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DragonFly BSD Introduces A 'Stable' CVS Tag
bsdman writes "The DragonFly BSD project have recently introduced a new 'stable' tag in their cvs. If you ever wanted to use DragonFly BSD but was scared of any instability - now is your chance!"
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One shiny feature that might not be obvious the first time you see a BSD box is ease of administration. Which is a consequence of a clean and integrated system. OpenBSD specially has a proactive approach to security, which is an important "feature".
Maybe this doesn't seem like fancy features to a teenager geek, but they are so important if you want to take *nix administration seriously.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
I can clearly see the differences in linux distro's. But other than portability, and security, what other differences/uses are there?
Frankly, who cares about the differences? The purpose of the BSDs isn't to be different.
This is very different from the Linux community. Linux users, in general, tend to chase after the latest "hot" distro. Almost like flash mobs. The latest seems to be Ubuntu skyrocketing up the distrowatch charts. I can't understand why someone happy with their current distro would switch just because everyone's talking about something new. But apparently a lot of you do.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
FreeBSD, and BSD in general, is an OS that once you learn...you will love forever. It's an OS you can love without becoming a zealot. It's pragmatic, intelligently designed, and the code is very clean, relative to linux. You'll also be working in an OS that really just has one goal - to be as good an OS as it can. Not to overthrow microsoft, not to overthrow linux, not to fight against Mac OS as the primary underdog. That, in my opinion, is the main appeal of the BSDs. They're there just to be there, to represent different models and ideas in computer science, and show how these different ideas might work. Linux does this, too, but there are ulterior motives that sometimes draw away from the goal of being the best that it can be. Though, Linus does a damn good job of keeping things on track and focused.
Now, BSD is mainly for servers, but i would venture to say that most BSD developers use it daily as their main workstation. It's a completely viable system to fill that role, and it does a damn good job. Also...nvidia puts out 3D drivers for FreeBSD, you can play almost all linux games in FreeBSD, usually as fast, if not faster, than under linux. I have no evidence of this...but it's what I hear...and people do play linux games on FreeBSD (think wolfenstein, 3D FPSes). So...it can be a platform for gaming. But yeah, to enter the BSD world you have to realize goals. If you want a firewall or a gateway, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD. If you want a nice fast workstation or a high-load network server Get yourself a copy of FreeBSD-STABLE (the 4.X series) or track DragonFly's development. If you want to see BSD die, get a copy of FreeBSD-RELEASE (the 5.X series). If you want to see somethign that will run on anything, and run pretty damn well, then it's all about NetBSD. If you want point and click prettiness with a terminal, OS X is BSD-based. I recommend trying all of them, because they all offer something different for the 16 year-old nerd to learn.
Every other OS out there pissed me off because of haphazard system layout, and pain-in-the-ass administration; and there was usually also some poor-quality code - which always seemed to exist in the distro's highly-touted admin tools and/or highly-touted upgrade mechanism.
The ports system just plain WORKS, dammit!
I think that the older geeks value the BSD's goals because they also remember being pissed off by OS's that only focused on the "shiny" factor.
The shiny stuff is fun for a while, but someday you'll be using a new Linux distro and you won't be able to print that all-important term paper because you're stuck in some circular-RPM-dependency hell (sure you can fix it, but not before you have to take an Incomplete) - then you'll wish to God you had an OS that just worked, and the shiny new distro won't seem so damn shiny any more.
BTW, don't let other geeks hear you say that performance is "superficial"!
Insightful, my rim!