Slashdot Mirror
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 ."
TFA is not a Slashdot-style discussion, obviously. No matter how hard Joe Barr tried to get Linus to engage in a comparison, he was unwilling to rise to the bait. Good going, Linus.
/.ers think, Windows does work well enough to allow people to do productive work. The various BSD flavors work well enough for their community to do productive work. I would venture that Solaris users probably get quite a bit done with their relatively immature software as well. Oh yeah, OSX stuff works well too.
There are obvious merits to any operating system. Despite what many
The problem with comparisons is that once all of the products begin to operate at a level that makes them useful to their target audience, then the only thing left to argue about is the margins. Zealots exist on the margins and so are they are the most likely to carp and moan about the small differences between various products.
Linus is not a zealot. He is an advocate.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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?
Would you have a "debate" with a racial bigot over which race is better?
Bigots of any type aren't worth the time of day.
IMHO
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Try to use the appropriate tool at the right time at the right moment.
What is appropriate depends on the situation and your experience.
Easy, you just compair them to Microsoft and the Linux and BSD bigots will unite.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
So what? Everyone knows windows blows both of them out of the water as far as viral whoring goes. Try that with wine.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
In summary, Linux Torvalds understands that computers are about the right tool for the right job. For some, that tool is Linux. For others, that tool is *BSD. But he rightfully takes the stance that competition is no skin off his nose.
;-P
This is a *good* thing people! I realize it's much easier to jump into Highlander mode ("There can be only one!"), but reality is rarely so simple. Until someone invents the "perfect solution", every decision will lead to a particular set of tradeoffs. If you don't have anyone else exploring alternatives, how can you know for certain that your own alternative is the best one? Cooperation always leads to better results.
That said, I have a feeling about the replies I'm about to get:
Girl: Don't even think about it!
Human Torch: Never do. (Jumps off building)
Human Torch: Flame ON!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Torvalds : It just means that I don't know anything about BSD technical internals, so I'm the wrong person to ask. Ask somebody who uses both.
Which are better, apples or oranges?
Linux or BSD? I don't care...
As long as you use vi (and not Emacs).
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
One of the things I'd love to see in Linux that exists in BSD is umount -f for any filesystem, not just NFS. On FreeBSD (and probably other BSD's?) you can force unmount any filesystem. This is especially useful when you need to foce unmount snapshot mounts.
I shows a lot about how he thinks. He seems to be more of a realist than I would have thought.
I find Linus's interviews to be very interesting.
I do think that Linux, and Windows seems to be more similar than Linux and BSD, since he keeps commenting that BSD wants everything to be perfect, whereas Linux tends to be all things "good" for everyone.
I would consider Windows to be happy with just being "ok" at all things, and not perfect. Which also works for a lot of people.
Personally, I find it hilarious that there's a standard anarchy symbol....
Just junk food for thought...
Maybe he doesn't have the time but isn't it a good idea to learn some of the technical details of the competition, especially when it's all legal to look at the code of what they do well. He should know at least the general arch and some tech details in areas linux is trying to get better at.
of course, this is my engineering mind thinking. Learn from what's out there and then do it better.
Evolution or ID?
Your point of view is as utterly intolerant as the point of view of those you are criticizing.
"Mac users are phanatix. They are insecure and utterly intollerant.. Mod me up for being reasonable!"
Are you kidding us?
diegoT
"...It just means that I don't know anything about BSD technical internals, so I'm the wrong person to ask. Ask somebody who uses both."
That said, he raised some interesting points about the differences in philosophy between the two camps.
He's obviously a bad person to ask since he thinks things like "you'll find a lot of areas where Linux is better (often a lot better -- as in "it works"), and then you'll find a few narrow areas where one particular BSD version will be better." and "Linux has a much wider audience, in many ways. That ranges from supporting much wider hardware (both in the driver sense and in the architecture sense) to actual uses.".
Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does, and apart from running on very large SMP systems, I can't think of *anything* that linux can do and BSD can't, much less "many" things.
Putting aside truly harmful types of bigotry, such as racism etc., I find "OS bigotry" pretty entertaining. I am a centrist, who sees merit in almost every viewpoint, so it's pretty funny to me to watch people get at each others' throats over ludicrous low-level minutiae from the inner bowels of arcane computing concepts. I mean, who gives a rat's ass? And yet people are using comparisons to the Nazis, and worse.
Truthfully, it's what keeps me coming back to Slashdot.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Summary: some guy tried to get a newsworthy quote from Linus, he says the interviewer's questions don't make sense and ends with "Ask somebody who uses both."
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
It's quite easy.
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.
Simple, no?
The easy part was getting the brain out, but the hard part was getting the brain out.
"The BSD people (and keep in mind that I'm obviously generalizing) are often perfectionists. They hone something specific for a long time, and then they frown on anything that doesn't meet their standards of perfection. The OpenBSD single-minded focus on security is a good example." - linus So what he's saying is bsd people don't release as much buggy code. I'll have to agree with him here with the bimonthly linux kernel security vulnerabilities creeping up. 2 years and no 'root level' exploit in freebsd's kernel.....
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
I am mainly a BSD user (I guess my .sig gives me away), but I have used Linux before I made the jump to FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) a couple years ago. I am not enough of an expert to comment on the technical superiority of one or the other, but it's not for technical reasons that I went with FreeBSD.
The reason is quite simple and probably uncommon: While I realize that Linux is easier to install and to configure (once you get used to the distro specific tools) and has wider hardware support, I just couldn't decide on which distro to use. For every review of a distro, there would be an equal number of comments arguing for or against it. To some, it was the most "polished", "advanced" and "easiest" distro ever, to others it was a "nightmare".
I didn't really feel like trying them all out just to see who was right. There's a plethora of distros all aiming for different objects, and I found that quite overwhelming. So I decided to spend some time exploring FreeBSD and pretty quickly fell in love with it. So, I enjoyed using Linux (SuSE), but I feel more comfortable with FreeBSD - and not for technical reason.
For me the best OS is the one I already know how to use. My brain has been full for a few years now and--as pathetic as it sounds--I just don't feel like learning another OS. I use Linux and Windows since I know how, but, for all I know, BSD may be better.
I guess that when I find something that I really need to do that Linux and/or Windows can't manage, then I will be forced to learn something else. Maybe BSD...who knows?
Sitting Walrus Blog
This is easy. Linux is cool because it has an X in it. Everyone knows Xs are cool. (Of course, Linux would be cooler if they capitalized the X, but that's a minor point.)
On the other hand, BSD is cool because it has a hot chick.
Both are valid attributes and neither side should feel bad.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Funny, maybe, but how is this insightful? Even that kind of joke is a little old and tired. Anarchy isn't about people working alone, it's about avoiding hierarchy and state power. You can certainly come to agreements on things like symbols without a central authority to decide it for you.
Ceci n'est pas un post
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/technology/13dri ll.html
The movie biz is bitching about movie downloads. They're citing stats gathered from people's hard drives.
Hmmm?
With what degree of knowledge or cooperation from the people who's hard drives were scanned?
Or were these people just hacked? (Linux and OS X probably not just cooperate quite so readily to an invasive procedure like this, so is it just Windows that tattle-tells?)
An enquiring mind wants to know...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You must be referring to Solaris on Intel. I still don't think "immature" is the right adjective. The problem with Solaris on Intel is mostly hardware support, and that's not going to change with age. Hardware popularity shifts faster than Sun's ability to support it.
"Stodgy" and "crusty", maybe, but not "immature".
For vanilla hardware in a server, it does just fine.
sigs, as if you care.
Its very easy on openbsd, and I seriously doubt its much harder on freebsd. You have to download the distfiles manually because of Sun's stupid license, but then you just type "make install".
And of course, some company not making software for BSD is not a limitation of BSD. BSD is entirely capable of running the software, Sun just doesn't feel like releasing a BSD version.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Wow. Amazing. Linus has managed to speak to another human being in paranthesis. What happened here, was he talking one minute verbally and then transmitted his thoughts to the interviewer through some Jedi'ish mind trick?
I knew Torvalds had to be an alien. I just knew it.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I didn't say anything bad about linux at all, I stated two simple facts. Maybe you could point out some of these things that linux does and BSD doesn't? Just because its Linus spreading the FUD doesn't make it ok.
Now, now, operating systems are technical things, with technical merits and disadvantages.
A good computer scientist can look at any system and ask himself, "ok how does this suck?".
Because the answer to that question can be followed up with "how do we make it better?".
If you can't ask "how does this suck?" for fear of being an "troll" then you've effectively eliminated thought.
...when Linus says he thinks "Which is better" questions are stupid, and Joe's first few questions are all of the "Which is better" variety.
But what is more fun. Is if you post a message that can really rial them up. Like saying all the things you can do in windows that you can't do in Linux, or Dissing on Stallman. You can get hate responces as far as the bowser scrools. and you comments and Modded down into boliavian. I am sure some of them are people who are tring to egg me on from the other side, and have some fun at my expense. But still it is a lot of fun.
Some of my favorate Instults.
"Tie Wearing Sheeple." (Although I only wear a tie like once ever 3 months or so)
"poorly argued rant simply demonstrate that you are a close minded jerk of lower than average intelligence that no amount of college could help." (Ohhh good comeback, If my argument was so poorly argued why didn't he just give reasons.)
"Windows loving fananic" (although I normally run Linux, Solaris or OS X)
If they were just a little bit more moderated they would live happier lives. Because every other thing out there that could be more popular then their choice wont make then annoyed. I know I use to be an Open Source Zealot then I relized ill just be happier if I wasn't
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I mean, you've got to be able to come up with a better BSD daemon girl than that without even trying. What, is that your girlfriend or something? Pathetic.
Honestly, doing a google search didn't give me _just_ the image I wanted, but there are some pretty impressive examples in this collection, even if what is perhaps the best one is animated. ( Warning: not entirely work-safe, *and* contains flamefest-inducing images of penguins impaled on pitchforks ). You've been warned, now let's see that server melt...
A: I don't know, man. It depends what you mean by "better."
Q: Okay, then, why is it BSD used to be better?
A: Was it? I was busy not noticing.
Q: So you prefer Linux?
A: Um. Yes. Are you an idiot?
Q: Why do you think BSD and Linux are two different operating systems?
A: Probably because they start at different places in the alphabet. Are we done here? (points) Hey, look, there's Tanenbaum! Go ask him why writing a Unix kernel from scratch is impossible!
Q: Thank you for your time. Tune in Wednesday as we ask the BSD leaders why they insist on using one-button mice.
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
Look in the article! He sez:
I often find black-and-white people a bit stupid, truth be told.
See! See?!
include $sig;
1;
Personally, I find it hilarious that there's a standard anarchy symbol....
The hilarity can be explained by the following reasons:
1. You have absolutely no clue what anarchy means in a political sense.
You are probably one of these people who imagine crazed lunatics running around with cartoon-style bombs when you think of anarchists. In fact, anarchy (as a political term) is defined quite simply: absence of authority. Generally, I would describe it as a system of living without government or the enforced hierarchy which accompanies such government. You may not think this is practical or reasonable (fine, I agree) but don't ignorantly define anarchy as "chaos". If anarchists simply wanted chaos, they would call their movement chaotics or something.
The ideal of anarchy is a system voluntarily accepted by all without forcing it's ideas on anyone. Society would operate by a system which no one person or group controls, but everyone agrees to. By standards everyone follows, with no need to enforce them. Metaphorically, the best symbol for anarchy would be one that all anarchists adopted, but was not dictated or owned by any one of them in particular. Thus, we find that the symbol is actually quite appropriate, contrary to your "hilarious" view of it.
Disclaimer
I'm not a linux zealot. I don't use Linux at home (I use OS X), and have no ideological reason to prefer Linux. I'm also at UC Berkeley, so, for "patriotic" reasons, I have a slight bias in favor of BSD.
That said, I have to admit Linux is more mature than FreeBSD for desktop use. Before you flame, hear me out.
Background
I'm a graduate student, and, with the help of another grad student and the College's head unix support guy, I'm stuck administering a small network of about 15 computers, all of which are vanilla Dell Precision 360s. Some run Windows, some run *nix. Our server is an Xserve G5, and it serves user home directories via NFS and does authentication & directory services via LDAP.
The FreeBSD story
We started with FreeBSD 4.9. Out of the box, we were able to get NFS mounting working, but there were a lot of problems. Sound didn't work. To get X working, we had to grab a special Nvidia driver. Even then, we only had VGA support, and not DVI. After much tinkering and kernel recompiling, I got DVI working, sort of (there were a few weird random "twinkly" pixels on each screen that showed up when in BSD DVI mode, but not BSD VGA or Windows DVI). Sound never worked. Then we tried to get LDAP working. No go, pam_ldap and nss_switch require FreeBSD 5.x.
So we upgrade to FreeBSD 5.2.1 (read, reinstall from scratch). That breaks DVI video, and the same kernel options as before don't work. No amount of tinkering can get sound working. Thus, we give up on DVI and sound. LDAP *does* work, after some effort, and so we have a mostly-usable system. There are still problems: KOffice apps crash on saving, and that the default PDF viewer doesn't work.
In an effort to fix KOffice and the PDF issue, we update & upgrade the ports tree. After a great deal of manual intervention to deal with broken dependencies in the pkg database, non-building ports, etc., the upgrade finishes. Now X is broken. It turns out the configuration file format for XFree86 changed when X got upgraded in the ports upgrade. A similar thing happens to KDE. After resolving those problems, the PDF and KOffice issues are resolved. Still no sound or DVI video, but we can live with that.
Then we upgrade our Xserve to Mac OS X 10.4 Server. All of a sudden, logging in via KDE as a "network" user on *some* of the BSD machines doesn't work. KDE complains that it doesn't have write access to the user's NFS-mounted home directories. A quick check on the command-line or with a failsafe session shows that users do, in fact, still have write access. I spend forever on this, and get nowhere. Some users can log in, others can't, on some BSD computers and not others. There are no clear differences, no explanations, and nothing makes sense.
I call in backup. The College's head unix admin comes over and spends a day on the problem. He contacts the KDE developers. I call Apple "Premium" Support. Nobody knows what's going on. In the end, we realize that the issue is that the NFS spec is fairly loose, and it's possible to have two nominally compliant implementations that don't quite talk to each other. Our theory is there's some sort of strange conflict between Apple's OS X 10.4 NFS implementation, the FreeBSD 5.x implementation, and KDE that causes some very subtle race condition with writing some KDE configuration file. At this point, we decide to try installing Linux on one machine as a test to see if it will work any better.
Total time about 100 hours.
The Linux Story
We install Centros 4.0 (a RedHat Enterprise Linux-derived distribution) on a machine. Everything works out of the box, except LDAP. After an hour or two of futzing around, that works too. Everything works. Sound, DVI video, NFS, KDE, PDFs, you name it. It all works.
Total time 3 - 5 hours.
Moral of the story
FreeBSD just isn't ready for the desktop. I wish it weren't true, because I like lots of things about FreeBSD, but it is. FreeBSD
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.
Did anyone learn anything of interest from this interview? What new insight into Linux or FreeBSD did you come away with?
I think I learned just as much about open software from this article as I did from E!'s coverage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
For the end-user, probably. But there's a huge amount of work and research left to be done with OS kernels. How about a standard driver API/ABI for OSS kernels? How about the ability to use the BSD TCP/IP stack with Linux (something I'd love to see, for reasons I won't get into here)?
How about a microkernel or an exokernel with decent performance? The HURD is essentially dead, but there's still an opportunity for a brilliant someone to come along and make a good microkernel OS, with all the security, stabillity, and maintainability that comes along with such an architecture.
Point is, there are many many opportunities for a creative kernel hacker to do new, useful things.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
MS and Apple both now have competent OS's - as of Win2K (in my opinion) and OS X - but they will always be driven by a different set of values than Linux and raw BSD.
So, I personally use Windows and sometimes even like it, but my hat goes off to those who use Linux, whether it is best or worst.
It depends on what you mean by "competent OS's".Though for the past several years I've used mostly Windows I rank it at the bottum of the heap in stability, with WinNT being the most stable to me, and I've used Windows from 3.x to XP though not Server 2003. Well actually 3.x gave me less trouble than the others, but then comes NT 4.0. Win95 crashed pretty regularly, and though not as much WinME still crashs too much for me. Of Win2000 and XP, though I've only used them in classes I've taken and not at home, I had 2000 crash on me a few tymes in a 16 week semester and XP crashed on me the very first day of the class I first used XP in. For now, I plan on getting a Mac Powerbook for my next computer/OS. I am wondering though if I should set it up to dualboot Linux or just use BSD.
FalconShould there be a Law?