Comparing Linux and BSD, Diplomatically

Joe Barr writes "Talk about a red-button issue. How do you compare Linux and the BSDs and keep the debate from turning into a friendly-fire flame-fest nightmare between bigots on both sides of the line? Linus Torvalds once handled a similar situation by wearing a BSD beanie at USENIX while delivering a Linux talk. Now he tries it again in this interview on NewsForge ."

Comments

Short Summary

[Hungus]

To summarrize Linus :
1)They are different don't try to compare them.
2)I like Linux better because it agrees with me.
3) Don't ask me what I wan't in Linux (kernal) from BSD (kernal) because I don't use BSD.

Basically it was a whole bunch of nothing

troll much?

[ignorant_newbie]

wow. where shall i start?

Linux' native file system, EXT2FS,

um... i believe you're about 5 years behind the ball here. all major distros have shipped with ext3 or reiserfs as their default for at least that long.

According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage.

um... no. reiser 4 is in beta. reiser 3 has been production ready for years. so, basically, you're just cutting and pasting random unsupported ( when not just blatantly false ) trolls hoping for a response.

Re:Easy.

[halber_mensch]

Purchase 1x Tux Plushie, 1x Daemon Plushie, fill them both with audio tapes of associated OS zealot's verbal spew, put them down and press play. Whichever one's batteries run out first wins the debate.

Shouldn't the one that runs out of juice first lose?

That's so typical! Leave it to the Linux users to redefine success in their own benefit...

;)

Re:bothersome

[(startx)]

If he looks at BSD internals, anything he comes up with relation to those internals might be considered derivative works and would need to be BSD licensed.

I was going to mod you down since I've got the points, but there isn't an "Incorrect, -1" moderation.

The BSD license is about as liberal as it gets, basically saying "Do what you want with the code but leave my copyright notice." This includes sticking the BSD code into GPL'd code, XYZ'd code, or even closed, proprietary code.

GPL is the license that says what is open must stay open, and even with that, only if you copy the actual code. "Ideas" are not protected by copyright, just expression. Protecting designs and more recently ideas is what patent law is for.

Solaris is best at big iron

[Bishop]

Solaris has fault tollerance features that aren't found in Linux. Solaris has support for isolating failing hardware and hotswaping everything includeing cpu boards. Big IBM, and SGI/Cray iron support this as well. To be fair most Linux developers don't have access to a Sun E10k. So it is understandable if they don't fully support it. Solaris zones are nice and currently better then Linux/Xen, and much better then usermode linux or VMware. On the userland side Solaris has excellent nis/nfs support that I have yet to find in any Linux distro.

However Solaris is big, stubborn, and ugly. I would rather admin three machines each with a different Linux distro then a single Solaris box.

Linux has other strenghts, but on big servers Solaris is best.

Re:Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD.

[Azog]

You can't think of anything else besides large SMP systems that Linux does and NetBSD doesn't? Come on, you aren't trying very hard. Just off the top of my head, Linux has:

- Newbie-friendly installers with lots of really nice up to date free software (Ubuntu, FC4, etc.)
- Lots of custom distributions for specialized purposes, live CDs, etc.
- Accelerated 3D graphics with manufacturer-supported drivers.
- Support contracts available from Oracle and other large players.
- Hyperthreading support in scheduler.
- Kernel event system (dbus, hal, hotplug, etc)
- Device drivers for far more devices.
- Security levels beyond standard POSIX (NSA-designed SELinux framework, etc.)
- Really good, mature, journalling file systems.
- ... lots more, really.

Sure, NetBSD runs on more hardware. This is good if you want to create an embedded system with some obscure microcontroller.

But nobody choosing an operating system actually cares how many microprocessors are supported. They just care if their cpu is supported. And for 99.99% of the world, with linux, it is.

Re:bothersome

[sflory]

Unless it's the old bsd license it's not an issue. The old BSD license had an issue with the GPL, but it's not used much any more.

Compare orginal, and modifiedBSD licenses.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

Re:Linux beats BSD on the desktop

[toadlife]

Your post correctly points out some of the things FreeBSD lacks - mainly things working "out of the box". As for you not being able to get those things working, that sucks. Might have been the flakiness if the earlier 5.x releases of FreeBSD - or maybe those areas of FreeBSD just aren't up to snuff.

I do recall having some misc. problems with 5.1/5.2 releases of FreeBSD, but they seem to have finally gotten it right with 5.4, which is my current desktop at home.

Still things generally do not work out of the box. I had to load the cam kernel module and do some config editing to get K3B to work as a non-root user, I still have to mount my USB thumb drive manually, and I had to rename a config file to get ethereal to compile correctly, I had to implement a shell script to get Firebox to talk to Thunderbird, and vice versa.

But now everything just works - *beautifully* I might add. portupgrade , portmanager and portsnap together make maintaining ports as simple as running two simple commands from time to time.

It would be much easier to just install linux, but I like the feeling of BSD, and I LOVE the FreeBSD documentation. All of the issues I described above (except for the Firefox/Thunderbird issue) were covered in the documentation of either FreeBSD *or* the ports that were involved, and I've never run into a piece of BSD related documentation that I couldn't follow, or was flat out wrong.