average non-linux user associates with "usable".
> > It had more in common with Ubuntu than it would with something like DSL,
> > I'd guess.
>
> you know, the BSDs have operated with this mentality for some time.
I know--and if not for the vastly greater number of drivers offered by
Linux (Linux supports more crap by far than Windows on ia32 at this point,
though it is not a clear superset), I would probably take a closer look at
FreeBSD. The main thing preventing this is that I'm not much interested
in rtfm-style answers to questions, especially to questions with short
answers that would be easier to have answered by a knowledgable person
than to dig up tfm to r.
I'm a very busy person these days. =/ I know a lot of general use crap
about UNIX in general and Linux and MacOS X in particular (my Linux is a
little rusty, but not really THAT much has changed from 2.4 to 2.6), but
applying this to a particular platform (a BSD or any particular variant of
Linux which does something in ways I'm not used to) is going to require
some Q&A.
It's pretty easy at this point to get that from Linux people because they
are so used to idiots who think Linux will make them l33t h4x0rz that an
occasional simple, direct, and intelligent question is a welcome relief,
even if it could be found somewhere in documentation. They're too swamped
with new users to be snooty and indignant that someone hasn't read the
spotty, incomplete, and in places incomprehensible documentation cover to
cover. I find too many BSD users, who largely are used to trying to
justify their superiority to Linux users, relish in their snootiness.
This is of course not an accusation to any particular person, just an
overall reaction to the community vibe. Linux went through the same thing
back in the latter 90s when it started to become popular. That kind of
exclusionism just resonates with me in bad ways.
Of course, I am pretty sure I don't remember any FreeBSD systems having a
nice little integrated configuration for things like what services are
enabled or anything like that either. In fact, I remember FreeBSD being a
lot like Gentoo, but without the cute little etc-update tools (and it's
not like those are all that effective either!)
> a pretty complete base system that's easy to install (one web server,
> one mail server, one inetd, one version of each basic tool, etc) and
> packages for extra stuff.
>
> I remember doing a tiny OpenBSD & gnome install on one of Jamie's
> old laptops (~200 MB harddisk IIRC) at a clinic a couple years ago.
Again, it wasn't so much the size as it was the 0 to ${workingthing} in a
very short time period. That's something lost from the major Linux dists
which all want to give you a desktop system, either designed to be mind
numbingly simple (Ubuntu) or ridiculously overly complex with everything
and anything available--and often required--to be tweaked (Gentoo). Most
everything else fits in there close to those extremes, without much middle
ground, and not much notice that a person might not want a desktop at all.
Yeah I know Gentoo can be any kind of system you want, but c'mon, it's not
meant for production servers. And I know Fedora can be run without X if
you want to, but that's not its intention. And Debian .. well, who knows
what Debian is or isn't these days. And there are tonnes of minor dists
with niche purposes for firewalls and whatnot.
I just lament that Linux has generally gone the way of trying to compete
with Windows in the feature list rather than trying to simply be better.
Quality and integration were my interest.
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