Ya know, i'm starting to get sick of all of this firefox trash talking. I dunno. I've been running this instance of firefox on my IBM ThinkPad X31 for a few days, plus vlc playing some family guy, on arch linux and I don't notice all of these memory issues you dudes keep talking about. It doesn't seem sluggish. It's fine. This laptop is fucking at least 5 years old, I bough it used for like 100 bucks back in '07. Maybe you dudes just don't know how to keep your system running effciently, and it's not firefox?
You're confusing communism with fascism. Communism does not intrinsically restrict the free flow of ideas, products, speakers, cats, bits, whatever. However, in a communist system flow can be restricted by fascist leaders. The same is true for a socialist system, a capitalist system, a mixed system, and - yes - a free market system. It just takes a lot more trickery and subtlety when the power structure is more transparent. And when the fuck did we start using economic terms to describe political systems?
That said, the Open Source Software paradigm can't be compared to ANY kind of governing system because it's NOT a governing system. Nor can it be compared to an economic system, for the same reason. It's not an economic system. There is no intrinsic form of incentivized exchange of goods and services. Most of the services provided and goods rendered are given away and are done without expectation of reimbursement for one's time. Hell, it's closer to Utopic Anarchy than any kind of government or economy (which is intrinsically different from the free market, because the free market requires a coercive power differential which is *precisely* what Anarchy aims to destroy). Of course, it's not Anarchistic...at least Linux development isn't. OSS can be, however, compared to other software paradigms.
What you'll get if you try and compare software to government or economics or anything else that it is NOT is an endless debate that no one can win because neither side will ever be right. In other words, please shut the fuck up. Wait, i'm not new here, you won't shut the fuck up.
Beautiful sarcasm. What ASTOUNDS me are the number of people who are agreeing with you. I wonder how many of them are aware X forked a few years ago. Here's what i think we really need. Call it the "BSD" model.
We need an X fork that caters to desktop graphics,
We need an X fork that caters to network graphics,
We need an X fork that caters to security-based graphics,
We need an X fork that delivers absolute modularity,
We need an X fork that delivers absolute monolith...is....ity,
And we need and X fork that does all of of those, but a little slower than all of the above, and is generally good enough for the public.
It's a development prototype for hacking on, it's not meant to be used as your home video card. So just say to yourself "oh cool, open source hardware. Maybe in a few more years, eh? Sweet." Then, continue with your day. Unless you want to learn low-level video programming and/or interfacing this with a particular kernel (linux, *bsd, etc), just pretend it's like NASA's plans for a spaceship that will be ready to take us to mars in 50 years or so. "Sweet, progress. Nothing beats progress!" Then continue your monotonous job as a coder-bitch and lament about your wasted college degree that only turned you into someone's thought-slave.
God, you're an idiot. It's not a consumer product to begin with, it's a development prototype. Just...Just keep your fingers on your mouse from now on, ok?
Hardware support is actually quite good for good laptops, it works great on my thinkpad X31, which I use as my traveling laptop to stay connected to things. Basically just need web and IM, which it'll do perfectly. Use something low-range like ION for the window manager and it becomes a nice little information hub with very very little bloat. Add the filesystem level encryption and you've got something that won't hand your identity to anyone who steals it, to boot.
Of course, if you want to play games, you're pretty much fucked. But you can watch movies full screen with no problem, and sound works perfectly without any tweaking. All of the laptop buttons work as expected, suspend works, wifi works. So, you know, you shouldn't assume quite so much.
Hah. Actually, I do! And it works perfectly well. Suspend works, WiFi works, it gives me everything *I* need. Of course, that's a lot less than most people, but i like being a minimalist.
I like how you provided a link from a pulp and paper special interest group, clearly created with the express purpose of brainwashing elementary school children into believing that growing managed forests explicitly for wood pulp is good. It even has a word match at the end to make sure you've learned an important lesson: hippies are bad! Reminds me of a certain simpsons episode, "When i grow up, i'm going to bovine university!" Or, should i say, Paper University. Being someone who's been trained in environmental science and forestry resource management, i gotta say that this is a very dumbed down argument they're presenting that easily evades answering the really tough questions: air pollution from pulp plants, disease potential and fire danger associated with timber monocultures, nutrient depletion stress from overcrowding and net soil loss, urban pulltion stress (yeah, the pollution from pulp plants actually feeds back to timber stands and makes them weaker, more suscpetable to disease and catastrophic fire), and ecosystem marginalization from a decrease in biodiversity. These are all real threats, not FUD, as shown by the recent fires in California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, etc, that were all exacerbated by bad forestry practices perpetuated by the timber and pulp industries.
Now, i'm not saying that we should stop harvesting all together. That's stupid. The forests are so screwed up now that we NEED to thin them, but as an emergency precaution. Thinning should not be long-term policy. And the pulp industry needs to diversify into non-woodland sources like hemp and papyrus, which have a smaller ecological footprint than tree farming, and generally a larger, cheaper yield.
Bottom line: it's well accepted in the resource management community that tree farming DOES fuck up the environment. Selective thinning is really the best solution, but that can not satiate our hunger for wood products - something needs to take up the slack and start replacing timber in the pulp industry.
Still, a good chunk of nutrients in a forest (the majority, actually) are held in standing biomass (trees). When you take out the trees, you take out a lot of nutrients that would go on to enrich the soil for more trees in the future. You get a net decrease in soil productivity. This is why a lot of tree farms inject your standard gassified NPK fertilizers. Ironically enough, these gasseous fertilizers easily and readily convert to nitric acids, which are not only detrimental to foliage, but are easily oxidized to produce NOx and Ozone. Ozone is also very detrimental to foliage, and NOx is again oxidized to yield...guess what...more ozone and more NOx. What you end up with is a weakened, stressed stand of trees that's highly susceptible to disease and pests, along with soil that's sub-par. You basically get an economic loss to tree farmers and a huge fire hazard.
And i didn't mention the impact of soil perturbation as a result of mechanized tree harvesting (the way it's mostly done now-a-days). Soil takes decades to centuries to form and be productive. If you disrupt it on a large scale, as is done in mechanized tree harvesting, you basically get a retarded growing environment, as well as allow a small fraction of the worlds largest CO2 sink to let loose some scruptious heat-trapping gas. Basically, what this all boils down to is tree farms are bad news for disposable goods (paper products). It is extremely costly to run a tree farm that can sustain itself for more than a few decades, and they're usually run at a loss. Economically, you get your tax dollars used to aid tree farmers because paper pulp is seen as a neccessary good in our economy (and it is). A much better solution, economically and environmentally, is hemp. Hemp will grow in just about any soil condition, use markedly less water and fertilizer, and can be used to produce just about any disposable paper good you can think of.
And if you don't believe me about the tree farm stuff, do a little googling. This is all standard, undergrad level environmental chemistry. Or, just look at your original statement and try and remember the first law of thermo: energy/matter can not be created nor can it be destroyed. If Nutrients in a system prduced a tree, then you take that tree out of the system, you've taken nutrients out of that system. That's a net loss, and in this case it's a net loss directly to the soil as that's where most of the nutrients would have ended up had that tree stayed in place. Thus, the soil composition would not be like that of a normal forest. It would be poorer.
Not everyone needs everything a modern computer offers. Not everyone even needs the internet. It may come as a shock to you, but people survived for several thousand years before computers existed, and arguably lived healthier, more fulfilling lives. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect someone to use a comparatively archaic machine if it suits their needs.
Any distribution that a major corporation is going to put on a server will be using some apt derivative or RPM + automated dependency resolution to manage software. If they need to compile a service from scratch (like postgres, apache, samba) it's going to be because they need a feature that isn't available in the standard binary release, which is very rare. To be honest with you, unless i'm running a source-based distribution, i have never had the need to compile anything, and that goes for all of the production servers i admin as well (about 2K, all RHEL).
I don't know. It just doesn't seem that hard to me. I'm lazy and fairly unintelligent. That's why I got a cooshy job as a sysadmin, and I've never run into a problem.
Yeah, his post was not contradictory. You assumed his argument was that AMD was the best alternative to Intel WRT DRM. That definitely was not his argument. His argument was simply that companies that make products that tell the user what acceptable use is deserve financial ruin.
While I agree with him, there's a lot of evidence to show that the opposite is, in fact, true.
Let me guess, you tried to install a BSD, it didn't work for you, then a friend came over and installed it successfully on the same machine, your geek penis retracted, and you've have a badger up your butt about BSD "elitism" since then?
When it comes down to it, the BSD's are forked based on design philosophies. BSD has never wanted to be the best tool for all jobs, because that is a sure-fire way to introduce needless complexity into a codebase (as has happened with linux). 386BSD split into FreeBSD and NetBSD, with FreeBSD focusing on optimizing for the x86 architecture (where 386BSD left off) and NetBSD focusing on portability. Then OpenBSD split off to make as secure a system as possible based on NetBSD's code (again, over a different in design philosphy). Then DragonFly split off from FreeBSD based on, again, differences in basic design philosophy. In anycase, there are only a handful of BSD forks, each with their own niche, or a different approach to their niche (eg, DragonFly vs FreeBSD). And all are very good general purpose Operating systems.
If you really want to compare apples to apples, compare BSD forks with linux distributions. In which case, your question comes flying back at you. If linux is so great, why are there so many distributions to help it specialize in certain niches? You have several DSL clones, different reimplementations and streamlines of LFS, many, many "power user" distros, several desktop distros, tons of server distros, and so forth. Why can't the linux community just make a single distribution that does everything well?
The answer to that question will also be the answer to yours regarding FreeBSD: Choice and freedom. Powerusers and geeks like choice and developers like freedom to develop things the way they want them developed. Number of Forks and distributions doesn't say anything about quality of engineering - it speaks of diversity of the mindshare. The more intelligent, creative people you get in an open-source project, the more potential for personality clashes, differing opinions, and forking (be it system forks in *BSD or distribution creationg in linux) develops. Since BSD has a relatively smaller mindshare than linux, there are fewer distributions. However, this makes it neither inferior or superior to linux.
You've brought up examples of things that linux has indeed done, but which of them could not also be done by a BSD just as effectively? You mention a clustering solution in 1994. How about now? FreeBSD clusters just as well as linux does now. In 1994? Not so much. But now? Yes. Also, it's important to remember that those decisions in NASA aren't made by scientists, they're made primarily by bureaucrats with an eye for buzzwords. Back in '94 linux was very much a buzzword in research communities, while the BSD name was marred a bit by the AT&T lawsuits. Had I been in the same situation in 1994, I would have made the same choice
I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.
I think you're loading those words with your own emotion. Linux was mostly developed in the begining by hackers who primarily worked on x86 PC's (ie, PC Hackers), while BSD UNIX was developed at Berkeley by students and professors who were well-versed in the workings and design of UNIX systems (ie, UNIX hackers), lead by Brian Kernighan while he was on sabbatical in Berkely. You can't get much more of a UNIX hacker than Kernighan. It's simple fact: BSD was started by UNIX hackers before the PC architecture as we know it was wide spread. Linux was developed by PC hackers, and it's development was/is more or less powered by the commodity computer movement. This doesn't say anything directly about code quality between the two projects, but there may indeed be differences in thought culture. You, yourself, added the connotations that seem to exist exclusively in your mind.
No, the main advantages of *BSD over linux is that all of the BSDs have a far more sane, engineered development process and an older, more tested code base. Outside of core kernel architecture changes, Linux is very much a hodgepodge of drivers and subsystems at varying levels of stability. Formal testing and code auditing is really left up to the distribution creators more than anyone else.
In practice, these differences really don't come up for the majority of people on standard commodity hardware. You can slap a generic debian install and a generic freebsd install on just about any machine, be successful, and have a pretty good user experience. As you specialize, things deviate though. If you want accellerated 3D graphics on a 64-bit system, for example, linux is going to be your only choice. Nvidia has drivers out for x86 FreeBSD, but not amd64 FreeBSD.
Because of the development cycle, however, cutting edge desktop hardware tends to be supported at a slower rate, though this is more an observation than a rule. FreeBSD had stable USB support first. Project Evil (the use of windows wireless drivers on unix-like free OS's) was started on FreeBSD. FreeBSD also tends to support high-end server hardware fairly quickly, as some companies depend on FreeBSD to run their servers, and are willing to donate hardware to developers to get things working smoothly.
Things that take time are programs that require kernel-level hooks that exist in the linux kernel but not in the FreeBSD kernel. An example would be things like hal and dbus, though there is currently a push to get these working on FreeBSD.
Then there are more abstract differences. When I sit down at a FreeBSD machine, it feels different. It feels more cohesive and well-designed than a linux machine usually does. That said, i can never decide which I like more. For the past year or two i've been running exclusively linux (mostly for nvidia accelleration, as i'm an amd64 user), but i've recently switched back to FreeBSD mostly to explore the kernel knobs and optimize it's performance. And, yeah, once it's optimized from it's out of the box configuration, its definitely more responsive than my Arch Linux or Gentoo installs ever were.
Uh...it's freebsd with some helper apps and a different default configuration. It DOES have gnome support, you just have to build it from ports or packages. It's really easy. pkg-add -r gnome.
Slashdot Mirror
While at the same time, the house science committee cuts funding for NASA to continue important space-based biogeochemical research of earth systems:
http://news.sciencemag.org/funding/2015/04/controversy-awaits-house-republicans-roll-out-long-awaited-bill-revamp-u-s-research
WHAT A GOOD THING.
Ya know, i'm starting to get sick of all of this firefox trash talking. I dunno. I've been running this instance of firefox on my IBM ThinkPad X31 for a few days, plus vlc playing some family guy, on arch linux and I don't notice all of these memory issues you dudes keep talking about. It doesn't seem sluggish. It's fine. This laptop is fucking at least 5 years old, I bough it used for like 100 bucks back in '07. Maybe you dudes just don't know how to keep your system running effciently, and it's not firefox?
You're confusing communism with fascism. Communism does not intrinsically restrict the free flow of ideas, products, speakers, cats, bits, whatever. However, in a communist system flow can be restricted by fascist leaders. The same is true for a socialist system, a capitalist system, a mixed system, and - yes - a free market system. It just takes a lot more trickery and subtlety when the power structure is more transparent. And when the fuck did we start using economic terms to describe political systems?
That said, the Open Source Software paradigm can't be compared to ANY kind of governing system because it's NOT a governing system. Nor can it be compared to an economic system, for the same reason. It's not an economic system. There is no intrinsic form of incentivized exchange of goods and services. Most of the services provided and goods rendered are given away and are done without expectation of reimbursement for one's time. Hell, it's closer to Utopic Anarchy than any kind of government or economy (which is intrinsically different from the free market, because the free market requires a coercive power differential which is *precisely* what Anarchy aims to destroy). Of course, it's not Anarchistic...at least Linux development isn't. OSS can be, however, compared to other software paradigms.
What you'll get if you try and compare software to government or economics or anything else that it is NOT is an endless debate that no one can win because neither side will ever be right. In other words, please shut the fuck up. Wait, i'm not new here, you won't shut the fuck up.
Beautiful sarcasm. What ASTOUNDS me are the number of people who are agreeing with you. I wonder how many of them are aware X forked a few years ago. Here's what i think we really need. Call it the "BSD" model.
We need an X fork that caters to desktop graphics,
We need an X fork that caters to network graphics,
We need an X fork that caters to security-based graphics,
We need an X fork that delivers absolute modularity,
We need an X fork that delivers absolute monolith...is....ity,
And we need and X fork that does all of of those, but a little slower than all of the above, and is generally good enough for the public.
I think then we'll be ready for the desktop.
It's a development prototype for hacking on, it's not meant to be used as your home video card. So just say to yourself "oh cool, open source hardware. Maybe in a few more years, eh? Sweet." Then, continue with your day. Unless you want to learn low-level video programming and/or interfacing this with a particular kernel (linux, *bsd, etc), just pretend it's like NASA's plans for a spaceship that will be ready to take us to mars in 50 years or so. "Sweet, progress. Nothing beats progress!" Then continue your monotonous job as a coder-bitch and lament about your wasted college degree that only turned you into someone's thought-slave.
God, you're an idiot. It's not a consumer product to begin with, it's a development prototype. Just...Just keep your fingers on your mouse from now on, ok?
Son of a bitch.
Hardware support is actually quite good for good laptops, it works great on my thinkpad X31, which I use as my traveling laptop to stay connected to things. Basically just need web and IM, which it'll do perfectly. Use something low-range like ION for the window manager and it becomes a nice little information hub with very very little bloat. Add the filesystem level encryption and you've got something that won't hand your identity to anyone who steals it, to boot.
Of course, if you want to play games, you're pretty much fucked. But you can watch movies full screen with no problem, and sound works perfectly without any tweaking. All of the laptop buttons work as expected, suspend works, wifi works. So, you know, you shouldn't assume quite so much.
Hah. Actually, I do! And it works perfectly well. Suspend works, WiFi works, it gives me everything *I* need. Of course, that's a lot less than most people, but i like being a minimalist.
No, but most hippies are now yuppies. They are just yuppies that buy all organic.
but I still get a dirty feeling when using firefox
....PERVERT!
Are you sure that's firefox, or what you're using firefox to look at?
I like how you provided a link from a pulp and paper special interest group, clearly created with the express purpose of brainwashing elementary school children into believing that growing managed forests explicitly for wood pulp is good. It even has a word match at the end to make sure you've learned an important lesson: hippies are bad! Reminds me of a certain simpsons episode, "When i grow up, i'm going to bovine university!" Or, should i say, Paper University. Being someone who's been trained in environmental science and forestry resource management, i gotta say that this is a very dumbed down argument they're presenting that easily evades answering the really tough questions: air pollution from pulp plants, disease potential and fire danger associated with timber monocultures, nutrient depletion stress from overcrowding and net soil loss, urban pulltion stress (yeah, the pollution from pulp plants actually feeds back to timber stands and makes them weaker, more suscpetable to disease and catastrophic fire), and ecosystem marginalization from a decrease in biodiversity. These are all real threats, not FUD, as shown by the recent fires in California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, etc, that were all exacerbated by bad forestry practices perpetuated by the timber and pulp industries.
Now, i'm not saying that we should stop harvesting all together. That's stupid. The forests are so screwed up now that we NEED to thin them, but as an emergency precaution. Thinning should not be long-term policy. And the pulp industry needs to diversify into non-woodland sources like hemp and papyrus, which have a smaller ecological footprint than tree farming, and generally a larger, cheaper yield.
Bottom line: it's well accepted in the resource management community that tree farming DOES fuck up the environment. Selective thinning is really the best solution, but that can not satiate our hunger for wood products - something needs to take up the slack and start replacing timber in the pulp industry.
Still, a good chunk of nutrients in a forest (the majority, actually) are held in standing biomass (trees). When you take out the trees, you take out a lot of nutrients that would go on to enrich the soil for more trees in the future. You get a net decrease in soil productivity. This is why a lot of tree farms inject your standard gassified NPK fertilizers. Ironically enough, these gasseous fertilizers easily and readily convert to nitric acids, which are not only detrimental to foliage, but are easily oxidized to produce NOx and Ozone. Ozone is also very detrimental to foliage, and NOx is again oxidized to yield...guess what...more ozone and more NOx. What you end up with is a weakened, stressed stand of trees that's highly susceptible to disease and pests, along with soil that's sub-par. You basically get an economic loss to tree farmers and a huge fire hazard.
And i didn't mention the impact of soil perturbation as a result of mechanized tree harvesting (the way it's mostly done now-a-days). Soil takes decades to centuries to form and be productive. If you disrupt it on a large scale, as is done in mechanized tree harvesting, you basically get a retarded growing environment, as well as allow a small fraction of the worlds largest CO2 sink to let loose some scruptious heat-trapping gas. Basically, what this all boils down to is tree farms are bad news for disposable goods (paper products). It is extremely costly to run a tree farm that can sustain itself for more than a few decades, and they're usually run at a loss. Economically, you get your tax dollars used to aid tree farmers because paper pulp is seen as a neccessary good in our economy (and it is). A much better solution, economically and environmentally, is hemp. Hemp will grow in just about any soil condition, use markedly less water and fertilizer, and can be used to produce just about any disposable paper good you can think of.
And if you don't believe me about the tree farm stuff, do a little googling. This is all standard, undergrad level environmental chemistry. Or, just look at your original statement and try and remember the first law of thermo: energy/matter can not be created nor can it be destroyed. If Nutrients in a system prduced a tree, then you take that tree out of the system, you've taken nutrients out of that system. That's a net loss, and in this case it's a net loss directly to the soil as that's where most of the nutrients would have ended up had that tree stayed in place. Thus, the soil composition would not be like that of a normal forest. It would be poorer.
Not everyone needs everything a modern computer offers. Not everyone even needs the internet. It may come as a shock to you, but people survived for several thousand years before computers existed, and arguably lived healthier, more fulfilling lives. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect someone to use a comparatively archaic machine if it suits their needs.
I would say being a successful voice actor requires far more creativity than a C++ programmer. FAR MORE.
Phil Hendrie.
That's all you'll ever need to know.
You clearly are naive.
Seems to me he means a linux-themed screensaver to be used on a microsoft windows OS.
Hey, at least they didn't use QT, the actual ugliest tool kit known to man kind.
ndiswrapper is based on FreeBSD's project evil. That is to say, the FreeBSD had support for windows wireless drivers before linux did.
Any distribution that a major corporation is going to put on a server will be using some apt derivative or RPM + automated dependency resolution to manage software. If they need to compile a service from scratch (like postgres, apache, samba) it's going to be because they need a feature that isn't available in the standard binary release, which is very rare. To be honest with you, unless i'm running a source-based distribution, i have never had the need to compile anything, and that goes for all of the production servers i admin as well (about 2K, all RHEL).
I don't know. It just doesn't seem that hard to me. I'm lazy and fairly unintelligent. That's why I got a cooshy job as a sysadmin, and I've never run into a problem.
Yeah, his post was not contradictory. You assumed his argument was that AMD was the best alternative to Intel WRT DRM. That definitely was not his argument. His argument was simply that companies that make products that tell the user what acceptable use is deserve financial ruin.
While I agree with him, there's a lot of evidence to show that the opposite is, in fact, true.
Maybe then we will realize how much we depend on things that are wholey artificial and unnecessary to our survival.
Let me guess, you tried to install a BSD, it didn't work for you, then a friend came over and installed it successfully on the same machine, your geek penis retracted, and you've have a badger up your butt about BSD "elitism" since then?
When it comes down to it, the BSD's are forked based on design philosophies. BSD has never wanted to be the best tool for all jobs, because that is a sure-fire way to introduce needless complexity into a codebase (as has happened with linux). 386BSD split into FreeBSD and NetBSD, with FreeBSD focusing on optimizing for the x86 architecture (where 386BSD left off) and NetBSD focusing on portability. Then OpenBSD split off to make as secure a system as possible based on NetBSD's code (again, over a different in design philosphy). Then DragonFly split off from FreeBSD based on, again, differences in basic design philosophy. In anycase, there are only a handful of BSD forks, each with their own niche, or a different approach to their niche (eg, DragonFly vs FreeBSD). And all are very good general purpose Operating systems.
If you really want to compare apples to apples, compare BSD forks with linux distributions. In which case, your question comes flying back at you. If linux is so great, why are there so many distributions to help it specialize in certain niches? You have several DSL clones, different reimplementations and streamlines of LFS, many, many "power user" distros, several desktop distros, tons of server distros, and so forth. Why can't the linux community just make a single distribution that does everything well?
The answer to that question will also be the answer to yours regarding FreeBSD: Choice and freedom. Powerusers and geeks like choice and developers like freedom to develop things the way they want them developed. Number of Forks and distributions doesn't say anything about quality of engineering - it speaks of diversity of the mindshare. The more intelligent, creative people you get in an open-source project, the more potential for personality clashes, differing opinions, and forking (be it system forks in *BSD or distribution creationg in linux) develops. Since BSD has a relatively smaller mindshare than linux, there are fewer distributions. However, this makes it neither inferior or superior to linux.
You've brought up examples of things that linux has indeed done, but which of them could not also be done by a BSD just as effectively? You mention a clustering solution in 1994. How about now? FreeBSD clusters just as well as linux does now. In 1994? Not so much. But now? Yes. Also, it's important to remember that those decisions in NASA aren't made by scientists, they're made primarily by bureaucrats with an eye for buzzwords. Back in '94 linux was very much a buzzword in research communities, while the BSD name was marred a bit by the AT&T lawsuits. Had I been in the same situation in 1994, I would have made the same choice
I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.
I think you're loading those words with your own emotion. Linux was mostly developed in the begining by hackers who primarily worked on x86 PC's (ie, PC Hackers), while BSD UNIX was developed at Berkeley by students and professors who were well-versed in the workings and design of UNIX systems (ie, UNIX hackers), lead by Brian Kernighan while he was on sabbatical in Berkely. You can't get much more of a UNIX hacker than Kernighan. It's simple fact: BSD was started by UNIX hackers before the PC architecture as we know it was wide spread. Linux was developed by PC hackers, and it's development was/is more or less powered by the commodity computer movement. This doesn't say anything directly about code quality between the two projects, but there may indeed be differences in thought culture. You, yourself, added the connotations that seem to exist exclusively in your mind.
No, the main advantages of *BSD over linux is that all of the BSDs have a far more sane, engineered development process and an older, more tested code base. Outside of core kernel architecture changes, Linux is very much a hodgepodge of drivers and subsystems at varying levels of stability. Formal testing and code auditing is really left up to the distribution creators more than anyone else.
In practice, these differences really don't come up for the majority of people on standard commodity hardware. You can slap a generic debian install and a generic freebsd install on just about any machine, be successful, and have a pretty good user experience. As you specialize, things deviate though. If you want accellerated 3D graphics on a 64-bit system, for example, linux is going to be your only choice. Nvidia has drivers out for x86 FreeBSD, but not amd64 FreeBSD.
Because of the development cycle, however, cutting edge desktop hardware tends to be supported at a slower rate, though this is more an observation than a rule. FreeBSD had stable USB support first. Project Evil (the use of windows wireless drivers on unix-like free OS's) was started on FreeBSD. FreeBSD also tends to support high-end server hardware fairly quickly, as some companies depend on FreeBSD to run their servers, and are willing to donate hardware to developers to get things working smoothly.
Things that take time are programs that require kernel-level hooks that exist in the linux kernel but not in the FreeBSD kernel. An example would be things like hal and dbus, though there is currently a push to get these working on FreeBSD.
Then there are more abstract differences. When I sit down at a FreeBSD machine, it feels different. It feels more cohesive and well-designed than a linux machine usually does. That said, i can never decide which I like more. For the past year or two i've been running exclusively linux (mostly for nvidia accelleration, as i'm an amd64 user), but i've recently switched back to FreeBSD mostly to explore the kernel knobs and optimize it's performance. And, yeah, once it's optimized from it's out of the box configuration, its definitely more responsive than my Arch Linux or Gentoo installs ever were.
Uh...it's freebsd with some helper apps and a different default configuration. It DOES have gnome support, you just have to build it from ports or packages. It's really easy. pkg-add -r gnome.