FreeBSD under the Penguins Shadow

An anonymous reader sent us an article about FreeBSD, and life in Linux's Shadow. Interesting article about the culture difference between Linux and FreeBSD users. Its a good one for you FreeBSD fans and you curious Linux users alike. I wish more BSD stuff came down the pipe here, but Linux just has the vast majority of the submissions here too.

Comments

one of a difference is...

[Frederic54]

... that there's only one "distribution" of FreeBSD compared to a lot for Linux (RH, SUSE, etc), also FreeBSD is a BSD standard, program written following the BSD rules always compiled fine under FreeBSD. Some years ago i remember at university we installed a network of FreeBSD to have a standard, and also because we could find tons of books about BSD standard and nothing about linux (not true today :o). Anyway i used a lot HPUX from 8 to 10 and it's a mix about all standard...
what i regret also about linux is that linux users sometimes are "LiNuX-is-better-than-your-fucking-OS-so-you-are-a -morron" :-(
let's live in a free os community :o)
i don't want to start a war between FreeBSD and Linux, use what you prefer! you? MacOS, great! you? BeOS, great! etc
--

Good article.

[jerodd]

I liked the article (although it failed to mention OpenBSD, which is the ideal BSD distribution for Intel (NetBSD from what I hear still rules for Macintosh/VAX platforms)). I do wish BSD would get more credit; BSD is still a better kernel in terms of raw performance than Linux. And BSD has been aroud much longer and is far more mature. OTOH, Linux has that dynamic element you only get when you have idealistic young kids working with it who think they're going to change the world (and don't realise what we think is cool was done by IBM on their System/3[68]s 25 years ago). In addition, it's hard to be a BSD newbie--the culture is cruel to the unknowledged.

That said, BSD is going to be with us for a while longer, if only because of the ease with which GNU/Linux binaries can be run on BSD and the ease with which device support can be migrated over (I won't address licencing issues here).

I haven't seen the Matrix movie, but I did hear on Systalk that FreeBSD was central to the production of said movie.

Cheers,
Joshua "Still running OpenBSD on one PC" Rodd

FreeBSD deserves its nitch

[Izaak]

I've been a happy FreeBSD user for years; I run my business on it. For Internet/Intranet server i've found it to be a very efficient and scaleable box (kicked NT's but on the same hardware anyway). I know of many other companies using it for same and I see no compelling reason to switch. That is not to say I won't be using Linux also. Linux is also a great OS and it appears to be attracting more applications and desktop services. I'm running two Linux systems at home (as well as FreeBSD, NetWare, Windows95, and WindowsNT) and it has become my primary desktop.

And contrary to some comments I've seen saying otherwise, FreeBSD's install is really slick. Redhat and other Linux distros have only recently caught up to where FreeBSD has been for some time in ease of install. Furthermore, the Ports system rocks! Linux needs something like this.

BTW, Jordan Hubbard seems like a rather nice guy. He provided me some very useful feedback on a project I'm working on. Comparing him to Linus, I'd be hard pressed to say which one is more cool. ;-)

Thad