From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mike Tancsa)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: press inquiry -- bsd vs. linux?
On Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:19:48 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Hi. I am writing an article for WebServer Magazine on BSDI's recent
>merger with Walnut Creek, and it's attempts to publicize BSD and its
>cousins. I am looking for end users to comment on why they chose BSD
>(and/or its derivatives) over Linux. What are their various pros and
>cons? I hear the BSD kernel is "better", for example. Any others?
>
>If you want to participate, email me, and we can set up a time to do an
>interview, either e-mail or phone. Thanks.
The chaos of LINUX is both its strength and weakness. I like a little more
order in my operating platform, and the way that FreeBSD is developed and
released gives the right mix for me. You can get into a never ending
minefield as to which is technically better, which will squeeze out 10%
more performance than the other. To me, this is pointless, as hardware
upgrades and inherently more scalable designs should never rely on such a
small margin of performance gain. Anyways, you only need to look at
www.hotmail.com and yahoo.com to see that FreeBSD can cut it in a high
availability, high performance environment. For me it comes down to issues
like
a) design AND implementation. You can have the most sophisticated design,
the most FOOLproof plans, but if the implementation is fraught with bugs,
who gives a damn about nice design and nice nifty cutting edge features
(e.g. Win2K-- my favorite being the much touted security designation. sure
its secure by design, but if the implementation is security swiss
cheese....). For me LINUX, although quick to fix issues once discovered,
does not seem to be as careful about the review process before bits and
pieces get committed into the mix.
b) Expectations of the user community: FreeBSD is sometimes given a hard
time because the developer/user communities are 'not nice enough' to new
users and beginners. Another way to look at it is, "they dont dumb it
down." As a somewhat experienced sys admin, where would you rather see
limited developer resources put ? Making it simple as possible,
anticipating user mistakes (i.e. stopping people from shooting themselves),
or creating powerful, stable, robust and secure OS environments.
c) cvsup. I think this is perhaps the greatest underrated feature of
FreeBSD. Important changes can be made and deployed without having to do
the "hotfix/patch/dependency/revision control/regression testing, oh no a
third party application has put an old version of MSCxxx.dll in my system
introducing an insanely difficult instability bug to track down syndrome"
cvsup -g -L2 4.x-stable
cd /usr/src/etc
merge changes
cd /usr/src;make world;cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf;config mykernel
cd ../../mykernel;make;make depend;make install;sync;shutdown -r now
As for complexity of the above, see point b) Ultimately though, its not
that difficult.
This is not to say that FreeBSD is user unfriendly. It actually is, but it
does expect that you do some research as well as to understand some basic
operating system concepts. In some ways, I think LINUX is being lured too
much away from the server space, to the end user "point and click, and I
dont want to understand whats going on underneath" space.
There are of course many other things that some people like (or dislike)
about FreeBSD as opposed to LINUX or any other OS. But for me, the above 3
are the main ones apart from the standard, reasonably fast, reliable,
secure criteria which LINUX is as good as. Note, my perspective is from a
server perspective....
---Mike
Mike Tancsa ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Sentex Communications Corp,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
"Given enough time, 100 monkeys on 100 routers
could setup a national IP network." (KDW2)
------------------------------------------------------
Rohit Sharma [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Public Relations Officer,
IEEE K.J.Somaiya college of Engineering Student Branch.
Ph: +91.022.5673390
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