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Why FreeBSD
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
He didn't even flag it for the BSD section on the site. I guess this is a step up from that RAID article, though.
Simple, choice is good. As muck as I like Linux, I'm glad to see that there are viable, open alternative OS's.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
Don't ask why, ask why not.
Jesus Christ, is this post a bloody propaganda speech or something? Slashdot - keeping the Nuremburg spirit alive!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
"FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been."
Can it get anymore flaimbaitish than this. Ironicaly enought it comes from I.B.M developer works.
P.S: Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
Well, if anybody asserts that "Windows is the operating system that Linux should have been", they clearly deserve a bashing.
Linux and BSD based operating systems provide many of the same services, and pretty much work the same way. I think that you can't go wrong with either of them. I see no need to pit them against each other, as they both provide freedom and excellence to the user.
IIRC, there was just enough controversy over the sealed agreement in the Berkely vs. AT&T kerfuffle that developers were a teensy bit nervous about working on BSD. By the time that was all properly dealt with, Linux was already gaining speed, and had the additional advantage of riding the back of a wave of MS hatred.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Exactly how is this news?
;)
I've know that FreeBSD was much better than Linux for ages
Joking aside, FreeBSD is a bit hard to install and get working if you're using it as a workstation OS...
I've been using it for 4 years now and it still took most of my free time in a period of 2 weeks to get it installed properly on my newly bought laptop (with all the details and little stuff, that is)
Of course when I was done, it was very much worth it. I don't think any system is as robust and stable as FreeBSD.
A huge "Thank You" to the developers!
Skippy is the unknown giant among peanut butters. Starting out from George Washington Carver's project, it is an extremely creamy spreadable peanut product mostly for the "& Jelly" sandwich and its clones. In many ways, Skippy has always been the peanut butter that Peter Pan should have been. It spreads on Wonder Bread and artisan sourdough loafs fresh from the oven, and it serves terabites of children a day on some of the largest daycare centers on earth.
Let me make an analogy to a newspaper. Not everything you get in a newspaper is "news". For instance, there's the "Life" section of USA Today or the "Living" or "Features" section of a typical local daily newspaper, which typically runs plenty of articles other than news. Even the "Business" section (called "Money" in USA Today) usually has some articles other than news.
Nope. But it's sunday, and slashdot is almost always slow on sundays. Just take a look at today's "news" about google.
Yep. A slow day indeed.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
But all the new and fun stuff comes out for Linux. If you're looking for something close to the style of FreeBSD, but with the new and freshness of Linux, try Gentoo.
freebsd is dying as is macos x and windows. The future is Linux. The future is Free.
FreeBSD is free'er than Linux, or more accurately the BSD license is free'er than the GPL. That said, the less free GPL's restrictions are meant to be benevolent for certain users.
Mac OS X's share is growing wildly. For some it is replacing Linux as their general purpose unix. Now some people have more specialized needs and Linux may be a better choice but many folks using Linux just need a general purpose unix box and are not into the politics and Mac OS X combines unix, a consumer GUI, FOS software, and off-the-shelf retail software very nicely.
In general, it is rock solid; I've seen a FreeBSD server with a load of 80-something (process went nuts), and still been able to login and take corrective action without rebooting. I remember being quite shocked to find a console reporting that / was inaccessible due to a drive error - but server processes on other partitions continued to run just fine anyway. We've had a few hiccups with 5.x (although 5.4 fixed most of them), but our testing of 6-beta is going really well. FreeBSD is the masochist of operating systems: you hit it, and it just keeps asking for more!
There are other reasons to love it. The ports system is very solid, and it's been years since we had problems applying an upgrade due to dependency issues. The documentation is marvelous - man pages are useful, and the handbook covers most things. The community support mailing lists are very useful, too. Jails provide a convenient way to partition processes on a single server, although they are far from perfect at this point (they keep improving, though).
I really can't say enough good things about FreeBSD. It has been running most of our hosting setup, and many of our client's networks for years, and the only time we ever seem to run into problems is when hardware dies.
(For the record, I also use Debian - and it is good, but I prefer FreeBSD for servers that have to be trusted)
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
But BSD is dying! I thought everyone knew that. I guess someone forgot to tell CmdrTaco.
One could also argue that Linux is what FreeBSD should have been, and cite the huge number of supercomputers using Linux, or the success of Linux on the mainframe. However, it would be nice if the poster realized that it's a pissing contest and both operating systems are impressive and have their uses, benefits, and drawbacks. Neither is what one "should have been". They both have their own, very different methodologies, so let's leave it at that.
Not that it's news anyways...
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
R.
No, FreeBSD runs THIS.
I've admin'd most every flavor of Unix at some point in my life and I really really like how FreeBSD is managed, from development to the ports tree.
Now that there is a push to support binary updates, my last major complaint has been addressed.
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the perl dependancy hell will absolutely love the ports tree - I really don't understand why there hasn't been more adoption of that concept in Linux.
Also, I am suprised that Linux is the platform of choice for all of these appliances that companies are pumping out, like wireless routers, security devices, etc, when the BSD license is so much more attractive to business.
The major stumbling block that FreeBSD has left is their development team. It seems like the way things are organized really creates a lot of opportunity for personality clashes.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones.
This sounds like FreeBSD performs vastly better than any OS in the world. And how much faster is exteremly compared to Linux or Windows? Twice the speed? Four times?
The first time I installed FreeBSD, I looked at the screen and kind of went "What do I do now?". After a bit of digging, my impression was that of a system that had all the kinks worked out of it. After trying many Linux distros, FreeBSD made more sense.
/usr/local, if I upgrade the system, cvsup is simple, the ports tree makes keeping software up to date a breeze, I'm not going to have to hunt for a distro specific rpm or a wierd library just to get something to work. The amount of software available for FreeBSD is astounding, chances are, if a project is in development, it's already in the ports tree.
If I install software, it's going to be in
I've used FreeBSD for about 6 years and I really don't see myself using Linux anymore. The community is very supportive, intelligent and open minded, I always seem to get things done with FreeBSD, I haven't found a problem I couldn't solve within a few hours, it just works, and works well. Try it, you might find that it works as well for you.
I think those days are over...
The PC-BSD project makes it a snap to install a functioning FreeBSD system. DistroWatch mentions a very nice step-by-step guide to installation process but really, you don't even need that if you are already handy at installing various GNU/Linux distros. (Although the guide does go into some custom configuration things that are useful/interesting.)
The torrent for PC-BSD is ready to roll, give it a try. Now there are no more excuses ;-)
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Seems like an informative and unbiased article, but I couldn't help but laugh at the author's email address. Especially given the "FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been" jab that the story submitter felt compelled to include.
Why FreeBSD
A quick tour of the BSD alternative
Level: Introductory
Frank Pohlmann (frank@linuxuser.co.uk), U.K. Technical Editor, Linuxuser and Developer
19 Jul 2005
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Why FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD, NetBSD, OSX, etc.?
The article was really sketchy on this point.
I work at a large internet organization that runs thousands of FreeBSD systems. When we need 64-bit though, we switch to Linux because it has a stable 64-bit distribution and FreeBSD does not. I've gone through all the kudo's about FreeBSD being stable, but are you using release 5? and are you using 64-bit? (and don't even get me started about threading support.)
Quote Via QDB.us
Look, it's a giant troll posting thinly disguised as a news article!
BSD is great, but it's not the only game in town. Suggesting that it is what Linux should have been is nothing more than troll bait.
The reason you'll see just as many BSD fanatics as Linux nuts is for just the same reason: the license.
*BSD is a stable, secure OS with a proprietary-friendly, open source license. Linux is a stable, secure OS with a proprietary-hostile, open source license.
90% of the actual software that runs on the two is exactly the same. However, each has its own kernel and basic libraries.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Mach, not FreeBSD, is the "guts" of Mac OS X. The code borrowed from FreeBSD is mostly userspace code.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Actually, about the time of the DOS/Win to Win transition and beginning of the elimination of the 16-bit section to move to 32-bit, there was some argument that Microsoft should have stayed with a windowing manager on top of core OS paradigm as they previously had and beefed up DOS to be something like Unix.
Fortunately, saner minds prevailed.
As advanced as current iterations of Linux are over BSD in useability and sanity (Gentoo notwithstanding) they still harken back to phosphor terminals and text interaction at every turn. Want to install everything in FC3 off the DVD and work with nothing more than what is on there? Fine. But it won't include Java, Macromedia Flash, the latest Firefox, drivers for any webcams or a dozen other things you might have or want to put on your box, etc.
Use of a text interface and system fiddling is inevitable. Not so with Windows.
If the BSD community could drop their (admitedly less than the Linux crowd's) dislike of Windows and Microsoft, they might see that useability and integration do not have to be wholly separate from security. I would love to see OpenBSD as the guts of a good GUI-centric OS with modern packaging systems as easy as those found on Windows. Then you could say, "here's an OS that is as easy to use as Windows and infinitely more secure because its parentage was all about security."
And I could finally stop referencing BSD/M.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Its called Mac OS X. Sorry i don't want to be a troll but OS X just fit your criteria.
there was some argument that Microsoft should have stayed with a windowing manager on top of core OS paradigm as they previously had and beefed up DOS to be something like Unix. Fortunately, saner minds prevailed.
No, they didn't. That's exactly what Windows is; you can boot NT into a command line environment and run it completely without a GUI. It would have been insane if they hadn't done that.
Use of a text interface and system fiddling is inevitable. Not so with Windows.
That's total bullshit. There are millions of Linux systems that don't even have a command line and do everything graphically (e.g., Linksys routers). And desktop Linux installations usually come with a full complement of graphical administration tools.
On the other hand, a lot of Windows system management involves going to the command line. It's just that many people give up at that point and just reinstall Windows.
...not so fast there sparky, a common misconception.
You are right in thinking that the true "guts" of the kernel is mach, however, it's only really used for the very very low level stuff and message passing, the rest of the system is provided by a BSD server for mach that takes care of 90% of the system duties. What apple have created is a bit of a bastard child of a microkernel and a monolithic kernel.
I am NaN
"Sorry, but when you said "use" there I guess you really meant "close". Which is really more like "prevent others from using". Which is exactly what I was saying to begin with."
This is the major deceptive argument made by some GPL fans. Software licensed under BSD remains free forever and ever. The fact that people are allowed to modify it without distributing the modifications in no way makes the orginal code "closed".
We can debate the merits of GPL vs. BSD, but let's keep it honest.
that would be portupgrade, my friend..
I wrote this a while ago but it seems applicable here.
Linux vs. FreeBSD
I run NetBSD on a Macintosh SE/30.
Because I can.
(I run Minix on a 286 laptop)
Wow I gotta stop believing all that Linux FUD I've been reading. So Linux can't, hasn't or done any of that? Talk about tooting your own horn at the expense of something else.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
"The OpenBSD project does not make the ISO images used to master the official CDs available for download. The reason is simply that we would like you to buy the CD sets, helping fund ongoing OpenBSD development. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de Raadt. Theo does not permit people to redistribute images of the official OpenBSD CDs. As an incentive for people to buy the CD set, some extras are included in the package as well (artwork, stickers etc).
Note that only the CD layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes someone else from downloading OpenBSD and making their own CD. If for some reason you want to download a CD image, try searching the mailing list archives for possible sources. Of course, any OpenBSD ISO images available on the Internet either violate Theo de Raadt's copyright or are not official images. The source of an unofficial image may or may not be trustworthy; it is up to you to determine this for yourself.
We suggest that people who want to download OpenBSD for free use the FTP install option. For those that need a bootable CD for their system, bootdisk ISO images (named cd36.iso) are available for a number of platforms which will then permit the rest of the system to be installed via FTP. These ISO images are only a few megabytes in size, and contain just the installation tools, not the actual file sets."
So they do not provide isos for free, they prefer to have you buy a set of boxed cds to fund their effots. Yeah, I can see it... Bad, evil people trying to make some sort of money for a project.
They then say you can download from unofficial sources as you will. Gosh. They must be mad as well as evil...
They even propose to build a full system from an ftp using just a floppy or a cdrom . My head start spinning. This people REFUSE to give you an iso, but helps you 3 ways to get their sofware.(3.4 - Downloading via FTP, HTTP or AFS...)
So, I agree, BSD is made by Bad, Evil, Mind Spinning people that actually help you get their software. In multiple forms... but they won't provide you poor soul with an ISO, you'll have to use your bleeding fingers into 20 seconds of googling to get it...
Madmen, all...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
And if you want a portable BSD, don't overlook NetBSD, arguably the most portable and ported modern high-performance operating system in existence.
you had me at #!
The article just gets to making a point, and then never makes it. Over and over again.
The net result is just a lame advocacy attempt.
Again the lame point about linux being merely a kernel is made. What decade is this author living in? Has anyone ever decided to deploy linux in the enterprise by simply downloading the latest kernel for the install? Hell no, linux is installed as a distribution, always. This tedious harping on semantics and unix purity is nonsense.
In the replies the lamo 'RPM doesn't handle dependencies' rears its ugly head yet again. What modern distro now doesn't have a package management wrapper? If you violate dependencies with RPM's or whatever your package of choice may be, it's because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how to manage your system of choice. I haven't had dependency issues *ever* using RPM's created for the installed base I was running. Sure if I chose to install rogue, poorly built RPM's from a source that doesn't use a consistent build environment, they will have issues...but that makes it my fault, not the fault of the system I'm running. The system, at least for now, isn't smart enough to keep me from using my free will and breaking it.
What happened to informative journalism? It's dead. Everyone from mainstream media to bloggers lives in a three sentence, paragraph header mentality. 90% of anything 'published' online now consists of a 'story' that is merely a collection of paragraph headers with no meat.
Just read all the 'security' articles weighing linux vs windows and it's evident. People with an obvious misunderstanding of both platforms, spouting off daily as though they are experts. The unfortunate part of all of this is that the average reader of any of these topics won't even realize the inherent flaws in the 'articles'.
If they came with a full set of graphical administration tools then it wouldn't be necessary to go to a command line at all.
Systems like SuSE do come with a full set of graphical adminstration tools; it isn't necessary to go to the command line to administer them, ever.
And something like Webmin runs on any UNIX system and gives you a far more comprehensive and consistent administration interface to a larger set of subsystems than Windows tools.
Of course, many end-users find command line administration actually easier.
With the comments about poor usability and friendliness as compared against windows and linux sure to abound, I have to put in my $0.02.
.
FreeBSD has taken some huge steps toward a more user/newbie friendly experience in recent times. I'm posting this from my significant others' PC, which is running PC-BSD, based on 5.4 RELEASE.
The funny thing is, she prefered PC-BSD over any of the linux flavors I've had her try (including Mandriva/Mandrake, Debian, Mepis, Knoppix, etc.) and even over windows.
She tells me she likes PC-BSD because it "feels" more stable and predictable to her, and after doing a windows install last nite (for games and the occasional MSOffice/OO.org compatibility/formatting hiccups), I gotta say the PC-BSD install (the installer is a nice graphical installer, with nearly everything being fine if one just accepts the defaults) is much faster with far less pickiness, and of course, only one reboot..at the end, into the new fully-installed and functioning system.
Windows failed to detect or set up the very vanilla Linksys NIC, and required significant (for a newbie) setup after the install to get a working internet connection. PC-BSD "just worked" in regards to the NIC, and most everything else, including sound.
PC-BSD also has a package system for software management, using ".pbi" pre-built packages as well as the FreeBSD "ports" system. The ".pbi" packages available are somewhat limited still, but does include some standouts, such as the java installer, which automates the java installation, which has been an issue for me with the various FreeBSD desktops I've tried.
OO.org 2.0 beta is also included, running in KDE 3.4.0. Guess I've rambled enough, just wanted to get the word out on PC-BSD for the FreeBSD-squeamish. You can check it out for yourself at http://www.pcbsd.org/
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If you want to seriously compare two open-source Unix-like systems, the only instrinsic difference is the kernel. Arguing that one system is better because of the default configuration of network services, the package system, the organization of the rc scripts, and so on, is a red herring, because there is no reason you can't take all of the userspace from one system and run it on top of the kernel from the other -- and there are projects which do this.
In that light, these benchmarks are the most enlightening comparison I have seen to date. Some BSD users have attacked the methodology, but none of them has gone on to do alternative tests of their own, and the author has been very conscientious about addressing some of the criticism. The bottom line is that FreeBSD is, whichever version you choose, at best equal to Linux in low-level kernel performance, and usually slower.
When you also take into account the greater ease of use of most common Linux distributions, broader hardware support, greater availability of commercial software (yes, you may be able to run it under FreeBSD's Linux emulation layer, but the vendor is unlikely to officially support that, which matters to large corporations), and better scalability, it really isn't suprising that most people considering a free Unix-like operating system choose some distribution of Linux.
Undoubtedly for a long time, perhaps until the 2.4 kernel came out, FreeBSD probably was superior, and had a well-deserved reputation as a better choice for serious usage. For some purposes (there are some routing benchmarks that FreeBSD people always bring up, which I can't find right now) it may still be. But through some combination of the AT&T lawsuit, media coverage, and pure chance (licensing may also have played a part), the commercial support and developer mindshare swung decisively to the Linux kernel, and today it is clearly the best choice for most uses. We can wonder what would have happened if FreeBSD had won out instead -- the resulting kernel might very well be better than either Linux or FreeBSD is today -- but that doesn't change the facts about which is the better choice today.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
A lot of the FreeBSD plusses you listed also apply to Gentoo Linux.
:)
Both are decent operating systems.
Security is a big point for OpenBSD, but I would consider the documentation and the ease of administration as being bigger points. OpenBSD has a very minimalist approach, which translates to being very simple to learn and run. It also has the policy that any commit to CVS that changes the user-visible behaviour of any part of the base system must also include an update to the man pages. FreeBSD doesn't do this - something that stung me when they changed the interface to Project Evil between 5.3 and 5.4.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you are not poking around at the kernel level, the next difference is the init system. OpenBSD uses a pure BSD init system, which is nice and simple. FreeBSD and NetBSD use rcNG, which allows individual init scripts to specify services they provide and services they depend on, allowing a more parallel init process. GNU systems usually use the abomination known as System 5 init. Just to confuse matters, OS X now uses Launchd and Solaris uses SMF, both of which are more flexible at the expense of being more complicated.
Finally, you get the ports system. These are basically BSD Makefiles that define how to apply BSD-specific patches to code and install it. They are integrated with a package system which installs compiled versions. On NetBSD and OpenBSD, installing from binary is standard (on OpenBSD, building the port first builds the package and then installs it, not sure about NetBSD), while on FreeBSD building the package installs the port, builds the package and then uninstalls the port. All of these systems do automatic dependency resolution and fetching.
I generally find BSD systems to be cleaner and less full of cruft than GNU systems, and to have a better security model (check out the reasons why GNU su doesn't restrict use to members of the wheel group some time). Generally, it's a matter of personal taste. If you can't tell the difference then just stick with whatever you are most familiar with.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Its certainly not the clear-cut decision it was two years ago though, when I would have said Free on x86 and Net on anything else.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Testing. The FreeBSD CVS has three branches. -CURRENT is what the kernel developers use. -STABLE is the stuff that they are happy to say works without problems. -RELEASE is a fixed point in -STABLE where only bug-fixes can be added (no new features). Linux has the branch that Linus runs which contains all of the newest and shiniest features, and then a huge number of other branches that people who want production systems use. When Linus makes a change, it may break a custom patch in the Red Hat or SuSE branch (for example), and this will have to be fixed by someone other than the person who broke it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
900 days? I really hope you've been keeping up with the FreeBSD errata. Uptime is nothing to be proud of - downtime is. If your system is compromised because you didn't apply a security update then this costs a whole lot more than the two minutes of scheduled downtime required for a reboot.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I am not going to get into which OS "is better" because actual performance is not the issue here. If I had to rate what I saw, FreeBSD (4.1x) worked okay for the hardware it was put on, although it probably would have worked better on a "stock install" than the kludged clusterfuck that we deal with now.
The background is this: a few years ago, the small company I worked for had two admins who were FreeBSD fanatics. They pressured the IT department to use FreeBSD because it was free, their Windows infrastructure was taxed, and they had just bought a whole lot of new hardware. The pressured FreeBSD over Redhat, and made an impressive demo. So the company started going to FreeBSD. The admins, who had impressive mod skills, "tuned and tweaked" FreeBSD to work under the specific loads of the various server functions.
This would have been a good situation to be in, but then one of them got lazy, and updates got further and further behind. The other quit. The lazy one got fired. The other admins didn't know FreeBSD and barely knew Linux. Both of them eventually quit, too. I don't blame FreeBSD for the personnel problems, but this is leading to the main problem.
The company searched for someone with FreeBSD experience. The few people they found were not the kind of people they were looking for (inexperienced, would not pass clearance, had poor work records), and now they were stuck with a rapidly aging system that wasn't supported by anyone who had a clue. The new admins they hired tried to match the previous admin's skills, but were spending so much time diagnosing crashes, they didn't have time to learn new FreeBSD skills via online sources, which are sparse, confused, unorganized, and unsupportive (don't flame me on this, because this is pretty much the opinion of the whole company). And finding corporate-level supported software and hardware to run on FreeBSD was next to impossible ("We don't support FreeBSD for our fiber channel cards," says a SAN company desperate for our business, "but we hear some guy in the Netherlands had a flaky beta driver that can see things as long as the partitions are less than 256 GB." then the Sourceforge project hasn't been updated since 2002, doesn't work on our kernel version, and the guy's website is 404...)
So they decided to go with Redhat Linux. It just works. It worked faster than FreeBSD. It had an easy-to understand packaging and script-driven administration system, corporate support, and better yet: they could find LOTS people skilled in Redhat Linux in resumes. I was a particular gem because when the hired me I was an RHCT and had experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD experience to boot. My first project was "Get us off FreeBSD!!!" by direct order. Yes, you could argue this is not a FreeBSD issue at all, but some management of people issue, and you would be right, and that is my exact point.
If FreeBSD had a sensible corporate base, a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in /etc and /usr/local/etc... and have you ever had to diagnose which one broke?), better hardware/software vendor support, and a huge skills base, maybe with some certs... THEN we will see true competition with Linux in the corporate sector. Redhat is the type of company businesses want. They understand the support language Redhat speaks. And maybe I'll see stats that the Redhat kernel is bloated, runs 20% slower the what FreeBSD does on Apache pulls, or some fanatic going on about, "Oh yeah? What about PORTS, dumbass???" But you know what? If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.
PC-BSD is a GUI-centric version of FreeBSD (KDE) with a program installation system similar to Mac OS X (application folders).
I didn't want to use it at first because you didn't have control over partitioning in the first few versions.
Thankfully, they changed the installer so that you can partition and install over multiple partitions in the newest versions.
I'm going to install it soon as a server even though it's intended as a desktop. The reason is that, in my opinion, text-only administration of my server is way too much hassle, I've got better things to do than memorize dozens of text commands and their flags. On top of that, the installation of programs is easier and cleaner, even easier and cleaner than Windows.
I'm a visual person and handling my FreeBSD 5.3 install with text-only programs was not good enough, not enough feedback and not enough usability. I didn't have a good mental overview of my system with shell-only programs and everytime I wanted to do anything I had to consult the (excellent) FreeBSD manual. With Windows I could figure things out just by clicking around the GUI. GUIs can be seen as having built-in manuals in my opinion.
One thing that worries me is that I've been told that X is a big security vulnerability. Is KDE an X system? Is it open to attacks by default? It'd be great if someone can help answer. Thanks for helping out a newcomer.
- -- Truth addict for life.
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
It is not superior to RPM, nor DEB for that matter. Anyone who has built or managed a large number of servers with disperate services on them should be able to recognise why.
It checks for required dependancies and installs them as required, something even CPAN can do, and it can even (usually) uninstall them (with varing levels of success), that is more or less it.
What it does not do is check for conflicts between libraries or the dependancies of other applications (meaning it's possible to fuck up one application, by installing another because it may overwrite an existing, older, installed library).
Systems like 'ports' do not verify package integrity, nor do they it support using a previons minor revion of the same application (often a requirement when the 'latest' version of whatever application or library your using breaks a feature you've been relying on, or is simply not a release you've had time to test in your test environment).
An even bigger problem related to the reliance of ports system, one of the most time consuming, is the process of upgrades. Upgrading between newer versions of FreeBSD is a mine field, awash with the potential for screwups, because there is no system in place to handle this task elegantly. Upgrading between disperate versions of the same branch (e.g. 4.6 to 4.11) will often cause serious problems you'll have to sort out manually at the console, upgrading from systems that are not in the same release (from 3.x or 4.x to 5.x) will often take up a good chunk of an afternoon to sort out the resulting mess. Upgrading a DEB or RPM system which is fully packaged managed (kernel and all), even between quite disperate releases is far more straight forward (more along the lines of 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade', or in the case of a Red Hat system, pop in the CD and click the 'Upgrade' button).
Another feature that makes more feature rich package management systems more desirable is the reduced risk. RPM is staggeringly powerful with regard to the sorts of operations it is able to carry out with packages (pretty much every feature you could ever want) and it is also trivial to build packages for - as is also true of DEB. This massively reduces the propensity for mistakes - sure you can write individual custom bash install scripts for packages in ports, but that is not a robust approach when you think about how many packages your likley to use.
There are two practical reasons why people typically dislike RPM:
1) It's refused to do what they wanted because a package was trying to be installed did not have it's appropriate dependancies also installed, or it conflicted in some way.
In these circumstances most users opt to 'force' it to install because they are frustrated at installing dependancies and sub-dependancies, and then they wonder why their system does not work as they expected, and so declare the RPM system to be at fault.
Arguably, it is at least partly at fault, but it was only being accurate by alerting them to problems that they would not otherwise have known about, which is pretty hard to critisize.
2) This is compounded by the fact that they are usually exposed to it in the form of 'Red Hat', or a similar distrobution, which does NOT feature something like 'apt-get'. 'apt-get' is in fact package management system agnostic, at least technically, and their have been RPM based commercial distrobutions which have shipped with it. It's absolutly more associated with Debian, and I think it's a mistake for Red Hat and other vendors not to include it in their RPM based distros because of the frequency of the scenario above, I suspect the cost of maintaining apt repositories (man hours, infrastructure and running costs such as bandwith) are key reasons.
Disclaimer:
I use ports on an almost daily basis, along with De