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The State of the Demon Address
Kelly McNeill writes "It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going."
As a user of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I must say that I have been quite satisfied with both, especially FreeBSD. While it could use some help in the ports and upgrading department, it is all around a wonderful piece of software, and it is quite interesting to watch the development of all the BSDs. Way to go!
Shouldnt that be State of the Daemon?
I mean daemon as in services doing good useful things running in the OS?
vs. the newer form of the word, Demon, usually signifying the exact opposite.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
I'm a long time user of Linux (since '93 or so), and I've never really had a need to use FreeBSD. This article treats FreeBSD as the second (or first, depeding on your religion) coming of Christ. The article tell us that "The new FreeBSD 5 branch offers some exciting technology, generally regarded as comparable with or superior to what is offered in Linux", but doesn't even give a hint as to what this technology is, only that it is "tantalizing".
Since "it has a bright future ahead of it", can someone name a few of these killer features? It would be interesting to see if any of them could be added to Linux, as well...
Like offering less than ideal Java support? That is probably Sun's fault, but anyway. I have installed and used FreeBSD quite alot and it is a great OS. Almost everything you need runs out of the box, but things like Java and OpenOffice required abit of fumbling.
to understand how BSD is doing, go to your local coffee shop, book store or student union. Take a look around, how many people do you see using BSD? 3 or 4 laptops. Now how many linux laptops do you see? none. I think thats pretty good.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
This is one man spewing invalid opinions and using outdated information. He hits hard on NetBSD and OpenBSD as though they were evil or the spawns of some demon's loins.
He says of NetBSD, "...its desktop and production applications are so limited as to be nonexistent...," yet this is a foolish and downright insulting thing to say. Desktop applications are not dependant on Linux or FreeBSD as much as they are on X. The issue of production applications are a problem with companies, not the system itself. And even then there are means to emulate other systems to allow most programs for Linux to run on NetBSD.
Of OpenBSD he says: "Sticking with Intel and compatible chips is a safe bet as its Alpha and PowerPC ports are still in their infancy." I find this once again rediculous. The macppc and alpha ports are better than what FreeBSD has to offer and are pretty much comparable to the NetBSD ones (what with the code sharing). He also takes a personal slam at Theo de Raadt himself, not at all something to make his opinion more valid or acceptable.
Of Darwin he speaks as though it were a complete system and not an incomplete husk of one. He even calls it a Unix, while it is not. His views seem tainted and hazed by his own prejudices.
He does not even touch on DragonFlyBSD, a system which I find to be far more a BSD than Darwin considering Darwin uses Mach and not BSD for a kernel.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Although 386BSD hasn't been developed in a long time, it is worthier of a mention than BSDI, being the first-ever port of the BSD tapes to the Intel architecture. Indeed, it beat Linux for X11 support, networking and many other Unix features by some considerable time.
(You can tell I started with this distro. I moved to Linux, because it was being developed faster. But I never forget the time I've spent with the BSDs.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Where is my option to mod this article down? It's full of misinformation and slander. How do things like this get posted? Do any fact checking in the OpenBSD section alone and you will see several glaring false statements, as well as hateful remarks towards its lead developer.
While I have never had problems using the packages with freebsd and using ports that I built myself, I have had problems building packages myself and installing them elsewhere. Origonally I planned to sync servers and simply have a port build server for all the others, but ended up with problems that the packages I built would fail to install correctly (basically died in portupgrade) for some reason. At first I thought it was the CFLAGS I was using, but I was building against i686 so it should have worked for Athlons and Pentiums.
So I went back to just building from ports, and on any machine at over 1Ghz ports tend to build fast enough for me (note: I don't use a GUI). The things that tend to take the longest are updating portdb after syncing the ports tree, and downloading the sources. If you have a build server do that, then the compile time on the other servers really isn't that long in comparison.